There’s nothing more frustrating than mastering your squats, hip thrusts and Bulgarian split squats, but still seeing no signs of a bigger booty. Zero. Zilch. Nadda. A couple of years ago this was me and I just couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was. I was eating well and training hard lifting heavy weights, why were my glutes still not getting with the programme? It wasn’t until my coach at the time pointed out that I had been making a key mistake during my training and, since sorting this, I've seen some serious glute gains.
The mistake – and I know there will be loads of you who are guilty of doing this – was that I was doing absolutely no glute activation exercises prior to training. “When we talk about glute activation, we’re referring to the process of awakening the gluteus maximus muscles and priming them for exercise,” says Aroosha Nekonam, a personal trainer at Ultimate Performance. “Failing to activate the glutes correctly can impede your progress in building strong glutes and, worse, other parts of your body will act as over-compensators during your lifts – most notably the lower back – which can lead to injuries and back pain.”
