Transcription
The glute bridge is one of the most prescribed exercises by physical therapists, chiropractors, and fitness professionals, and for good reason. It can be one of the best exercises for increasing overall strength and flexibility, and it can give us a nice rear end to boot.
However, in working with thousands of people over the years, I find that more than 90% of people aren't doing the glute bridge exercise properly. That means they aren't getting the results they want, which is frustrating. More importantly, they're increasing tension and load in their low back and hamstrings, which leads to more low back pain.
The good news is that with a few simple cues, you can take a bad glute bridge and turn it into the exercise it was meant to be. This is one of my favorite things to teach my patients. In this video, I'll teach you the four most common mistakes people make when doing a glute bridge. I'm going to show you how to assess if you're doing the glute bridge properly using a biofeedback technique I was taught by one of the world's top back pain specialists. Lastly, I'll help you perfect your form so that your time and effort spent doing this critical exercise earns you strength and low back protection instead of low back pain.
But first, let me show you how improper glute bridge form will ruin your low back. What I'm about to show you will help you know if you are doing your glute bridge properly. The glute bridge, by its very name, is an exercise meant to target your gluteal muscle. You notice it isn't called the hamstring bridge or the quad bridge. The gluteus maximus is supposed to be the biggest and strongest muscle in the human body.
The glute max connects your pelvis to the back of your hip, and it works mainly as a hip extensor. For example, when you're walking, that's what's propelling you forward. Or when you bend over to pick up something, it's the main muscle that brings you back upright. You use it when you get in and out of a chair.
You have three muscles that help you accomplish these activities that you do every day. They're partners, but they don't all contribute equally. The three muscles are your low back muscles, your glute muscles, and your hamstring muscles. They all act as hip extensors and low back extensors, but again, they don't contribute equally. The amount of force or activity that should be there is about 20% from your hamstrings, 70% from your glute, and about 10% as a stabilizing force from your low back.
So here's the problem: many people these days have glute muscles that aren't firing properly. They've lost the ability to activate and control this key muscle, and it is really a problem. You may have heard of terms like dead butt syndrome, gluteal amnesia, or even office chair butt to describe this.
When our glute muscles aren't strong and they aren't able to be activated when we walk, bend, or get out of a chair, then the neighboring muscles that do the same function—the hamstrings and the lower back muscles—start doing more than their proper share of the work. For example, your hamstrings might take 50% of the load instead of 20%, and your lower back muscles might take 30% of the load instead of 10%, with your glutes only contributing 20%.
What this looks like for you is that your hamstrings are always tight. They may be likely to cramp, or you may pull them frequently. Also, your lower back muscles are always tight, always feeling like they need to be stretched. That back tension leads to compression of the lumbar discs and also the spinal joints called facet joints, all of which lead to low back pain.
All the while, you're feeling less flexible, less strength in your everyday activities, and like your back might go out at any moment. How can I describe that scenario in so much detail? It's because new patients walk into my Northern California clinic with those exact complaints every single week. Literally thousands of them have come in over the past 20 years, and most of them have been given glute bridge exercises in the past by an MD or a physical therapist, or they saw it online.
But when I ask them to demonstrate the glute bridge exercise, I see four common mistakes over and over. I then teach them what I'm about to teach you, and not only is the exercise not painful anymore, but most find over the coming days that their low back pain decreases, their hamstrings feel looser, and they notice more pep in their step and more ease with getting in and out of a chair.
So what are the four most common mistakes that people make when doing a glute bridge? I'm going to demonstrate those now, and then afterwards, I'm going to walk you step by step through how to know if you're doing your glute bridge properly. If you're going to try these things as I show them—and I do encourage participation—just know that nothing should cause any pain. Listen to your body and stay within your limits.
The first common mistake I see is with people's feet. First off, make sure you have traction between your feet and the surface you're on. This is critical, so don't do these, for example, on a hardwood floor while wearing socks. Next, you should have your heels up close to your buttocks. Ideally, your heels are under your knees, and your fingertips should be able to touch your heels. If you can't get your knees to bend this much, don't worry; just do the best that you can.
But know that based on biomechanics, the more your heels are away from your buttocks, the more you're going to use your hamstrings to go into that glute bridge position. This is what leads people to feel this exercise more in their hamstrings versus their glute max muscles. Lastly, as you come up into your bridge, you want to be putting pressure through these three points of your feet. A lot of times, people put too much weight on the outside of their foot as they come up.
I may modify this direction here in a moment to help you learn proper form, but as you progress through your glute bridge, you definitely want to be feeling the pressure into your heel, the outside of your foot, but most importantly, here into the inside of your foot.
The second mistake I see is over-tucking of the buttocks. There's a good reason to go into a slight posterior tilt or butt tuck when preparing for your glute bridge, but many times I find people really over-tucking their butt. It looks like this, and this is not a functional posture or way to move. What you want to do is find a good neutral spine before and during your glute bridge.
To do that, you're going to want to press the hollow of your lower back down into the floor so that you feel your whole lower back touching the floor. You do this by gently contracting your abdominal muscles.
The third mistake that I see is people arching their low back at the top of their bridge and also going up too high into the bridge. A proper bridge has you come up where you can draw a straight line between your knees and your shoulders through your hips. You should be able to do this without flaring your ribs. If you start to flare your ribs, you're losing your neutral spine and getting out of your functional range.
So it might be that you can't go into a full bridge yet. That's okay; just work on the functional range that you do have, patterning in good movement and proper form. You'll get to a full bridge over time.
The last mistake is people not feeling it in their glute max. They'll feel it in their quads, or their hamstrings, or their lower back—sometimes all of those—but the key area to feel it is in the glute max. I'm going to teach you a biofeedback trick I was taught by Dr. Craig Lebenson, the author of a landmark book called "Rehabilitation of the Spine." This trick is also going to lead us directly into teaching you the proper way to progress your glute bridges so that you can get the most out of them.
Before I show you that biofeedback trick, my love language is words of affirmation, and I just love it when people share their experience in the comments. So please drop a line or heart this video to let me know my work is resonating. Thank you so much.
Okay, so here's the way I go about cueing and progressing the glute bridge exercise in my clinic. First off, you're going to want to touch your glute muscles with your fingers. Do this on both sides. Your fingers are going to be feeling for and letting you know if your glutes are firing, and your fingers also are going to help you wake up your glute muscles through physical cueing.
Now for the fun stuff! I'm going to teach you how I cue my patients on how to do a perfect glute bridge. We're going to start in the proper position, avoiding those mistakes that we talked about previously, making sure your heels are where you can touch them or do the best that you can.
From here, I'm going to have you take your fingertips and place them in your glute muscle. Don't go too low; you'll be on the hamstring. You don't want to be up too high, just right here in the sides of your glutes. What we're going to be doing with our fingers is a couple of things.
The first thing is we're going to listen with our fingers. We're going to listen for the glute contraction. So, line here, what I want you to do is, without moving, take and contract your glutes and then relax. Contract your glutes and then relax.
Now, what happens to a lot of my patients is they say, "I can't feel anything contracting with my fingers," and that is a lot of the problem. If you can't contract your glutes when you're trying to, how are you going to get the benefits out of doing glute bridges or other exercises like that? So we're trying to wake up the glutes.
We're going to tell you how to do that in a second, but try this with your bicep. With your bicep here, contract it. You'll notice that you didn't move your arm around; you didn't have to contort your face. You could just contract it and relax it—right, voluntary control of the muscle.
When the glutes get inhibited or we lose activation of them, we need to practice this. So what we're going to do is, lying here without moving, relax everything, fingers in our glutes, and contract, and then relax, and contract, and relax.
You might find you have a lot of accessory contractions going on. You're going to try and minimize those. If you say, "I can't feel anything in my glutes as I do this," here's what you're going to do: you're going to take your fingers and have those cue you. So you're going to have them push into your glutes.
What I say to my patients is, as you push in, you're going to try to push back out against pushing in. So here, pushing in, I'm going to try and push out against there. Relax, push in, cueing it, and relax. Sometimes this takes patients a few days—not all day, but a few days of practicing this to get it where they can get that glute contraction without contracting a lot of other things, and they start to feel it again.
But this is very important before we go on to the next step. Okay, that next step is, once you're able to, with your fingers in your glutes, contract your glutes just in place, now we're going to put some motion into it.
So again, the proper position, the weight going into all three parts of our feet. We're going to take and first step, contract your glutes. That'll help flatten your back. You want your back pressing into the floor evenly throughout, not overly tucking your pelvis.
With your glutes contracted, we're going to come up into the bridge. We're still feeling for the glutes to be contracted; they're still contracted. Then what we're going to do is slowly come back down, keeping your glutes contracted all the way till you get to the floor.
Then once I'm here, relax the glutes. Most people lose the contraction somewhere between here and here, and it's really important to be able to lengthen your glutes as you contract them. It protects your back and helps your hamstrings.
So what we want to do, once again, is from the good starting position, the weight going into all three points of the feet, we're going to contract our glute, lying here with our back flattened into the mat. Come up into the bridge position, feeling for our glutes contracting, and then on the way back down, continue to contract the glutes.
You can cue it if you need to with your fingers until you come all the way back down to the floor, and then you can relax your glutes. Just like that! I like to do three sets of 12 reps of those glutes. You can do them on a daily basis.
I want to show you a few tricks that can really supercharge your glute bridge, especially if you're having trouble really feeling it or you don't feel like you're making the gains that you want. There are four tricks here.
First, you can take a foam roller or anything. You could take a roll of paper towels. Getting into your proper position, heels in close, you can take and squeeze that foam roller in between, feeling for your glutes to contract. This might help you feel this contraction.
Come up into a bridge, feeling for the contraction all the way down, and then relax. So using a foam roller and squeezing that can a lot of times really help.
Another thing that we can do is take something like a belt and put it around our feet—sometimes, I'm sorry, around our knees. I'm using an SI belt; you could use a regular belt, you could use a piece of elastic band, use a rope—it doesn't matter.
But what we're going to do is have it around the outside of our knees. Sometimes people will really notice that this helps them to cue feeling for the contraction in their glutes. It will really help them to cue and get a better contraction in their glutes by pushing out. It kind of varies between people which way seems like it works best.
Another thing that can help people is making sure that their thighs are parallel to each other. A lot of times, people have their feet too wide. Having them too wide will make it hard to get that contraction in the glute.
So again, with our feet in close, having our thighs parallel when we come up into our glute bridge. The last thing that can sometimes help people to turn off the hamstring and further develop the glute contraction is for people to come up on their heels like this.
So we'd be up on our heels, feel the contraction in our glute first, come up, feel the contraction, all the way back down, and then relax. Those four variations can really help you to feel the exercise differently, and sometimes people will notice a much different response.
Getting your glutes stronger through a proper glute bridge exercise is really important for your low back. But if your hamstrings are tight, it can cancel out all those gains. I find many people stretch their hamstrings over and over without ever really seeing any improvement in their flexibility, and that is needlessly frustrating.
That's why I made this video right here, where I teach two simple exercises that permanently fix tight hamstrings without stretching. You see, it isn't doing exercises that makes us stronger and more flexible; it's doing them properly.
Thanks for watching, and until next time, take care. [Music]