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Especially for runners, you find plenty of advice to "activate" glutes - the logic seems to be that those muscles are usually switched off for most of the time (i.e., when sitting in front of a PC for 8 hours a day), so when running they don't do much; by activating them, you can have them involved more, and so either relieve other muscles, or plain run faster, or be less injury prone. From experience, I know how "deactivated" glutes feel while standing or walking, so I'm not disputing anything; I just want to dig a bit deeper into what it means from a physiology/biology standpoint.

The activation is usually a choice of exercises that, well, involve the glutes (squats, lunges, side leg raises, static plank-like side holds etc.).

So far so good, on to the question(s): what is the physical thing happening with the muscles or nervous system when we "activate" them? Is this just some kind of strengthening? Or is it more about the enervation or the control from the brain? Would such exercises have to be performed closely before the main activity (during warmup for a running session, in this case), or does timing not matter? Can you overdo it in some way? Would the same result be achieved by simply consciously engaging the glutes while performing everyday tasks (i.e., standing, walking) or during sports?

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You can't physically stand/walk/run without using your glutes. They're always "active" in some capacity when you feel it or not.

What people think is "activating" their <insert body part here> is that they are either:

  1. Increasing their focus on the respective bodypart so it feels more activated than it previously would otherwise.
  2. Exhausting other muscle groups so that the "activated" muscle group has to work harder to achieve the same physical performance.
  3. Exhausting the primary muscle group so it's actually weaker than it was before the "activation exercise". Thus it feels like it's more engaged. It'd be like doing 5 reps of bicep curls and then saying that my bicep is finally active because I feel more tension on the 6th rep.
  4. Warming up the muscle group so it's not working from a cold state which can reduce performance initially.

I think #4 is probably the primary mechanism in which people do activation exercises. Light bodyweight squats and lunges are good dynamic stretches to do before a run to warm up the body. The use every muscle part available.

The rest is just marketing.

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  • Thanks @DeeV, that aligns with my suspicion that this kind of activation is maybe more a "marketing" term for a warmup exercise instead of a physiological (objective) aspect. Or maybe in the case of running, just a secondary proprioceptive feeling of different running form cues (i.e., it is definitely possible to walk/run with the glutes feeling differently by actively tilting the hips - which is a movement then ultimately executed by the glutes). I'll wait a bit for more answers and then accept if nothing better pops up.
    – AnoE
    Commented May 15 at 9:13
  • @AnoE I don't think is necessarily marketing, it's both warmup and proprioception. It's just easier to say "activation" than explain the four points above every time.
    – Luciano
    Commented May 15 at 10:20
  • @Luciano There are some that use it that way, but I feel most people who say "activation" are implying that the specific muscle somehow won't get used during the exercise unless you do this pre-exercise first. It's a side-effect of fitness influencer culture where people parrot what someone else says without looking in to the context. "Warm-up" or "pre-exhaustion" are better terms that get the point across.
    – DeeV
    Commented May 15 at 12:37

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