“Activation” exercises are often recommended at the beginning of a workout. You may get the idea — whether from a random TikTok or from a trainer you pay for their expertise — that activation is necessary to be able to properly activate your muscles and take advantage of the upcoming workout. However, that’s not quite true, so let’s figure out what activators actually do.
What does it mean to “activate” your muscles?
The explanation you’ll often hear is that our muscles – often especially our glutes, or butt muscles – “forget” how to fire correctly. But that’s not actually what happens, according to physical therapist Tyler Detmer. Told Lifehacker when discussing so-called gluteal amnesia. Our muscles do not require specific exercises to be able to contract correctly.
But that doesn’t mean activation exercises are useless; It’s better to think of these moves as a warmup with a specific purpose. As I have written before alsoWarmup exercises occupy a spectrum from the general (like jogging on a treadmill before squats) to the specific (doing light squats before doing heavy squats).
Warmups, sometimes called “activation” exercises, fall in the middle of that continuum. They can help you prepare for the day’s heavy exercise, as they are quite specific to the muscles involved. If the person designing your workout is good at what they do, this is a great way to prepare for your working exercises. Unfortunately, not all activations are a good use of your time. So here are some cases where activation exercises are useful – and some where they aren’t.
Activation exercises help you “feel” the muscles
If you’re going to do isolation exercises, it helps to know how the muscles feel when worked properly. Using the glutes as our example again, side-lying leg raises can be done in ways that actually use the glutes (when your leg is slightly behind you) or in ways that distribute some of the load onto other muscles (such as when your leg is slightly in front of you). When you lift your legs, you can focus on whether or not you feel your glutes working – but to do that, you need to know what it feels like to work your glutes.
This is where activation exercises come in. You make a movement that is difficult to do Without Using your glutes, and you feel the sensations that accompany using that muscle. You may feel a burning sensation as the muscles begin to fatigue, or a feeling of tightness and fullness as the muscles fill with fluid (this is what bodybuilders call a “pump”). All this helps you focus your attention on that muscle and how it feels. You’ll remember that feeling when you do your next exercise.
The more you work a muscle, the bigger and stronger it will become. We often call that amount of work “volume” and measure it as the number of sets: If you do six sets of squats in each workout you’ll build more muscle than if you only do three sets.
Activation exercises, if they are challenging enough, can count toward those sets. Imagine we have two people in the gym: one does three sets of banded walks and single-leg glute bridges (both often classified as activation exercises) before doing three sets of barbell hip thrusts. The other one just applies hip thrust. That first one is working your glutes more than the second one, regardless of how the exercises are labeled.
What do you think so far?
However, using activation exercises in this way must be challenging. If you do your activations so high that you are at or near the point of failure by the end of each set, they are adding up to your total volume. But if they’re light and easy and you’re just going through the motions, they’re not really adding anything.
activation exercises never happen necessarybut they can be helpful
I’ve described some ways that activation exercises can help your workout, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth skipping. You No need to feel muscles working To know that you are giving it a good workout. And if you want to get more volume for a body part, you can do those extra sets before, after, or during your main workout; They do not need to occur initially during the “activation” phase.
So if you are not doing activation, no problem. Just make sure you’re warming up in a proper way. (If you’re not sure, read I wrote this guide to prepare an effective warmup. Warm up is about what gets You Ready to work, and it should really be tailored to your body and your workout.)
But if your instructor has given you activation exercises, or if you’ve seen some exercises you want to try online, go ahead and do them. They’ll give you extra work for targeted muscles, and you’ll find that they help you feel prepared when you start the main sets of your workout.
