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Weak Glutes?

Friday, 30 December 2016 23:10

Ensure that your running stride originates from the body’s main engine.

By Jene' Shaw (triathlon.competitor.com)

The health risks associated with sitting at a desk all day have made numerous headlines in the past year. And outside of the serious health risks, a sedentary lifestyle from 9 to 5 can also have an impact on the quality of your afternoon run workouts.

“Because we sit on our butt all day, it sometimes forgets what it’s supposed to do when we go to run,” says exercise physiologist Krista Austin, Ph.D. If you go directly from your desk to the roads, your glutes may have trouble engaging. Sitting for hours also puts the hip...

flexors in a shortened position, which limits your ability to extend the hip and causes you to decrease your stride length, explains physical therapist Bryan Hill of San Diego’s Rehab United.

This dormant-to-active transition can result in more stress on your quads, hamstrings and lower-leg muscles, which aren’t cut out to do all of the heavy lifting. “You have to view the glute as the huge motor of a machine,” Austin says. “All of a sudden you’ve shut down the biggest part of the machinery and now you want the smaller components to do all of the work.”  READ MORE