7 No-brainer Reasons to be Squeezing Your Butt!

Hey, I’m Shawn. Today, I want to talk to you about your butt why is it so important to have a good relationship with your? But I’m always telling people “squeeze your butt every day”. I squeeze my butt every day. I get paid money to help people squeeze their butts the right way. It really helps people! Why is that? Let’s talk about it. 

So there’s seven or eight, really good reasons to squeeze your butt every day. 

Reason, number one is it’s going to set your pelvis. 

So your pelvis might be in a posterior position and might be anterior or post likely it could be higher on one side than the other. When you squeeze your butt your pelvis becomes neutral. It’s a very important set of postural muscle. that keep your body together. Helps your gait immensely. Well, it’s very important. So for most people, a lot of people I work with, when they’re learning stabilize, their pelvis – I’m like squeeze your butt for 10 to 50 times any time throughout the day, especially if you’re going to be standing for a while. If you have been sitting for a long time, it’s just really great to do. Having a neutral pelvis is like setting your whole posture in your whole body up for success. Squeeze your butt!

 Another reason. Is that a lot of low back tightness pain, even inflammatory spine injuries are driven by a gluteal dysfunction. 

When you walk, and you leave your leg behind yourself, your glutes should kick in to help you extend your hip. It’s really easy for that not to happen and your low back muscles, your erector, quadratus lumborum, and your hamstring will work to manipulate your pelvis and your low back so that you can mimic hip extension by flailing your pelvis around instead of it being a stable keystone of your movement. I believe this happens because people are sitting for a long time, getting up, not re-appropriating their movement. It’s just they’re not optimizing their body. So when they go to use it, it’s not ready. They set up a new pattern, a path of least resistance and that grows until it becomes dominant and their glutes don’t even work anymore. So a lot of people I see, they’re having some back pain. They feel like they can’t do what they want because they’re limited and every single time they fail their glute test. I help them squeeze their butt, balance their pelvis, realign their spine, and they feel great. It’s really amazing to see it happen and people could save thousands and thousands of dollars and days and hours of suffering and worrying. If they would just lay down and squeeze their butts a little bit. There’s some other specific things to worry about to, but it’s really that simple.

Another reason is like I mentioned a little bit is it’ll improve your gait.

 Your gait is a lot to think about – “okay. I’m going to step through and squeeze my butt, I need to roll though this part of my foot, hit the ground this way, I’m going to keep my pelvis stable, I’m going to keep my core 20% engaged.” Nonsense, easy to mess up, pretty much guaranteed to create some new compensation. People are really struggling with improving, their gait, because it’s so complicated. There’s so many things to think about. And the great thing about posture management is you do the exercise, you achieve the position, return to baseline, and then you don’t worry about it for the rest of the day or at least a few hours. If your glutes are working properly with the rest of your body, your gait is going to be really good. You can just squeeze your butt. Maybe do one or two other things and just go about your day, go for a walk exercise, and you can rely on that function being restored and you can easily test it for yourself to make sure(and Ill cover that later).

Another reason is reducing and preventing daily inflammation and stress on your system. 

When your body is working from a place of compensation, your glutes aren’t working properly. Some other muscle nearby isn’t working properly. Other muscles are doing more than they need to. You’re going to build up inflammation and stress. Those muscles are responding to those actions and those positions, and they are going to stiffen up, tighten up to try and support you in this unintended way. We see a lot of people with very stiff necks, very stiff shoulders, upper backs, stiff ribs. Those are people that are sitting all the time. They’re working very hard while they’re sitting there. Their body isn’t being exposed to any other position. They’re not laying very flat ever except in a bed with a big pillow, or maybe be on a couch. If you don’t put it there, you body is never getting a chance to return to base. So it’s just constantly totally holding onto itself and trying to keep that person going so to speak, and eventually they’re going to run into a problem because the body will build up so much inflammations stiffness. It’ll eventually lead into an injury. 

The next thing I want to talk about is preventing inflammatory injuries. 

You reducing your daily stress, if you’re preventing that end-stage, inflammatory injury, I’ve known plenty of people who have had herniated discs, fissures, bulges and alll sorts of downstream issues related to their nerves as a result of maintaining poor posture for too long. Someone with posture that is poor suddenly tries to do something that requires Great posture without any warming up, that type of sudden stress is going to be what’s causing that injury to show up. They’re like, oh my God. I don’t know what happened. I just threw out my back reaching for this thing, turning around, changing directions.  

No, it was probably happening for months or years before it got to that point. Your body just wasn’t able to stabilize the proper way anymore and it caused a reaction because something moved that wasn’t supposed to right near your spine, your body stiffens up real tight and then it might cause more damage. You’re going to be a little incapacitated. It’s no good. If you just squeeze your butt, making sure the right muscles are working, your body won’t ever get to that point. I’ve seen people with massive hernias like 13 millimeters, get better and not require surgery, from regaining the function of their hips and especially squeezing there butt.

 Another great reason is balance, and a balanced aesthetic. 

So if your glutes look unbalanced if you feel unbalanced a lot, you’re you’re probably unbalanced and a part of it is because your glutes are unbalanced. Most of the time when people start doing glute locks, which is what I call but squeezes a little more professionally. They notice that their butt cheeks aren’t attracting or relaxing at just the same time. And that’s representative of a difference every time you need your glutes to work. So, if you can’t relax them at the same time, if you can’t contract them at the same time, they are not coming in when you need them to during your movement. They’re disregulated from your brain messages, from your neural impulses. So taking a little time to focus on that, specifically, will improve the balance in your glutes and it will improve the balance in your movement because it will help keep you from favoring one side. People in their 30s to 50s, have been favoring one side, most of their life their legs and their hips can become very very different. The good news is that it’s really easy to restore especially with consistent practice over a few days or a few weeks… hopefully, you know, lasting a lifetime. Squeezing your butt to be preventive and stay in great shape works really well.  Another Pro. Is that your butt will probably look better. I mean in every single posture photo I take very first picture. Second picture is pretty much, always a noticeable change in their glutes. Their glutes are deactivated one side, not working as good in the other. They’re different sizes shaped differently. If your glutes are working the same, they’re going to look the same. The appearance of your body is a function of how you’re using it or not using it. 

Overall, Squeezing your butt is just a no-brainer. It takes one to two minutes. You can do it anywhere on the ground. There are several different ways. It will literally change your life. I cannot express enough how much I would love for you to squeeze your butt. These are all reasons to have a better relationship with your butt and why it’s going to help you be a more successful person. 

See my associated blog video post, and the 2nd half on how to test and squeeze your butt! It’s actually sort of specific, you should definitely take a look!

Thank you for reading!!

If you try some of the butt squeezes pictured or in the video and your re-test isn’t what you like – there is probably a more advanced compensation happening. Feel free to email me at the bottom of any page, on instagram to reach me for some more help and guidance. Love that!