​As some of you know, I recently returned to San Francisco from China, where I had been working as a physio for the Chinese Olympic teams in prep for Rio.  In China, the cultural standard of beauty for women is to be small and thin- no curves, no muscles, and definitely NO butt. As a result of this, it was nearly impossible to convince ANY female athlete to do their glute/hip strengthening exercises. “But I don’t want to get a big butt! Big butt not cute!” was the common complaint. It was like. Pulling. Teeth.  As a result, the first FULL phrase I learned in Chinese was NOT “Hi, how are you?” or “Nice to meet you!” or any number of other useful phrases one typically learns when starting a new language…the first phrase I learned was “Every day is GLUTE day!” This was much more useful for me and my line of work..I used it at LEAST 10 times per day, way more often than the other standard phrases. I would run around the gym, excitedly exclaiming “every day is glute day! Every day is glute day!”  While the Chinese athletes and their coaches looked incredulously at each other, wondering who the white girl was who wanted everyone to grow big butts. This was one of the biggest recurrent battles I fought in China (#battleofthebooty??)

Luckily, in working with circus artists in predominantly western cultures, I don’t encounter the same resistance to glute work.  In America specifically, we really love big butts…this makes my work SO much easier. Thanks, sir mix-a-lot. My #battleofthebooty here is much different. Typically, many circus artists I work with are already incorporating glute training into their warm up and/or conditioning…however, what I see being done to train glutes is not usually the most effective or efficient methods for glute training for circus arts.  SO- this post will discuss the common errors in glute strengthening in circus arts, and a few options for exercises that may be more circus-specific.

​Squats and lunges are some of the most common “traditional” exercises that we do to target glutes. The problem with these is that during these exercises, the hip moves from a neutral position to a flexed position, and then returns to neutral. In many activities in performing arts, we need our glutes to be strong in EXTENSION (leg behind you), not flexion. Examples of how our glutes need to be strong in extension:

• Squaring our splits (back leg)
• Supporting our hips and spine in a back bend
• Arabesque
• Active inverted leg flexibility: handstand splits/straddle, or inverted splits/straddle on an apparatus

If you think about the positioning of our legs in the above tricks, and then think about squats and lunges, you can see that there is limited similarity to how glutes work in squats, and how they work in an arabesque. Specificity of training is important in all sports, but is especially tricky in performing arts, since we’re…ahem…slightly different than the “average” athlete, and have very unique requirements of our bodies.

​What’s wrong with these exercises? Nothing. They are great total-body exercises. What they are NOT is glute-specific. Lets take a step back and talk about the natural tendencies of our #circusbooties before moving forward…​First of all, left to their own devices, our glutes prefer to do as little work as possible. They’re lazy, and not team players. You know that kid in high school who you didn’t want to get stuck with on a group project, because they never pulled their weight? Yeah, that’s our glutes.

The problem with these exercises is that it is REALLY easy to substitute by using our low back muscles. Our low back muscles are the overachiever in class, that always does TOO much and picks up the slack for the lazy kid on the group project. What all of these exercises have in common is that they are done with our backs arched- spinal extension. This is a position that our back muscles are very comfortable in, and therefore kick in extra.  As a result? Glutes don’t tend to activate as much as they should. So, while these exercises are not inherently bad, they do not tend to bias our glutes- especially for those of us who KNOW we have difficulty with activating our glutes.