Sprinting and Glutes

by Bret Contreras January 20, 2014

In sports and in the weightroom, all muscles need to be strong and powerful. The body works in a series of kinetic chains to produce forceful, powerful, and coordinated movement. Nevertheless, some muscles are more important than others. And in the weightroom, prioritization is needed to make sure the lifter puts the majority of his or her efforts into the methods that deliver the biggest return.

What’s the Most Important Muscle for Total Athleticism?

If I had to choose one muscle, I’d say that the glutes are the most important muscle for total athleticism. After all, they’re heavily responsible for hip extension, hip external rotation, hip abduction, and posterior pelvic tilt, which means that they’re highly utilized in sprinting, jumping, landing, climbing, throwing, striking, swinging, turning, cutting from side to side, squatting, bending, lunging, cleaning, and snatching (basically all things athletic).

It’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who feels this way. Researchers from a brand new study on sprinting concluded that:

“It appears that the human gluteus maximus is akin to a multifunction Swiss army knife.” 

What’s the Most Important Muscle in Sprinting?

However, I’ve always felt that the hamstrings are the most important muscle for sprinting. Most sprinting researchers feel the same way. The hammies are responsible for hip extension and knee flexion, and both of these functions are needed in sprinting (out of all of the joint actions, hip extension and knee flexion torques increase the most as running velocity increases from moderate to maximal speeds).

That said, it is my current belief that the hamstrings are the most important sprinting muscle in the air, whereas the gluteus maximus is the most important sprinting muscle on the ground. During the swing phase, the iliopsoas is vitally important in swinging the thigh upward, while the hamstrings are vitally important in reversing the movement and swinging the thigh downward. But once the foot hits the ground, the gluteus maximus takes over and becomes the most important hip extensor, absorbing braking and vertical forces and then rapidly producing propulsive forces.

Researchers and Tunnel-Vision

The problem is, many sprint researchers are so hyper-focused on the hamstrings that they fail to properly analyze the glute max’s contribution to sprinting. In fact, in the literature, there are so many amazing hamstring researchers (ex: Chumanov, Thelen, Henderscheit, Schache, Dorn, Pandy, Silder, Askling, Mendiguchia, Brughelli, etc.), but very few amazing glute researchers (ex: Nemeth, Worrell, Blemker, Ward, Neumann – many of these folks no longer study glutes) that there seems to be a frenzy to see who can publish the best hamstring material. Meanwhile, the glutes get the shaft. Allow me to provide two cases in point:

1. Muscular strategy shift in human running: dependence of running speed on hip and ankle muscle performance – this is one of my favorite papers on sprinting. This one is a free pdf, so I recommend that you click on the link and download the paper. 
2. Changes in muscle activity with increasing running speed – this is another excellent paper on sprinting. 

By the way, Chris and I reviewed both of these studies in our sprinting page. Please allow me to address each study more in depth below.

Muscular strategy shift in human running: dependence of running speed on hip and ankle muscle performance

Changes in muscle activity with increasing running speed

• This is an excellent paper as well, however, it has some limitations too (just like all papers)
• The researchers didn’t normalize the EMG activation to MVC, which is more telling

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