Ever wanted to strengthen your glutes? This exercise will show you how to strengthen your glutes and decrease your chance of injury. Best of all it can all be done without any equipment and be performed wherever you can lay down. Questions? Fire off below and Michael will answer as many as he can!
Video Transcript:
Aloha, Doctor Michael Garrison here with Ultra Running Magazine and Hawaii Running Lab, onto our quest of adding more tools to your ultra running tool box. The exercise this week is donkey kicks. This exercise is called a donkey kick. It’s going to be great for building up your gluts. Most distance runners tend to have very weak gluts and it winds up causing issues both up and down the kinetic chain.
We want to try stay injury free, obviously as an ultra runner, this is a great way to start moving in that direction. The donkey kick, we’re going to start hand and knees and all we want to do is lift our heel up. We want to try to keep our back nice and flat and squeeze the glut at the top. Bring it back up, lift that heel up. Knee back down to the ground.
Always try to keep that nice 90 degree angle in your leg and try to get your eyes sitting about three to four feet in front of you. Try to keep your back nice and flat and hopefully this is going to help you stay injury free on your quest for the ultra marathon.
Thank you for tuning in and if you have any comments at all, please feel free to leave them in the comment section below.
