If I had to pick one muscle group that defines the difference between a functional modern body and a dysfunctional one, it would be the glutes. Not the abs. Not the “core.” The glutes.
Your gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in your body. It is also, in the majority of people who walk into my practice, the most inactive. Not weak in the sense that it cannot produce force. Inactive in the sense that the nervous system has largely stopped recruiting it for the tasks it was designed to do.
This is a problem of enormous proportions, and I mean that literally. We are talking about the single largest muscle in the human body going offline in a huge percentage of the population. The downstream consequences touch everything. Low back pain. Knee pain. Hip pain. Pelvic floor dysfunction. Poor balance. Reduced power. Accelerated joint degeneration. The glute problem is not a fitness trend or a buzzword. It is one of the central structural failures of modern life.
What the Glutes Actually Do
Before we talk about what goes wrong, let’s talk about what the glutes are for.
Your gluteus maximus is a hip extensor. Its primary job is to extend the hip, which means pulling the thigh bone backward relative to the pelvis. This is the action that propels you forward in walking. It is the power behind climbing stairs, standing up from a chair, jumping, running. It is the engine of human locomotion.
But it does much more than that. The gluteus maximus is also a powerful external rotator of the hip. It stabilizes the pelvis in single-leg stance, which is what walking actually is: a controlled series of single-leg stances. It connects the lower body to the upper body through the thoracolumbar fascia, creating a force transmission system that allows your arm swing to coordinate with your leg drive.
The gluteus medius and minimus, the smaller glute muscles on the side of the hip, are equally important. They are the primary stabilizers of the pelvis during walking. Every time you take a step and one foot lifts off the ground, your gluteus medius on the standing leg has to fire to keep your pelvis level. Without it, your pelvis drops on the unsupported side. This is called a Trendelenburg sign, and you can see mild versions of it in almost any crowd of people if you know what to look for.
The glutes, taken as a whole, are not just muscles. They are the foundation of upright human movement. We evolved to walk and run on two legs, and the glutes are what make that possible. No other primate has gluteal development like ours. It is one of the defining features of being human.
Gluteal Amnesia
The term “gluteal amnesia” was coined by Dr. Stuart McGill, one of the leading spine biomechanics researchers in the world. It describes exactly what it sounds like: your glutes have forgotten how to fire.
Not forgotten in the way you might forget a phone number. Forgotten in the way a skill you once had can atrophy to the point of non-existence. The neural pathways that should activate the glute during hip extension have been weakened to the point where other muscles have taken over the job.
How does this happen?
Sitting.
When you sit in a chair, your hip is in flexion. The hip flexors, primarily the psoas and the iliacus, are in a shortened position. The glutes are in a lengthened position. If you sit for an hour, this is no problem. Your body was designed to handle varied positions.
If you sit for eight hours a day, five days a week, for years, something changes. The hip flexors adaptively shorten. The fascia in and around them becomes denser, less pliable. The tissues literally remodel to accommodate the position you spend the most time in.
And here is the critical piece: the hip flexors and the glutes have a reciprocal inhibition relationship. When one is active, the other is inhibited. This is normal and useful. When you flex your hip, you do not want the glute fighting it. The nervous system turns the glute down so the hip flexor can work.
But when the hip flexors are chronically shortened and hypertonic, they send a constant inhibitory signal to the glutes. The glutes are being told, all day, every day, to be quiet. To stand down. To not participate.
Over time, the nervous system adapts. It stops even trying to recruit the glutes for tasks that should demand them. It finds other muscles to do the work. The hamstrings take over hip extension. The lumbar erectors compensate for pelvic stability. The adductors and TFL pick up what the gluteus medius should be doing.
These substitution patterns work. Badly. But they work well enough that you can still walk, still climb stairs, still function in daily life. You just do all of it with the wrong muscles, which means you do all of it with more strain, less efficiency, and a slowly accumulating structural cost that eventually shows up as pain.
What It Costs
I want to be concrete about this. Here is what gluteal amnesia actually does to a body.
Low back pain. When the glutes are not extending the hip, something else has to. Usually it is the lumbar erectors. These muscles were designed to stabilize the spine, not to produce the power of locomotion. When they are forced to do the glute’s job, they work too hard, fatigue, and hurt. This is one of the most common presentations of low back pain I see. The back is not the problem. The back is the victim. The glutes are the problem.
Knee pain. When the gluteus medius is not stabilizing the pelvis, the knee has to deal with rotational forces it was not designed for. The femur internally rotates, the knee drifts inward during walking and stair climbing, and the structures around the knee, particularly the patellofemoral joint and the IT band, start complaining. Runners with knee pain almost always have weak or inhibited glutes. Almost always.
Hip impingement. When the deep hip external rotators and the glute max are not controlling femoral position, the head of the femur can migrate forward in the socket. This creates pinching at the front of the hip, especially in flexion. People feel it when they squat, when they sit for long periods, when they bring their knee to their chest. The conventional diagnosis is femoroacetabular impingement. Sometimes it is structural. Often it is positional, caused by muscles not doing their job.
Pelvic floor issues. The glutes and the pelvic floor are intimately connected, both anatomically and neurologically. When the glutes shut down, the pelvic floor often follows. Or the pelvic floor compensates by over-tightening, trying to provide stability from below that the glutes should be providing from behind. This is a factor in many pelvic floor dysfunction cases that gets overlooked because people do not think of the glutes as being related.
I could go on. Ankle instability. Plantar fasciitis. Thoracolumbar junction pain. The ripple effects of gluteal amnesia extend through the entire body because the glutes are so central to human movement that when they go offline, everything downstream and upstream has to compensate.
The Feldenkrais Approach
Feldenkrais would approach this problem through awareness and exploration. His method would have you lie on your back, or your side, or your belly, and explore small, slow movements of hip extension. Not forceful movements. Tiny ones. The kind where you are paying attention to what happens in your body when you begin to extend the hip.
Where do you feel it? What muscles activate? Does your back arch? Does your breath change? Can you find the glute? Can you feel it turn on?
This approach has real value. For many people, the first step in solving the glute problem is simply becoming aware that the glute is not participating. You cannot fix what you do not know is broken. And many people genuinely do not know that their glutes are offline. They have been living with the substitution patterns for so long that those patterns feel normal.
Feldenkrais lessons in hip extension and pelvic movement can start to rebuild the neural connection between the brain and the glute. They can help someone feel the difference between extending the hip with the hamstrings versus extending it with the glutes. They can create moments of genuine glute activation that the nervous system can begin to build on.
For someone with mild glute inhibition, someone who sits a lot but still moves regularly, who does not have significant tissue changes, this awareness-based approach can be sufficient. I have seen it work. The nervous system finds the glute, starts using it again, and function improves.
Where Awareness Alone Falls Short
But here is where my experience diverges from a pure Feldenkrais approach.
For the majority of the people I work with, awareness alone is not enough. And it is not enough for a specific, identifiable reason: the tissue environment has changed.
When hip flexors have been chronically shortened for years, they do not just return to normal length because you become aware of them. The fascia has remodeled. The muscle fibers have adapted. The joint capsule may have tightened. These are physical, structural changes in the tissue, and they create a physical, structural barrier to glute activation.
You can explore hip extension in a Feldenkrais lesson for an hour. You can bring exquisite awareness to the movement. But if your psoas is physically shortened to the point where it is pulling your femur forward in the socket and maintaining constant inhibition of your glute, awareness is working against a headwind that may be too strong.
I discussed this in my post on strength, the idea that real strength requires removing obstacles, not just adding effort. The glute problem is perhaps the clearest example of this principle in practice.
My Approach
In my structural integration work, I address the glute problem in a specific sequence that I have refined over years of practice.
First, release the hip flexors. This is step one, and it is non-negotiable. You have to change the tissue environment that is creating the inhibition. I work directly with the psoas, the iliacus, the rectus femoris, and the TFL. This is not comfortable work. These tissues are deep and often very sensitive. But when they release, you can sometimes see the change immediately. The pelvis shifts. The lumbar curve changes. The client breathes differently.
Second, wake the glutes directly. Once the inhibitory signal from the hip flexors has been reduced, I work directly on the gluteal tissue. Often it is dense, fibrotic, and tender. The fascia overlying the glute max can be remarkably thick in people who have been sitting on it for decades. I work to restore suppleness and blood flow to the tissue, to break up adhesions, to remind the tissue that it is supposed to be dynamic muscle, not a cushion.
Third, activate. Once the tissue is ready, we do targeted activation work. Not in a Feldenkrais sense of exploration, though exploration has its place. Direct, conscious glute activation. Bridges. Clamshells. Single-leg stance work. The client learns to feel the glute fire, to turn it on voluntarily, to know the difference between a glute contraction and a hamstring substitution.
Fourth, load progressively. A muscle that can activate in isolation on a treatment table is not the same as a muscle that activates automatically during walking and stair climbing. The final step is progressive loading. Squats, deadlifts, step-ups, walking hills. Increasing the demand gradually so the nervous system learns to recruit the glute under real-world conditions, not just in a controlled therapeutic environment.
This sequence matters. You cannot effectively load a glute that cannot activate. You cannot effectively activate a glute that is inhibited by shortened hip flexors. You cannot release hip flexors with awareness alone if the tissue has physically remodeled.
Both Approaches Have Their Place
I want to be clear that I am not dismissing the Feldenkrais approach. I am contextualizing it.
For someone who moves regularly, whose tissue is relatively healthy, whose glute inhibition is more about habit than about structural change, Feldenkrais-style exploration can be the primary intervention. The nervous system finds the glute, starts using it, and the problem resolves.
For someone who has been sitting eight hours a day for fifteen years, whose hip flexors are physically shortened, whose glute tissue has become dense and fibrotic, whose lumbar spine has been compensating so long that it has its own set of structural changes, awareness alone is not going to cut it. The body needs hands-on structural intervention to create the conditions where the nervous system can do its learning.
This is a theme I keep returning to in this series because it is the central tension in my work. Awareness and structure are not opposing approaches. They are sequential ones. Structure first, to create the possibility. Awareness second, to realize the possibility. And then movement, to make it permanent.
The glute problem is not mysterious. It is not genetic. It is not inevitable. It is the predictable result of a mismatch between how our bodies evolved and how we actually live. We evolved to walk, run, climb, squat, and move through varied terrain using the most powerful muscle in our body. We now sit on that muscle for the majority of our waking hours and then wonder why it stops working.
The fix is available. It requires understanding the problem at both the tissue level and the nervous system level. It requires structural work to undo the adaptations of chronic sitting. It requires awareness work to rebuild the neural pathways. And it requires progressive loading to make the changes stick.
In the next post, I will zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what modern life has done to our bodies. The glute problem is one piece of a larger pattern, a pattern of forward, rounded, disconnected posture that is reshaping human bodies at a population level. Understanding that bigger picture helps explain why interventions like mine exist and why they are increasingly necessary.
Your glutes are not gone. They are waiting. They just need the right conditions to come back.