So, I made an interesting derby discovery, interesting enough that I thought it deserved a blog post!

I was chatting to my sister about glutes the other day. She was telling me how whenever we get injured or hurt our glutes can shut down. It’s sort of the body’s way of saying OH FOR F$%&*%%%%% SAKE STOP DOING THAT THING YOU’RE DOING!

This can make life difficult if you a) want to keep doing the thing you’re doing or b) the glutes never switch back on again and you start using tiny muscles for things your POWERHOUSE of MIGHTY glutes should be doing.

Caty sent me an article about glutes and I was pleased to note that most of the exercises they suggest are exercises I do, or do similar ones. I thought, hmmm, interesting article, confirms that all the stuff I’ve been doing as prehab to activate my glutes is activating my glutes, HOORAY FOR DERBY BOOTY!

I thought that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t… the article planted a cool brain seed.

Ever since a really crushing fall last year, sometimes when I fall hard I can feel my glute switch off. Sometimes it goes numb, sometimes it just doesn’t feel as stable and it takes a while to get back into things. Off the track I’m working on my hips by getting horrible massagey stuff, active release and various exercises to build muscle aka natural armor. On the track my strategy has been to punch my glutes until they wake up and (if there’s space) do a few squats/sit down on my ankles.

Today I went down, felt my glute start to switch off and then I did something different. Thinking back on the exercises in the article I did some one legged squats and one legged balancing. That much more effectively targeted the shocked area and my glute came back to life faster and more evenly. One legged squats engaged a lot more muscles and I could almost feel the squat gathering up my muscles and bringing them back on line.

Yay one legged squats… and now you know, if I’m doing one legged squats on roller skates I’m not just being a weirdo. I’m also priming my butt so it can do some damage!