A fantastic exercise to help activate and strengthen gluteal muscles is the crab walk and monster walk. When completing these exercises you want to try and make sure that the focus is on these gluteal muscles but unfortunately some exercises don’t work the way we always plan. The main reason for this, with older clients, is because the human body is built to do everything in the easiest way possible but this may not be the best way for the body. An example of this problem is during these two exercises the TFL (tensor fascia lata) can become over active and once again take over a weak muscle (glutes) and the TFL tries to help in the movement. So what we need to do is try and reduce the amount of activation of the TFL during these exercises.
If you are a client of Vision you will have possibly completed these exercises before and you would have completed the exercise with the band around your feet. The reason for this is that you can reduce the amount of activation of TFL while still getting the needed strength and activation of the gluteal muscles. Obviously, we need to be careful that the exercise is still being performed correctly (knees out, broken at the hips in the squat position) because just because the band is around your feet it doesn’t make the rest of the exercise perfect.
We have added the article below if you would like to read more about this topic.
