Gluteus Medius Reactive Activation: Side Hop Progression

Gluteus Medius Reactive Activation: Side Hop Progression is a total body exercise designed to target the gluteus medius muscle while also activating the surrounding musculature of the hip, leg, and core. Through a progression of side hops, this exercise aims to improve balance, stability, and coordination while simultaneously strengthening the muscular system involved in side-to-side movement. With the additional benefit of strengthening the stabilizing muscles in the foot and ankle, this exercise can

Transcript

00:00:0200:00:06
This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness,
00:00:0200:00:06
and we're talking about gluteus medius
00:00:0600:00:11
reactive integration, or progressions of exercises for gluteus medius reactive
00:00:1100:00:15
integration. We've already done sidestepping, and sidestepping
00:00:1500:00:18
progressions in the previous videos, and now we're going to take it up a notch in
00:00:1800:00:22
the velocity category, by doing lateral hops to single leg balance. Now, the
00:00:2200:00:26
previous videos have talked about why we do reactive integration, I'm assuming at
00:00:2600:00:31
this point you've already done your release, stretching, mobilization, and
00:00:3100:00:36
isolated activation. We've already talked about the overactive synergists
00:00:3600:00:40
for the gluteus medius, which are going to be our quadratus lumborum, so we're
00:00:4000:00:42
going to be watching to make sure there's no lateral flexion of the spine.
00:00:4200:00:47
We've already talked about the TFL and piriformus in the case of side hops
00:00:4700:00:50
to balance. I want to make sure that there's not an excessive forward lean,
00:00:5000:00:55
and the knee doesn't cave. We also talked about the gluteus medius having propensity
00:00:5500:00:58
to get weak in both lower leg dysfunction, as well as lumbo-pelvic hip
00:00:5800:01:01
complex dysfunction. I'm going to have Salvi come out, because we've been working
00:01:0100:01:06
on her lower leg dysfunction so this is a very appropriate exercise for her.
00:01:0600:01:09
Alright, Salvi, so what I'm going to have you do here is, you're going to stand on one
00:01:0900:01:14
leg, good.Now I want you to just take a nice little hop that way, land nice and
00:01:1400:01:21
quiet, and stabilize. Good. Hold, two, three, and then come back. First things first,
00:01:2100:01:26
you want to make sure that people, once they hop sideways, they stabilize
00:01:2600:01:32
first, before they hop back. Now, a couple of things on form, we notice that she has a
00:01:3200:01:39
nice straight spine, and hip, knee, and ankle are in perfect alignment. To increase the
00:01:3900:01:44
activity of Salvi's core stabilization system, I'm going to have
00:01:4400:01:48
her draw in and squeeze her glutes when she lands. Good.
00:01:4800:01:53
Squeeze your glutes. Draw-in.
00:01:5600:02:00
Now you notice Salvi did that little tap down. I would prefer to see somebody
00:02:0000:02:04
tap down and hold, then to start losing their balance and just hop
00:02:0400:02:08
back into place, hop back to the other side rather, we end up with this controlled
00:02:0800:02:12
falling scenario, when people just kind of start hopping back and
00:02:1200:02:17
forth without stabilizing. Now, the gluteus medius fibers don't just do
00:02:1700:02:21
frontal plane stabilization. Some of the fibers that also have a propensity towards
00:02:2100:02:26
weakness, also do external rotation. So to progress this exercise, we can also do a
00:02:2600:02:32
transverse plane hop to stabilization. So I'm going to have Salvi start facing this way, and
00:02:3200:02:41
then you're going to jump and face the camera, good, and stabilize. Hop back. Now, with
00:02:4100:02:46
both these progressions, we can make it a little more difficult by just having
00:02:4600:02:51
Salvi jump a little further, so let's take a bigger jump, there you go. Let me have
00:02:5100:02:55
you land on your heel this time, and jump this way.
00:03:0100:03:04
So when you guys are doing the side hops, land on the toe for the best
00:03:0400:03:08
deceleration that we can get, when you're doing the transverse plane hops it's
00:03:0800:03:14
probably best to go heel to toe, nice soft landing. So there you go,
00:03:1400:03:19
we had sidestepping, then we had sidestepping through multiple planes, now
00:03:1900:03:23
we have our side hops to balance, transverse plane hops to balance, and
00:03:2300:03:28
that is the totality of our gluteus medius reactive integration progression.