Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains how sitting and aging shorten hip flexors and deactivate glutes, forcing hamstrings and lower back to compensate and raising injury risk. Without glute activation, squats and other exercises shift work to the wrong muscles, undermining training and mobility.
You know, one of the big things that happens to people as they go through the aging process is because everybody's sitting all the time and they're crunched over at their computer, you know, there's, there's basically shrinkage of the hip flexors, basically the, the things that allow you to pick your, your knee up towards your chest as you're standing on the floor, right? So your hip flexors get short, but then because of that, the glutes can become deactivated because they're linked together. And so it's really interesting. One of the things I'm doing right now is kind of reactivating my glutes. I realized that some of my mobility was being compromised because my glutes were not dominant anymore. And so I've been working to make myself more glute dominant than, you know, quad or hamstring dominant. And what happens is when the glutes aren't working, you know, the hamstrings, the low back all have to try to kick in and take over for that. And so being able to reestablish that, but also getting the glutes to fire again, right? Because when they, when they become deactivated, you can do an exercise, and yet your body will— let's say you're going to do a squat, which, you know, is certainly one, one way to kind of activate the glutes. There are many ways to do it. But let's say you're going to activate the glutes through a squat. If your glutes have been deactivated by the things we talked about, the prolonged sitting, etc., then even though you're doing the squat, instead of the glute actually doing the work, the work gets shuttled out to other parts of the body.
