Video and Transcript: Strengthen Your “Gluteus Medius” with Side-Lying Hip Abduction

What is the gluteus medius and why does it matter?

Your gluteus medius is one of your three major gluteus muscles. It leads the effort of lifting your leg to the side and stabilizing the pelvis while bearing weight. This movement occurs when you are walking or running. Your gluteus medius also supports the bigger gluteus maximus muscle as it flexes and extends your leg.

If your gluteus medius muscle is weak, your opposite hip (pelvis area) will drop when moving to stand on the other leg. This dropping effect can cause increased low back and hip pain when walking or running.

https://www.spine-health.com/wellness/exercise/strengthening-exercise-program-low-back-pain-relief

Video Transcript: 

So this exercise that I’m going to show you is called “side-lying hip abduction”. And it is also a common exercise that we give to strengthen the muscles on the side of the glutes, your gluteus medius muscle. It is pretty commonly used for that.

So what I’m going to have you doing is, you’re going to make sure that you’re lined up nice and straight. A really good place to do this is actually positioned right up against a wall so your shoulders and your hips and your knees, or sorry your ankles, or actually your heels are actually pushed up against the wall.

I like to do this with the bottom leg bent so that I have nice stability. You want to make sure that what you’re doing is actually think about pushing your heel a little bit away from your body while you do this because otherwise what happens is your trunk likes to sink down into whatever surface that you are laying on. For example, if you’re laying on the floor while you do this.

So you just kind of pull your heel a little bit out of the socket. Keep your toes pointing towards you. And you also want to bring your leg just slightly behind the body. Because if you were to look straight down, what you wouldn’t want to see is you wouldn’t want your leg to be in front of your body. You want to make sure that your heel is just slightly behind your trunk.

And then, what you’re going to do is you’re going to gently lift and lower. When you do that, what you should be feeling is you should be feeling your butt muscles working really hard as you do this exercise.

You shouldn't be feeling this in your back. You shouldn’t be feeling this on your knee or your inner thigh. If you are, you might be going a little bit too low.

So you want to start with a little bit higher lift, and just lift and lower. It’s a small motion.

You also want to make sure that you’re not moving in your trunk as you do this exercise.

This is a very, very targeted exercise, not a very big motion.

You want to hold for 3-5 seconds and then you want to lower back down.

Again you’re going to repeat anywhere from 10-15 repetitions or whatever the recommendation is from your physical therapist.