Do you have weak or tight hips? Try our lateral side stepping exercise for strengthening the gluteus medius. This simple exercise is a great progression on the squat technique and has great application to better performance in sport and other functional activities.

Hi this is Dana from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver and I want to show you a progression on strengthening exercises for your gluteus medius muscle.

We’ve shown you an exercise to do it lying down with the clamshell, we’ve shown you a squat exercise using it, and now I want to work on progressing to a sidestepping exercise.

Positioning

We’re going to use this TheraBand around our knees.
This gives tension into the glutes by pushing the knee out slightly in the the band.
You should feel it in your glutes, and you want to keep your feet even so that you don’t let your feet drop in.
Make sure you’re not pulling too far out, which makes your weight bear on the outside of your feet.

So, keeping both feet on the ground a little bit of tension on the band, I’m going to work on a sidestep.

The Exercise

The biggest key with the sidestep is that you keep your alignment through your spine.
So as you’re weight shifting and leading the tension through your knees, you don’t want to lead with your foot.
You want to lead with the knee and want to maintain your pelvis neutral so that when you shift you’re not getting any kind of transfer of weight like this happening. That your body stays over tall
So the exercise would be working like this and I’m feeling it working in my glutes now

Sidestep about three or four, five steps each direction, back and forth until you hit fatigue. You will probably hit fatigue fairly quickly because this can be quite tiring.