That means the Venn diagram of dead butt sufferers includes people who sit a lot, active people, those with back pain, and those with knee pain. All those people, all that overlap, all those butts.

Is your butt among them?

Putting a Name to the Pain

Stuart McGill, PhD, coined the term “gluteal amnesia” to describe what happens when pain causes people to change how they move.

“In people with longer-term pain, the pattern of nerve pulses distributed to the muscles can become corrupted,” he explained. “The pain kicks off an inhibition pathway, so the brain finds a different way to do the same basic thing.” 

That, in turn, changes the way muscles like the hamstrings contribute to the movement.

“But even when the pain has gone away, the brain often remembers the painful pattern,” McGill said. Which means it also forgets how to use the muscles appropriately and efficiently. 

The latter term is probably more appropriate, given that some people hear the former and think it implies gluteal dementia, as if the misplaced movement patterns can never be restored.

Fortunately for the gluteally deficient among us, they can. Just not in the way most of us would assume. 

Hips, Femur, Knees, and Woes

While McGill was teasing out the connection between gluteal amnesia and back pain, Christopher Powers, PT, PhD, was looking at how abnormal glute activation patterns could lead to knee problems. 

“The gluteal muscles control the femur,” he explained. “The femur’s half the knee joint. So by definition, the gluteal muscles control half the knee.”

Powers is associate chair of the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the University of Southern California, where he studies the root causes of the lower-body injuries. And he addresses a lot of them with the athletes and patients he sees at the Movement Performance Institute in Los Angeles, which he founded and owns. 

His research has shown that a key function of the gluteal muscles is to prevent the femur from rolling inward during sports, exercise, or everyday physical activities. 

“Once you stop using the muscle, the brain kind of forgets about it,” Powers said. “You lose the neural connectivity.”

And if the brain forgets how to stabilize the femur, just about anything you do, from walking to landing after a jump, will put stress on your knee joints. 

How to Know if Your Butt is Dead or Dying

Remember, given that sedentary and active people have this issue, aside from chronic knee or back pain, you may not be able to tell if your glutes are firing properly or improperly. 

Waterbury recommends this self-test: the single-leg glute bridge. 

Lie on your back with one leg lifted out straight and the other leg bent at a 45-degree angle with the foot flat on the floor. Your thighs should be parallel. Raise your butt so your thighs and torso form a straight line. 

Even if you haven’t used the exercises in your own routines, you’ve probably seen other people doing variations of them. 

Here’s the catch: To do the program correctly, you have to forget what you’ve done or seen. 

Instead of doing sets and reps, you’ll hold each position for up to a minute at a time. And you’ll need to do the program almost every day. 

“When you do reps – up and down, up and down – the focus tends to be on the movement,” Powers said. Isometric holds like these require something else: intense concentration on squeezing the muscle in one continuous position.

That extended muscle activation allows the brain to reopen its channels of communication. If you follow the isometric holds with exercises that use the glutes, like squats or step-ups, you reinforce those neural signals.

To get the most out of the exercises, you’ll want to use a miniband positioned around your thighs, just above your knees. When you can hold a position for a full minute, use a more challenging band the next time. 

Without shifting your hips, lift one leg up (hip abduction) and back (hip extension). Position your thigh so it’s neither perpendicular to your torso (straight out to the side) nor aligned with it (straight back), but instead about halfway between those two points. (It’s called “fire hydrant” because you’re mimicking a dog doing what a dog does to a fire hydrant.)

Now turn your thigh outward (external rotation) until you feel tension in the band. 

The goal isn’t to achieve any particular range of motion. It’s to reach a position you can hold while keeping your hips level with the floor.

Hold for up to a minute, switch sides, and repeat. 

Restoring Your Seat of Power

People in Powers’s studies did three isometric holds of each exercise, with each leg, twice a day for seven consecutive days. 

But Waterbury, who studied under Powers at USC, uses a streamlined version of the program with clients, athletes, and patients. 

Start with these exercises:

• Clamshell, 30 seconds per side
• Side-lying hip abduction, 30 seconds per side
• Fire hydrant, 30 seconds per side