“Your glutes are weak”

How many times as a runner do you hear this being a reason for injury?

In actuality this statement has no bearing on injury and rehab in the way you think it does.

It would be nice if it was just that simple. You could do some glute strengthening exercises and then get back into running and the pain magically disappears. That would be easy.

Unfortunately it’s not. There is more work than that to be done. More than likely it is your running gait, specifically that you never ‘learned’ how to ‘run’ right.  And our glutes are actually pretty strong naturally, making this even less likely.

Most of us teach ourselves to run. We literally just move faster, an extension of walking. Whatever way we end up doing it naturally we stick to. Unfortunately this is flawed. Not only is an extension of walking incorrect, ‘natural’ gait is also incorrect.

Running, like any other sport, requires technique. Sadly, most of us never learned that technique.

If we run as an extension of walking, we find we strike with our heel, landing sharply in front of our bodies; we have no thought process in what muscles to contract when, and we probably don’t even realize we are supposed to be contracting some muscles voluntarily.

This would be the same as picking up a heavy box using our arms. Without first engaging our core stomach muscles to protect the spine, then bending from the knees and using the leg muscles, we expose ourselves to injury, as we would not be using  the proper technique.

The same is true in running. Not only should the core be engaged the entire time, but the glutes have to be ‘taught’ how and when to fire each time the leg accepts weight and has to then push back off the ground.

A runner can have the strongest glutes around but if they fail to actively engage them at the proper stage of the gait cycle, it does not matter how strong they are, and the runner is exposing himself or herself to injury risk.