Glute Bridge Exercise - The correct way of doing it

today we're going to talk about one of the most common exercises I see people do wrong the glute Bridge the glutes are really important your glute Max on the back side is one of the main hip stabilizers and one of main low back stabilizers and it's extremely important for preventing uh low back pain the glute bridge is probably one of the most common exercises we see prescribed to people to in order to strengthen the glutes the only problem is if you really watch someone do that and you ask them where they feel it typically they don't tell you the right answer I when a lot of times when I ask my patients do it I say where do you feel it they'll tell me they feel it in their quads the front of them they might feel it in their hamstrings kind of their mid to lower leg they might feel it in their back too as they extend up but the only place you're really supposed to feel this exercise is your butt got your glute glute Max it's the most important muscle we have during this exercise and it's really important we activate it correctly So today we're going to go through that and make sure you guys know how to do it too so we have Leon here who's going to help me with the bridge and he's going to demonstrate how to go through the process if you've never done it before essentially he's going to lay in this starting position flat on his back hips bent knees bent feet on the floor hands at your side and then we're going to go from there all right Leon all I want you to do is just do a bridge all I want you to do is lift your butt off the ground and hold it there so looking at that looks like a pretty good bridge to me but I don't even know if he's using the right muscles or not not until I ask him so I'm going to say Leon where do you feel that and there's multiple answers he could give me he could tell me in his quads in the front of his legs here he could tell me his hamstrings on the back side he could tell me his butt he could tell his back he could tell me his stomach he could give me a combination of all those but Leon where do you feel this point to it for me feels it in his quads that's probably one of the most common areas we see people feel this exercise and we consider those people quad dominant which is not a good strategy some people also feel it in their back as they're extending up this again is not the strategy we should be using rest me rest for me Leon so the main objective here is going to be to get Leon to feel it in his butt when you guys do this at home it's really important that you feel it in your butt your glute Max that's really where you want to feel it so if you're feeling it in your quad you're feeling in your back we need to fix that now you could just lay there and squeeze your butt that would work for the excise but in real life that wouldn't work because you never tell your butt when to work right so we need to get his body to learn to use his glute to extend his hip so we're going to do a few things to try that all right leam what I want you to do is take your heels and just bring them together a little bit for me just bring your heels together a little bit for me yep and then I want you to lift your toes up in the air perfect and all I want you to do don't think about anything else but I just want you to push your heels into the ground and lift your butt off the ground again and see what happens so now I'll ask him the same question where do you feel this Leon do you feel it still in your quads do you feel it in your butt a little bit where do you feel it feel it a little bit in the butt you still feel it here a little bit okay so go down for me so he started to feel in his butt which is awesome he's starting to feel his gluten Max engaged but he still felt the little bit in his quads we we still want to do this again and we want to change it so he doesn't feel it at all in his quad so we're going to try a couple other things so we can take an object that we can squeeze so either a foam roller works good a yoga block something that's relatively dense and you can't just squish down you don't want a really soft cushion you want something with some density and we're just going to put it between his knees so squeeze that formula good you're going to keep with the toes up so I'm going to lift those toes up again good so while you're squeezing that I want you to do the same thing push through your heels and lift your butt up perfect now we're going to ask him where do you feel this Leon is it better or worse than the last time and better means you feel more glute and less quads does it feel better does it feel the same or does it feel worse than last time feel the glutes locked in there pretty good awesome go down for me and we're going to try a third variation on this there's one other way we're going to try it and we're going to see which one's the best out of all of them so I'm going to put my hands on the outside of Leon's legs here and I'm going to ask him just to spread his legs apart against my hand so I want you to push and don't let me close your legs pushing through your heels again I want you to drive up with your hips good and keep your knees apart Perfect all right now I'm going to ask him the same question does this one feel better or not and if better means more glute do you feel more in your glutes this time perfect rest down for me Leon so instead of having someone push your legs out which you're probably not going to have at home you can add something around your legs you can either use a really high resistance band you could actually put a belt around your knees you could even put a piece of rope I don't care anything that you can push your legs out against and activate your glutes you can use to do that version of the of the exercise now that we've done all three versions of the exercise we want to see which one was better and remember better means more glutes or more feeling in the butt and less everywhere else so if you felt better you felt more glute when you were squeezing the roller or squeezing the object then you start with that one if it was when you were pushing out against something like the resistance band or the belt then that's the one you start with if you didn't need any of that and it was actually better just the heels then you start there and then we'll progress from there and make it harder as we go along so now that we've figured out what the best version of the the bridg is for you we need to figure out how long to hold it and how many times to do it so we're going to start out pretty basic we're going to start out with a 10-second hold and we're going to do that as many times as possible with the maximum being 10 but if you get to your third fourth sixth rep whatever it is and all of a sudden your glute or your butt stops doing its job and your quads help or your back help you're done the next time you do the exercise you try to get one more you only do good reps where you feel your glute that's really important once you can Master this exercise and you can get 10 Reps for 10 seconds and you're not using a roller to squeeze or you're not pushing a band out then we can graduate up and we can try to do just a typical regular bridge to see how we do now that Leon's gone through this process for a week or two or however long it takes him to get to activate his glutes without any props without any uh add-ons we're going to have him just do a regular bridge and hopefully he feels it in the right spot so Leon all I want you to do is just do a bridge for me perfect and now with no assistance he's not squeezing anything he's not pushing out against anything I'm gonna ask him the same question where do you feel this Leon perfect he feels it in his butt that's exactly what we want so we're going to work on these we can progress with these over time to single leg versions to weighted versions but as long as he's mastered this and he's started to feel it in his glute 100% that's what we want and he'll be on the road to do even more complicated and harder exercises where it can really make that glute stronger I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I hope you got a lot out of it you really learned how to do this simple yet really important exercise for your low [Music] back

Channel: Back Intelligence

Views: 1,151,110

Keywords: Glute bridge, Butt strengthening, How to do glute bridge, gluteus maximus, bridge exercise

Id: Q_Bpj91Yiis

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018