Originally Posted by
Mark Rippetoe
You cannot believe how often I hear this ridiculous shit, and we were just talking about this yesterday. I frustrate more easily than you, I assure you. Apparently, there is some government agency tasked with the job of convincing everybody that the entire American populace has sleeping glutes that won't "fire" and that a special exercise must be performed to wake them up.
People: nerves make muscles contract. If you perform a movement that requires the contraction of a muscle, like a squat that incorporates the external rotators because you squatted in a way that produces external femoral rotation, and hip extension because the hips have to extend when you stand up, then the muscles that produced the external rotation and hip extension are working, or "firing" if you are a PT. This means that the nerves that make them contract are working too. You know this because the femurs externally rotated and the hips extended, and the muscles caused this to happen since they are what move the bones. And here is the really fascinating part that is apparently so much like integral calculus that nobody seems to understand it: if you learn to squat in a way that uses external femoral rotation, you're "firing" your glutes BECAUSE YOU CAN'T SQUAT THAT WAY IF YOU DON'T.