Q&A: Everything About Hip Thrusts and Loading Your Quads, Holiday Weight Gain and Body Splits

How is your week? Hope it is going great! Thank you once again for all your wonderful messages and the comments on my Facebook Page. I greatly appreciate it! It is time for the weekly Q&A. This week I decided to answer why you could feel the hip thrusters in your quads, instead of in your glutes; how to deal with the holiday weight gain and how to choose your training method.

Hello, Ines! Thank you for sharing your experience and your knowledge. Thanks to you I found the hip thrusters, but I have some troubles with them. I feel the load more on my quads, than on my glutes. Why does it happen like this?

I think that this is a common problem, and sure there is a reason about it. Nowadays most people suffer the so called dead butt syndrome, which is a consequence of their sedentary life and the lack of glute activation. This sedentary life, leads to tight hip flexors. When you are constantly sitting, your hip flexors become tight and your hip extensors lengthen.

When you perform hip thrusters(HERE), at the final phase of the movement you are supposed to reach hip extension. When your hip flexors are too tight, you can’t reach the desired hip extension and you can not activate your glutes properly.

If you have this problem, try massaging your hip flexors with a tennis ball or a foam roller. Besides that, before you jump on performing hip thrusts with weights, do a couple sets of bodyweight hip thrusts, in order to activate your glutes and prepare them to do what they are supposed to do, when you do weighted hip thrusts.

And because the weight is a limiting factor, be careful not to load the bar too much, because if the weight is more than you can handle, there is a big probability that this is the reason for feeling the load in the wrong muscles. You just do not have the strength you need, to move that weight and your body is trying to compensate, by activating other muscles, which could handle it.

Ines! I need your help! As you could guess, during the holidays not everybody has eaten the way you did- just meet and veggies. Personally I ate a lot of crap. How could I fix this now? Do you think that if I eat just fruits for a week, I will remove the damage from my food feasts?

If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably know my opinion about fruits. If not, HERE you could get a better idea.

I am sure that there are a lot of people, who have overeaten during the holidays and now they wonder which diet could help them get back faster to where they were before Easter.

There is no need to say that “ a week of eating fruits” won’t lead to anything good. It will be just more deprivation, which will lead to another feast later on.

The best you could do, is to leave everything that happened during the holidays in the past and quit thinking about it. Just keep on going. Go back to healthy eating. Eat clean, quality food in adequate quantities. Your body is not a bag, where you could put all the crap and then just flip it and pour everything, by working out more and starving yourself.

If you’ve tortures your body, by overeating, do not keep on torturing it now, by following short term diets. Keep on building new, healthier habits! This will guarantee you less extremes during the holidays that follow and you won’t need “emergency” diets.

Good morning, Ines! I have a question. If I train a different muscle group, each day of the week, am I gonna become too muscular and bulky? Because I train all muscle groups on a daily basis, but the thing is that I want to be smaller and become tighter. Which one is better? Thank you and have a nice day!

Training different muscle groups, every day, does not fit into my training philosophy. So this wouldn’t be my recommendation. Training all muscle groups, fits my understandings, if it is accompanied by the use of compound movements. The only problem is working out EVERY DAY. You do not need to do this. Besides that, I am sure that those of you who consider themselves too muscular or bulky, in reality are far from it. I work out A LOT, with HEAVY weights and I have not become too muscular or bulky. Instead I became just fitter and stronger. If your goal is to become smaller, I hope that it is in terms of becoming leaner, not thinner. This will happen with proper eating, and the “tight shape” is supposed to be achieved with adequate  weight training program,

My advice would be to lift weights three times a week and if you insist on working out more, do interval sprints once or twice a week. Take two days to rest and recover, and on those days do a lot of non exercise physical activity.

I recommend you read “How Do You Know When You Should Stop Lifting Weights?” and “What Is Gonna Happen When You First Start Lifting Weights?”

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