Understanding a hidden reason for low back pain and hamstring tightness

One of the most common orthopedic reasons that someone will make a trip to the doctor is low back pain. Unless there is a story for your low back pain (slipped and fell, tackled playing football, etc.) it is often a situation that simply develops over time and pain is the last stop in this process. In this episode of the podcast/newsletter, we thought we would shine some light on how this process unfolds and discuss something called Gluteal Amnesia.

We begin by discussing a test we will have people do when we lecture to various groups. Sitting down, do you have the ability to flex your right butt cheek independent of your left? Vise versa? If not, you may have something that is often referred to as Gluteal Amnesia, basically a fancy way of saying your glute muscles are weak and your brain does not recruit them well. Your glutes have a big role to play in your movement process. Your gait cycle (walking) requires your glutes to fire up and pull a big load once your foot hits the ground. The problem is that in modern day society most of us spend a good part of our day sitting on our glutes and this can often times drive weakness in these muscles. When we need to move from point A to point B but our glutes are not functioning as they should, what does our body do? It compensates.

In the podcast we discuss 2 very common strategies your body deploys in response to weak glutes. The first is your brain goes north of your glutes and starts increasing tone in your low back muscles to compensate. This can tilt your pelvis forward and aid your gait cycle, however over time can lead to back pain for obvious reasons. The second strategy is your brain can go south of your glutes into your hamstrings and begin increasing muscular tone there. This again can buckle your legs back (think locking your knees), tilt your center of mass forward, and propel your gait cycle forward. This gets the job done, but over time leads to tighter and tighter hamstrings which can irritate not only your hamstrings, but also your low back.

We end by discussing a few brief exercises (other than getting better at the test listed above) to begin the process of improving glute function. Lying face down and squeezing one glute at a time and then progressing to a frog leg glute squeeze (lying down, bending the knees and bringing the feet together and squeezing) are great starts. Doing things like weighted squats seems to not be great for driving a lot of glute function.

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Simplified Takeaways…

1. Glute weakness is a hidden reason for a sore back and tight hamstrings as this is your body’s natural compensatory mechanism for getting around weak glutes.

2. Sitting a lot is a prime driver of glute weakness.

3. Being able to sit and still isolate the left and right glute separately and feel the contraction is a good skill to work on.

4. It is better to master this skill first rather than load up a bar and squat as squats have been shown to not be great for eliciting glute function.

5. Master skill first, then add strength once the firing pattern is down.

Further Reading…

1.  Study showing quad activity was higher than glute or hamstring activity when doing squats

2.  Another study showing quad activity was higher than glute activity during squats

3.  Study showing hip thrusts seem to recruit glute max better than squats and correlate to sprinting

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