The Butt and Nothing But
No, really! This is serious!
Today, let’s go deep in the butt. OMG I’m so happy I get to write that sentence. How droll: what wit! I think Marcus Aurelius would have laughed.
Seriously, this area is a complicated layer of muscles topped off by the largest muscle in our bodies, the gluteus maximus. The maximus is accompanied by its sister muscles, the gluteus medius, and the gluteus minimus. Together, these three muscles get all the attention and much of the direct work in running. They are responsible for pushing you off the ground. They are responsible for helping you walk upright and stand up from a seated position. What they are not responsible for is a lot of injuries.
Although butt-and-hip pain is incredibly common in running, little of it has anything to do with the glut muscles. Instead, pain usually originates in one of the many smaller, stabilizer muscles that wrap around our hips and the tops of our femurs and hold everything together while the gluts propel us forward.
These small muscles lie deep underneath the layers of gluts (see, I told you we would go deep). They’re so buried and oddly connective that we frequently don’t even know we’re using them. You know when someone goes skiing or horseback riding or surfing for the first time and comes back saying that “hurting in places I didn’t know I had”? That’s the pain of these stabilizer muscles working in the forefront of our consciousness. When they’re irritated, they can cause some major pain.
I’ve always known that I don’t really engage my core that much; I work on it, but it’s not my natural anatomy. Instead, I depend on my gluts to hold me up and stabilize me. That works fine-ish, but it’s not very efficient. As I have continued to work on my pelvic floor strength post-baby, I realized that part the reason I didn’t (don’t?) engage my lower abs well is not because my gluts are too strong, which is what I always thought, but because I don’t really engage two bits of tissue I’d never heard of: the Quadratus Femoris and the Obturator Externus.
Their roles are collaborative. The quadratus femoris activates while you’re standing, when the hip requires stability, while the obturator externus changes femoral positioning during transitions between internal and external rotation. They work reciprocally to fine-tune hip position and control.
I found that my hip pain and much of my knee pain is actually caused by my lack of engagement of these muscles. I do lots of squats and lunges during cross training, but I wasn’t actually engaging the right muscles. Instead, I was allowing my hips to pop out a little, just a few inches, to either side, dumping my weight towards the center of my body and stressing out my glut max and knees, instead of lifting my weight up vertically using these stabilizer muscles. The result: a lot of knee pops and stiffness and sharp, random hip pain that was never enough to send me to the doctor but alarming and painful.
Since I discovered this, I’ve concentrated on literally, consciously moving my hips out of their popped position and into alignment under my shoulders whenever I’m cross training. The result is that, one week in and after being sore in muscles I didn’t know I had for a few days, I’m feeling more bounce and length in my running stride and experiencing a better range of motion than I’ve ever had.
So if you have hip or knee pain or just want to experience a greater range of motion, try to figure out if you’re properly engaging the tiny stabilizer muscles deep in your…hips. 35 years in, and I’m still learning; I hope you are, too. Go run.