Glute Training Can Make You Less Crazy

You already knew it could make you hotter

Still Life with Peaches, Paul Gauguin

They’re all saying this is the twilight of the age of the ass, the dawning of the age of the breast. In a sense this doesn’t matter at all, like, I doubt anyone will care less about other people’s asses—it’s not like men were noticeably better at maintaining eye contact back when breasts were out of fashion. But it will make people care less about their own asses, so it’s time for me to make my points, while y’all still kind of care.

Obviously this isn’t in my normal wheelhouse. But I’m increasingly believing that an influencer for a given subject is the worst-positioned person to give a normal person advice on that subject (I could write a whole post about this, although maybe that sentence just about covers it). Like, I’ve read a lot of diet advice from beautiful women on instagram, but ultimately the most useful diet advice I’ve ever read came from the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder.¹ So I will say what I have to say about glutes, once, and then go back to modernized fairy tales and opinions about 19th century novels.

We all know that people like looking at nice butts. We maybe know that the gluteus maximus is the biggest muscle & that strengthening it can have an outsized effect on performance for most full-body physical activities: running, climbing, swimming, yoga, that other one, etc etc. I won’t go into these things as much, other people have talked about them more.

I think people don’t talk enough about the impact of glute strength on emotional health. People talk a lot about psoas tension & how it contributes to maintaining emotional patterns of neurosis. I couldn’t agree more. But then they often try to solve the problem directly by relaxing the psoas, which is ultimately only a short term solution. Your psoas will never feel safe enough to relax long-term unless your glutes are strong enough to take up the burden the psoas is used to carrying. The psoas and the glutes are antagonists: paired muscles such that one contracts when the other relaxes, and vice versa. If you’re blocked on psoas release, glute strengthening can get you through (& if you’re blocked on glute strengthening, psoas relase can get you thorugh, though I kind of think my readers are more likely to be “embodiment and emotion” people than callipygian gym bunnies, &, further, I think the gym bunnies are more likely to already know about the psoas-glute connection.)

This is a great synecdoche for a systemic issue with self-healing in this corner of the internet: overfocus on ease at the expense of striving, when it’s often true that only striving can give you the stability required for safety in ease.

You don’t have to do that much glute training. “Noob gains” apply as much to the glutes as any other muscles. Your glutes move your legs backwards relative to the plane of your torso, so movements like the bridge, the hip thrust, and the quadruped leg extension are especially great, although squats and deadlifts are also great, & you’ll probably want to hit your gluteus medius too.

Below the paywall: a little bit about the glute/pelvic floor relationship. Sorry, I’m prudish, you could probably find out about this stuff elsewhere though.