Do you want stronger hips so you can walk and run faster and more efficiently? Help lessen the chance of lower back or hip pain? Try our simple home exercise for gluteus medius strengthening with a functional squat. It will help get you stronger and back to what you love doing.

Hi this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver and I want to show you a functional progression for glute strengthening.

We’ve done a few other exercises in our videos which work on strengthening the gluteus medius muscle which helps to stabilize the pelvis and hips. And now we want to show how to activate that muscle, and with a more functional strengthening exercise.

So we’ve got our stretchy thera-band here. Green is kind of a medium strength band and this band is cut in one piece. This length is very commonly used for people doing this exercise.

The Exercise

We want to use the band to try to maintain our knee alignment over our feet so that we don’t allow our knees to turn in, but we don’t want to pull them out so super far either.
So pulling slightly so you have some strain or pull happening on the thera-band, so it’s under tension.
Your feet are on the ground and then we’re going to work on a little squat.
As we’re squatting, we want to keep pressure pulled out towards the band.
With squatting, we want to maintain a good position of the spine, allowing the hips to seat back, neither arching the back too much or flattening it. So neutral spine and working on that knee alignment.

So as you come into your squat and back up, you should feel your glutes activating and engaging a little bit more functionally. This is a really nice functional progression for glute medius strengthening. Give it a try.