Glutes! Bums! Cheeks! Building Strength from the Trunk Up
Written by LJ
Strong glutes do more than just power our movements—they support our posture, stabilize our lower back, and enhance overall mobility. In our yoga practice, glute strength and activation are essential for supporting posture, preventing injury, and finding balance in standing, backbending, and even seated postures.
If you recall, the last 3 months we’ve chatted about Upper Cross Syndrome; we’re movin’ down to Lower Cross Syndrome for the next 3! This month, we’re focusing on intentional glute activation to cultivate strength and stability both on and off the mat.
The Lowdown on Lower Cross Syndrome:
Lower Cross Syndrome (LCS) is a common postural imbalance caused by tight hip flexors and lower back muscles combined with inactive glutes and core muscles. This imbalance can lead to lower back ache and less-than-optimal movement and posture patterns. By strengthening the glutes and focusing on supporting natural pelvic alignment, we can help correct LCS, hopefully reducing discomfort and improving our daily, functional movement.
Three Booty-ful Yoga Poses to Build Glute Strength
Chair Pose (Utkatasana): A powerhouse posture for glute endurance and strength.
- Start in Mountain Pose (Tadasana) with feet hip-width distance apart.
- Lift your hip points up slightly toward your ribs, bend your knees and lower your hips as if sitting back into a chair- ohhh that’s why it’s named that??
- Keep your chest lifted, core engaged, and weight in your heels. Try lifting your toes for extra foot engagement!
Glute Focus: Squeeeeze your glutes as you rise back to standing to build strength and control.
FUNKY TIP: Very often, a high/tall chair (think: hips down and back only 6 inches or so) gives you greater access to your glutes. Try it on to see how that works in your body!
Warrior III (Virabhadrasana III): This single-leg balance builds stability, glute engagement, and control.
- From a high crescent lunge, shift your weight into your front foot for Power Crescent, think about the four corners for stability!
- Engage your kneecap to extend your back leg straight behind you, bringing your torso parallel (or closer to) to the floor, then lift your back leg.
- Keep your standing leg strong and actively press through the heel of your extended leg.
Glute Focus: Your standing glute is working! Engage your lifted glute by gently pressing your heel toward the ceiling (while keeping your hip points pulling toward your low ribs – low back love). Wanna kick it up? Tap your fingers to the mat up and down for a few breaths- Hello yogi RDLs!
Bridge Pose (Setu Bandhasana): A classic glute-activating pose that strengthens the posterior chain. We have a whole Buddha blog on fun ways to spice this up!
- Lie on your back, bend your knees, and place feet hip-width apart.
- Press into your feet and lift your hips toward the sky.
- Keep knees in line with your hips and shoulders relaxed.
Glute Focus: Actively press through the heels and squeeze your glutes at the top.
How to Engage your Trunk in Any Yoga Pose:
Glute activation isn’t just about effort (though, it’s a LOT of effort! Sheesh!)—it’s about awareness and intention. Here’s how to fire up your Funkin’ glutes in any pose:
- Mind-Muscle Connection: Before moving, set an intention to engage the glutes by consciously contracting them. Energy goes where intention flows! Visualizing those buns does sooo much more than you’d think!
- Heel Engagement: Pressing firmly into the heels can help activate the posterior chain, in standing and balancing poses. We like to lift those toe beans to feel that posterior chain werk.
- Pelvic Positioning: A neutral pelvis supports glute engagement. Try to avoid excessive arching in the lower back, and draw your lower ribs in. We like to think about pulling belly button to spine, and hips and rib points together!
- Slow & Controlled Movements: Moving with intention, rather than momentum, helps recruit more muscle fibers. Slow and steady wins the… glutes?
- Breath Awareness: Syncing breath with movement can enhance muscle engagement—Although we often use our exhales to release and rest, consider in powerful poses like Chair or Horse that your inhale = expansion, and your exhale = contraction and stability.
Strong Funkin’ Glutes, Strong Funkin’ Posture
I can’t lie, I fight the goblin-hunch like no other, especially on those long days writing blog posts 😉 By integrating these poses and activation techniques, we’ll build a foundation of strength and stability that supports every movement, both in yoga and daily life. The greatest gift of a playful practice is all the ways we can integrate it into each day! Strengthening the glutes is a key factor in correcting Lower Cross Syndrome, reducing back discomfort, and supporting our postural patterns.
Join us in the studio this month as we focus on building glute strength with intention, activation, and hot power (yoga)!
Can’t wait to see you on the mat, friends!
R.A.I.N. Meditation: Showering yourself in emotional intelligence.
Written by Larissa
RAIN Meditation is such a wonderful technique to work with, and it can be used in what’s sometimes called your “formal meditation”, setting time aside to work with your body and mind in stillness and a bit of quietude. But more importantly, it can be used anytime throughout the day. It’s simple and clear, and trains us to allow our emotions, rather than hiding them, pretending they aren’t there, avoiding or pushing them onto others.
What Is An Emotion?
Of course we have the easiest ones to identify like: sad, happy, and angry-which many adults in a survey by Brene Brown defined specifically as “pissed off”, as many of us have a hard time admitting anger. Then we can look at all the sub-categories like: frustration, fearful, joyful, affectionate, insecure, excited… However we want to categorize these terms, an emotion is sensation in your body. Our goal is to learn feeling and expressing those sensations in a healthy and supportive way; which gives us more resiliency, connection, energy, ease, and freedom.
A feeling is the title, and emotion is the sensation in the body. We store these little bits of energy, they add up, and then eventually must go somewhere. Ayurvedic medicine tells us that dis-ease eventually turns into disease; like how we know that stress is a precursor for heart disease. Rather than waiting for emotion to build up to us exploding (or imploding), we can parse out the intense things (like grief or anger) into smaller moments and tend to the sensations as they arise throughout the day.
If you’ve ever heard me talk about meditation, or being human, you’ve probably heard me say that emotions are just energy in motion. You cannot contain or avoid them forever. Even if you are generally calm, cool, and collected, emotions are still there. And what do our emotions want? Simply, to be felt.
Feeling an emotion, getting into the “feels”, can be a lot to work with, which is why we often try to logic our way through them. (I promise I’ve tried to read allllll the books so I can cerebralize my way through them!) This may seem to work for a time, but invariably, that energy must move.
Let’s peek at the most common ways we Feel the Feels:
Outsized Reactions:
💥 One too many socks left on the floor brings up a rage that almost scares you.
💥 A tiny gesture of care brings you to a gulping sob.
💥 An innocent comment from someone in a meeting causes a reaction from you that you weren’t expecting.
💥 Or perhaps later, you get stuck in a rumination loop, or you spend the next few days “winning that argument” (even if it wasn’t an argument) in the shower.
Internalizing:
👉 “This isn’t that big of a deal; I should just get over it.”
👉 “I’m sure I’m just being sensitive.”
👉 “Everyone is doing their best, except me.”
Externalizing and accidentally pushing or blaming your emotions onto others:
👉 “You’re making me so angry.”
👉 “I’m not upset, you’re upset!”
👉 “This wouldn’t be happing if you weren’t so…”
Making your emotions a problem:
👉 “This s#*t is always happening to me!”
👉 “Listen to this, can you believe it??”
👉 “I can’t believe I feel like this, it’s awful.”
We don’t have to say these things aloud (and we often don’t) for our brain to believe them. Often, these are unconscious patterns of behavior. The good news is, they are not ‘who you are’. With practice and gentle awareness, we can become more aware of the patterns to take better care of our whole self, emotional life included.
When you slow down to take care of your emotions (your energy in motion), you will likely find you have a lot more energy left for everything else in your life for which you want to use your energy!
So, how do we take care of our emotions?
I’ve heard Resma Menakem say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” When something touches (triggers) us in just the right way, sometimes those tender emotions we’ve tried to keep at bay come up in a tidal wave. Our look at RAIN Mediation is a way to allow those little waves to splash up, ripple and settle, so we don’t have to endure the tsunami.
Emotional Care through R.A.I.N.
R- Recognize the emotion
💧 A brief pause to notice you are experiencing an emotion. This pause can change everything!
💧 You might try to name the emotion (fear, anger, sadness, frustration, etc), or just notice how your body, head, heart feel.
A- Acknowledge and Allow
💧 This is your inner witness. You aren’t trying to fix, blame, or suppress anything. Just allow yourself to feel how you feel.
💧 This does not mean you are allowing yourself or someone else to cause you harm. You are simply allowing the feeling to exist without changing it in the moment.
I- Inquire with curiosity
💧 This inquiry is about you and your body in the moment, not as much the story around the emotion, though you may find questions about the scenario helpful as you process.
💧 Where do I feel this in my body? Is there tension anywhere?
💧 What brought this up? Am I judging myself or someone else? Is following the story causing me to be flooded with emotion?
N- Nurture yourself
💧 You can work with phrases like:
💬 “It’s okay I’m feeling this way. This is a normal human experience to have all these emotions.”
💬 “I’m feeling a lot, and this energy wants to move.”
💬 Say to yourself: “I won’t abandon you. I care about you.”
💧 Check in with yourself: Does my body need movement, rest, creative expression (journaling, art, an Awe Walk in nature), a listening ear?
The best way to learn is through repetition, and I’d love to have you join us in our morning meditation as we practice this technique in many forms this month. This simple, clear, yet profound practice will enhance your ability to hold all the parts of being human, especially the tough bits, leaving more space and energy for the joyful bits <3
If you’d like to dive deeper, we invite you to join us for our monthly meditation circle!
Check out our Youtube for an overview of these concepts or a meditation practice to try them on <3
As always, we hope that you join us M-F at 7:30am for Funky Buddha Yoga’s free, live, virtual meditation to learn more practices, nuances, and dive deeper into a plethora of tools that can bring your practice off your mat and into your daily life <3
