 First question is from Jen's hikes. What do you recommend for someone who has lazy glutes? I try really hard to connect my mind to muscle, but after leg workout, my quads are super sore and never really feel it in my glutes. It's like that, no matter the exercise. I know it goes from sleepy to lazy. Yeah, let's define this for a second. So essentially somebody who's doing, you know, traditional glute exercises, so like barbell squats, for example, or lunges, and their glutes just don't seem to develop. They don't seem to feel it in their glutes. It's much more quad dominant for them. So it can be very frustrating. Sometimes people will get this with their chest when they're bench pressing, uh, sometimes people will get in their back when they're rowing where they just don't feel the target muscle, but they feel all the other muscles involved. And then the development starts to reflect this. Now here's what's happening. Now we've called this sleepy butt syndrome. You could call it lazy glutes. Really, what's happening is you have a recruitment pattern that happens every time you do a movement. This reminds me of the weight belt question that we have, right? That we often get where people ask about weight belts. Studies show that when you wear a weight belt, you still get the same core activation as when you don't wear a weight belt. So then the argument is, well, then weight belts are perfectly fine. It's not disengaging the core. The problem isn't the disengaging. The problem is how the recruitment patterns working. When you wear a belt, your core pushes out against the belt. When you don't wear a belt, your core kind of sucks and embraces. So what we need to do here is change the recruitment pattern to make it more favorable for this person's goals. Okay. So how are, how are we going to do that? Well, changing form and technique is the obvious answer. The problem is this person is probably so disconnected to this favorable recruitment pattern. It just doesn't work. One way to do this is to prime before you do these compound lifts with maybe an isolation exercise where you can squeeze and feel the glutes. Now, does this intrinsically or physiologically increase the connection to the glutes? Not necessarily. What it does though, is it allows you to feel the glutes more. So now that I have a little bit of a pump of my glutes and I've squeezed them with, let's say hip thrusts or donkey kickbacks or tube walking. Now when I squat, because I already felt my glutes earlier, like, you know, three minutes ago, now I can position myself in a way where I can change the recruitment pattern enough to get those glutes to fire more. Same thing with like doing like flies before a bench press. Now you can start to feel where you want to feel the exercise. You have to spend that time neurologically to really focus on activating and recruiting, you know, that major muscle group, if it's something that isn't responding, you know, the way you want, like there needs to be work in that direction where, you know, you place yourself with exercises that you can use for priming, but really even just, you know, isometrically just really like reinforcing that ahead of time. If it's something that you've noticed for a long period of time, there needs to be, you know, quite a bit of attention and repetition doing that consistently before it's really going to start to respond because of such a loud signal and opposition that you've been running off of forever with the quads. I wouldn't make the argument that it actually does help you use more glute and recruit that. I mean, when you do a squat, it's a hip hinge movement, right? And when you lay down and you do like frog pumps or, you know, floor bridges before, that's a hip hinge movement, but it's isolating the glutes in that situation or as closely isolating as you can. Obviously, there's a little bit of quad extension in there also, but it's mostly the glutes that are firing. And so you are neurologically training the brain to use the glutes in that movement, which mirrors the similar pattern that you would do going into a squat. So if you prime that first, you train it neurologically to go, oh, this is how I, when I do this hinge, this is where I should feel it and this is what it should be like. So then when I go in there, because we've talked about this before, I can take the same exercise and I can make it work a specific muscle more than the other. And then I can go into the next set and flip that and literally can take an exercise and change it like that because it's cognitively focusing on because, because, especially compound lifts, there's so many muscles that are required to do that movement that, and I can control my muscles without having any resistance, right? I can flex certain ones. So if you can flex your glutes with no weight, just if you could stand still and activate, that should be the goal, right? To be able to just flex your glutes. Well, yes. And that's what priming is doing. Like you are, you're getting down there and you're practicing flexing the muscle you want to work really well. Then you go into the movement that you have a hard time feeling that muscle and all you're really thinking about is flexing that muscle. You get down to the bottom of your squat and now you're thinking about, oh, what you were doing in those floor bridges. When I was in the floor bridge, I was squeezing those glutes and so you think about it. Here's the challenge and this is where you're going to get the people that are going to counter you. They're going to bring up these EMG studies that show it doesn't activate the muscle more than if you did whatever. Now, here's the problem with that is you can't separate the fact that I can consciously feel a muscle and now change my technique enough to squeeze it versus is it just automatically physiologically changing the recruitment pattern? But you can't separate the two. So it really doesn't matter which one it is. The truth is, look, here's a good example. As a personal trainer, one of the hardest muscles to get people to feel. Generally is any muscle in the back, right? Because they don't see it. Like trying to get someone to squeeze their rhomboids of their lats who's untrained and they're just having a tough time doing it. Here's a simple trick. I used to teach my personal trainers. If you take a pencil and touch the muscle, that's all you got to do. Here, squeeze right here. Just because you're touching it, the person automatically can now squeeze it more because they have that feel that feedback, that feedback, that outside feedback. Priming does that as well. So priming, I don't care if it does or doesn't automatically increase the, or improve the recruitment, what I think it's really doing, the value is you can feel it now. Because people who have trouble activating their glutes can't feel them. They typically can't feel them when they do almost anything. I hate when trainers and coaches try and argue the science and the semantics around this. When literally it's like, go apply it. If you have a hard time, if you're listening right now and you have a hard time filling your butt when you squat, do some floor bridges, slow and controlled, and focus on squeezing your butt before you go train that squat. And then come back and tell me if you feel your glutes more when you train your squat. It's just, it's very practical, very practical advice. Maybe the way we communicate it isn't come full circle because the science is still not complete around exactly what's happening and going on. But I'll tell you right now from teaching enough people, if you struggle with filling your butt and exercises are supposed to be for your butt, do an isolation movement, do a kickback, what is it called? Donkey kickback. Yeah, donkey kickback or do floor bridge or frog froggers before you go into one of those exercises and tell me you don't feel it. And then the next part of that would be if you want to prioritize development of your glutes is to just train your glutes first. And this is just an old school principle. You want your butt to build more than your quads. Well, then do your butt exercises, because you could prime your glutes and then go into some heavy hip thrusts and do that. And then go into all the other exercises. Like that's the other part of that. Hip thrusts are such a good movement for somebody who especially that struggles with this. So if you are wanting to build your butt and you've heard enough times that squatting or deadlifting are great movements for that but you struggle to feel it during those movements there. I mean, hip thrusts are such an incredible movement because you can load it. And one of the things you got to remember this when you want to build a butt, you got to, and this is the mistake I think a lot of people that are in this category do is they do donkey kickbacks or they do frog pumps or floor bridges and they feel it the most in their butt there. So they think that's the best way to build their butt. We still got to load it. Yeah, and those are really, those movements you can't really load very much. And if you can't, a dumbbell or whatever, that's 50 pounds between your legs. That is nothing like, but you can load a barbell and do a hip thrust really, really heavy. And so if you want to build your glutes, you struggle with that. That's a movement that should for sure be in your repertoire.