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The glutes are the largest, and arguably, the most influential muscle group in the human body. This powerhouse, which I often refer to as the “master muscle group,” plays an integral role in providing the strength and stability needed to thrive in the gym, in sports, and in daily life. The glutes also play a key role in maintaining optimal posture and alignment, as well as joint and muscle health. The bottom line (pun very intended) is that strong glutes matter.

Glute Anatomy 101

The glutes consist of three muscles: the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus.

The glute maximus, the most visible of the three and the largest muscle in the human body, is a powerful hip extensor that also assists in the abduction and external rotation of the femur, and the stabilization of the knee.

The glute medius and minimus muscles serve as the main stabilizers of the pelvis and femur and externally rotate and abduct the femur. Though these two muscles are often neglected or treated as an afterthought when training glutes, they play a vital role in the alignment of the hips, knees, ankles, and feet, and aid in injury prevention and overall performance, especially in single-leg exercises and movements.

These three exercises will help you improve the overall strength, performance, and development of your glutes. Watch the videos and read the coaching tips below, then give ‘em a try

Barbell Glute Bridge With Band Abduction

This extremely challenging and effective exercise combines a barbell glute bridge with banded abductions. The hip extension movement targets your gluteus maximus, while the banded abductions work your medius and minimus muscles. I won’t lie: if you are performing this exercise correctly, your glutes will be on fire.

Equipment Needed:

You will need a barbell, weight plates, and a resistance band to perform this exercise. If you are not able to perform this exercise with 45-pound plates yet, and don’t have access to lighter bumper plates, you might need to ask someone to help lift the barbell into the starting position and help you remove it when you’re done.

Instructions and Coaching Tips:

• Lie on your back on the floor. You can rest your head on a foam mat if it’s more comfortable.
• Place a low- to medium-resistance band around your thighs, just above your knees and position the barbell so that it’s resting in your hip crease. For added comfort, I recommend that you wrap the bar with a towel, a folded yoga mat, a foam pad, or a hip thrust pad.
• Keep your shins in a relatively vertical position to prevent your hamstrings from taking over. You can turn your feet out slightly if it feels more comfortable.
• Grip the barbell on either side of your hips and straighten your elbows. Keeping your arms rigid, drive them into your sides (imagine that you’re crushing something in your armpits).
• Gently press your knees out against the band. The band should have enough tension to challenge your glutes, but not so much that other muscle groups start to take over.
• Before you initiate the movement, inhale deeply through your nose, engage your core, actively tuck your ribs toward your hips, and squeeze your glutes. This will dramatically increase your lumbo-pelvic stability, safeguard your back, and increase your ability to generate force with your glutes.
• Extend your hips by pressing through your heels and middle of your feet (keep your toes on the floor), and squeezing your glutes. Avoid hyperextending your back and flaring your ribcage. This is extremely important.
• Maintain your spine in neutral alignment for the duration of the exercise. At the top position, your body should form a straight line from your knees to your shoulders.
• Hold at the top position by squeezing your glutes and bracing your core. Perform two to three glute abductions and then return to the starting position, controlling the movement with your glutes.
• Maintain tension in the band for the duration of the exercise, including when you are on the ground.
• Reset and repeat.

Regression:

You can make this exercise easier by performing it with less resistance. This might mean using a band with less tension, or removing some weight from the barbell.

Progression:

You can make this exercise more challenging by performing negative reps and taking three to five seconds on the way back down, using more resistance (additional weight on the bar or a thicker band). You can also stop each rep just short of touching the ground. If you do not touch the ground between reps, your muscles will remain under tension for the duration of the set.

Band-Resisted Negative 1.5-Rep Bulgarian Goblet Squat

This innovative exercise will absolutely torch your glutes more than most single-leg exercises you’ve tried before.

Equipment Needed:

You will need a bench or box, a resistance band, and a kettlebell or dumbbell to perform this exercise.

Instructions and Coaching Tips:

• Start in a split stance position resting the rear foot on a bench or box. Loop a band under the middle of your standing foot, and position the band on your upper traps. Avoid letting the band sit on your neck.
• Keeping a level pelvis, squeeze your glutes and push your hips forward a few inches to load the standing (working) leg. Your standing leg should be doing as close to 100 percent of the work as possible.
• Distribute your weight over the heel and the middle of your standing foot, keeping your toes in contact with the ground, particularly your first and last toes.
• Keep a slight forward lean in your torso, maintaining your spine in neutral alignment with your head, torso, and hips in a stacked position.
• Before each rep, inhale deeply through your nose, engage your core, and actively tuck your ribs towards your hips.
• Perform a split squat taking three seconds to lower, come up halfway, lower back down, then stand up to return to the starting position. This is one rep.
• Squeeze the quad, hamstring, and glute of your front leg and press your body up (rather than pushing backward which would transfer the weight to your back leg).
• Your body should travel in a vertical path the entire time. Imagine that you have a wall directly in front and behind you, and if your body travels forward or backward, your body will come into contact with the wall.
• Control the movement with your muscles rather than dropping down mindlessly.
• Lock out at the top by squeezing your glutes, quads, and hamstrings.
• For the duration of the exercise, maintain tension in the band at all times, avoid flaring your ribcage or hyperextending your lower back, keep your head, torso, and hips in a stacked position, and keep your front knee in line with your toes
• You can either exhale at the very top when you are finishing the rep, or as you are ascending on the half rep, and quickly inhale before completing the descending half rep.
• Reset and repeat.

Regression:

You can make this exercise easier by using a band with less resistance, performing regular split squats using 1.5 reps, or performing the rear-foot-elevated split squats for standard rep.

Progression:

You can make this exercise more challenging by using a thicker band with more tension or by adding extra weight with a kettlebell, dumbbell, or barbell. 

Double-Banded Toe Taps

You can include this deceptively challenging glute exercise as part of your warm-up for your lower body or conditioning exercises, or perform it at the end of your workout as a glute finisher.

Equipment Needed:

You will need two resistance bands to perform this exercise.

Instructions and Coaching Tips:

• Position one resistance band just above your knees, and one directly below, or around your ankles. If the bands vary in thickness, the thicker band should be above the knees.
• Start in a quarter squat stance, keeping a slight forward lean in your torso with your spine in neutral alignment (head, torso, and hips stacked).
• Distribute your weight over the heel and the middle of your standing foot, keeping your toes in contact with the ground, particularly your first and last toes.
• Lightly reach out to the side with your other leg, then return to the starting position and repeat. When your leg is moving laterally, the glute of the standing leg must work big-time to stabilize your pelvis, femur, and knee.
• For the duration of the exercise, maintain tension in the bands, keep your core muscles engaged and your rib cage tucked down toward your hips, and aim to breathe as regularly as you can, taking deep breaths into your belly through your nose, and exhaling through your mouth. Avoid rotation in your torso, spine, or hips, and don’t allow your body to lean toward the side of the working glute.

Regression:

You can make this exercise easier by using a single band above your knees, or by using bands with less resistance.

Progression:

You can make this exercise more challenging by using bands with more resistance. You can also hold onto a kettlebell in a goblet position or with arms extended in front of you. Both of these options will increase the amount of work both your quads and anterior core will have to do.

The post 3 Moves to Super-Charge Your Glute Training appeared first on Girls Gone Strong.

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There are two types of people in this world: those who ambivalently take or leave avocados and those whose heart skip a beat for the cool, creaminess of a ripe avocado. These recipes are for the latter group. Avocado toast is just the beginning, friends. From a vibrant green lassi and creamy avocado pasta, to fritters and an extra-chocolatey pudding, here are 10 irresistible ways to eat more avocados from breakfast through dessert.

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When you’re home from the farmers market with a fresh haul of summer produce and craving a comforting dinner, pull out your Dutch oven and some arborio rice, because risotto is in order. Start with whatever veggies and herbs you picked up and before long you’ll be stirring them into a pot of creamy rice bathed in a light and creamy white wine sauce. This veggie-filled risotto template is perfect for simple weeknight dinners or as a fast and fancy meal when hosting friends.

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From Apartment Therapy → The Kitchen & Cleaning Tool Brand I Always Go Back To

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Pies and cobblers, crisps and clafouti are all fine desserts, but when ruby red cherries are in their prime, there’s a fast and fancy dessert that tops all the others. It’s easy enough to pull together any night of the week, and finishes on the stovetop with a dazzling flambé before getting spooned over ice cream. If you make just one thing with cherries this summer, this is the dessert to keep at the top of your list.

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Picture this: You’re doing your weekly grocery shop and there’s a great deal on a family pack of chicken thighs. And now that you’re looking in the meat section, you were thinking maybe you’d have a cookout this weekend and the ground beef is on sale. And you might as well stock up on buns because, well, it’s summer and you always need buns.

Somehow you walk out of the store with more than enough to feed you, your family, and then some. You’re still feeling pretty good though — until you get home and you are hit with that sinking feeling that comes from knowing that you can’t possibly eat everything before it goes bad. No worries, though, right? That’s what the freezer is for.

But what if those thighs come out covered in ice and freezer burn? Are they still safe to eat? We investigated.

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If you’re reading this article, chances are I’ve caught you in a sweatpants and froyo-devouring phase listening for your ex’s car outside. Trust me, I was just there. Over the last few months, while going through a breakup from my former girlfriend of four years, I honestly wondered if it was possible to keel over […]

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Sour cherries are one of my most eagerly awaited fresh fruits of the summer. Thin-skinned and tart, they aren’t really best for eating out of hand. We who love them use them as creatively and quickly as we can, putting their bright, acidic hit to good use in jams, cakes, pies, cocktails, and even in the occasional savory dish. Picture your classic cherry pie, bright-red and glowing with orbs of juicy fruit. Well, you’ve just pictured sour cherries.

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My friend, former co-competitor, business partner, and writing buddy Brad Kearns had been on a “Quantified Self” kick, tracking biomarkers, testing blood sugar and ketone levels, and staying abreast of all the various ways we can quantitatively check our progress. He’s months into a ketogenic experiment and had hoped to marry his subjective impressions to objective measurements to strengthen his intuition and improve his results.

Then, several weeks ago, it all changed. Using the same finger prick sample, he checked his fasting blood sugar using three separate devices. Same blood sample, three devices purporting to give accurate readings. You’d think the results would be similar, if not identical. They weren’t:

That’s not just a few points here or there. That disparity is well outside the standard deviation. The numbers can’t be trusted, because which one’s right? And if you can’t trust the numbers, what’s the point of gathering them?

Brad’s results were extraordinary, but making any conclusions from the measurement of an organism’s secretions, emissions, and fluids must be tempered with the fact that biology is chaotic. It isn’t clean, neat, and predictable. If you dig deep enough, it might be predictable, but we don’t yet have the technology capable of untangling it.

This isn’t just limited to over-the-counter glucose monitors either. 

Gut Biome Testing: The different gut biome sequencing services can produce different results. One person had about as contradictory a pair of results as you can get from the same sample. In another case, taking samples from different sections on the same poop gave different bacterial readings. Bacterial strains do not have uniform distribution throughout the turd.

Blood Testing: Each blood drop is different from the next. This is where services like Theranos ran afoul of reality—they claimed they could test individual drops of blood for dozens of biomarkers. That’s all well and good, but a single drop is not representative of the the rest of the blood.

Sleep Tracking: Commercial sleep tracking is notoriously inaccurate, overstimating sleep duration even comparing poorly to established medical devices for tracking sleep, like polysomnography (used in sleep studies) and actigraphs. They give a false sense of security. That’s dangerous. If you’re only sleeping 6 1/2 hours and feeling lousy, but the machine insists you’re getting a full 8 hours a night, and you trust it (it’s “objective” after all), you will jeopardize your health. 

Let’s say the numbers are even accurate. This is only a snapshot of one drop of blood in one minute in a living organism, so trying to discern the truth from a single blood test is like trying to understand the plot of Gone with the Wind by looking at a movie poster. Then, when you factor in how inaccurate the numbers can be from machine to machine or from lab to lab, it makes it even more ridiculous to try to craft any kind of lifestyle strategy based on them. 

Almost a decade ago, a routine visit to the doctor for a skin checkup almost got me placed on blood pressure meds. It was 140/100. I refused, opting to track my own blood pressure over the next week at home using a store-bought device. The results were stunning:

Across 50 readings, I never got the same numbers twice.

My highest was 133/92, taken after leaving the doctor’s office. My lowest was 102/66, that same night after dinner. So, I went from needing drugs and a low-salt diet to l0w-normal BP over the course of 24 hours.

At night, my BP settled in around 110/67 on average.

That cemented for me how ridiculous it is to determine someone’s long-term health trajectory based on a single reading. Blood pressure, as with any physiological biomarker, fluctuates for a reason. When you’re exercising, it’s high to help shuttle oxygen and nutrients around the body. Stress also heightens the need for oxygen and nutrients—so you can deal with whatever stressor ails you—and thus increases blood pressure. It’s helpful when required, bad in excess.

Then there was the time I tested at almost 17% body fat despite looking like this.

Even in that perfect world where every blood drop is identical to the next and every lab machine and OTC device are interchangeable, I’m just not sure if the objective measurements have any real use compared to the subjective measurements.

Do you have energy all day?

Do you wake up feeling refreshed?

Do you want to work out?

Can you make it to lunch without eating or complaining?

Are you productive?

Are you happy with your body composition?

These are the questions to ask. If you can answer affirmatively, what more do you want? I have trouble seeing how numbers on a device that may not even be accurate can improve on those subjective biomarkers.

Another danger of reliance on lab tests, not widely acknowledged, is that we lose touch with our bodies. When we have numbers for everything, why pay attention to something as inaccurate, imprecise, and subjective as “how I feel”?  After all, nobody bothers remembering phone numbers anymore. This will only worsen the more technology improves and accuracy increases. You’ll have robot doctors or implants hooked up to your smartphone analyzing your health using complex algorithms based on biomarkers that are 100% accurate. “Trust the AI,” they’ll say, and there’s some truth to that. Who are you to disregard a supercomputer with 1000x the brainpower of John von Neumann?

Call me a Luddite, but we lose something important in that scenario. Humans are the thinking and feeling animal. We ponder the meaning of life and possess intuitive powers. That’s what makes us so dominant—the ability to use executive functioning to harness and direct our more base urges and instincts. If we no longer have to feel and can rely on flawless biofeedback relayed by sensors and trackers, will we cease to be human?

I don’t know the answer to that. That’s a tough one.

For now, stop rejecting your birthright as intelligent animals. Hone your intuition rather than surrender it. Don’t enslave yourself to the numbers and lab results. That doesn’t mean ignore them outright—particularly if you have a serious condition that requires treatment. I’m not suggesting anyone skip out on their medical care. But there’s this to keep in mind: Quantification is a tool, it’s not the full answer.

You come first. What you say matters. At least for now, it’s often the best biofeedback we have.

To sum up:

• Test results are often unreliable and inaccurate.
• Different devices/labs produce different results.
• Most tests are single snapshots in time and do not represent the natural fluctuations that occur in any biomarker.
• Subjective evaluations are more useful than objective numbers (that may be inaccurate/unreliable).
• Relying on a machine to tell you how you’re feeling may atrophy our ability to feel.

What do you think, folks? How do you weigh objective biomarkers against subjective evaluations of how you’re looking, feeling, and performing? What provides the most value to your life and health? Thanks for reading.

The post Stop Obsessing Over the Numbers appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.