Today I’m going to show you a very commonly butchered exercise which is the donkey kick. It is performed as a booty building exercise. if you’re using it for that you’re wrong anyway
but I’m going to show you the more effective way to perform it so you’re actually doing warming up the right muscles and using the right muscles to do the work and keeping yourself safe while you’re doing the donkey kick.
So she’s just going to go through this position. She’s just kicking her leg up in the air, rotate the hips and you notice her pelvis position. Her hips are changing positions. Her back is going from straight to arch as she goes through this. It’s really ineffective exercise in general
and we’re just putting her hips in her low back in a really unsafe position. so the purpose of this exercise is really to isolate and warm up the glue to extend the hip
if she’s trying to do that then we need to keep the hips in a neutral position so that she can go into hip extension.
Below would be where most people start with this arched glow back sticking their butt out
so a much more effective way to perform this exercise would be starting here in a nice neutral spine position or neutral pelvis position so you notice her low back is nice and flat
Now she’s going to pull her pelvis into a neutral position she’ll lock it in there and now maintaining this nice flat back, she’s going to go ahead and lift her leg up and all she’s doing is bringing up. She’s going to squeeze her glute and bring it back down. We notice that there is a much shorter range of motion.
We’re taking the hips into hip extension. the glue is primarily responsible for that hip extension so she’s warming up and firing up that glute muscle
and not putting herself in an unsafe position so it can be a great warm-up exercise . if you’re trying to just isolate the glutes and warm up your glutes you can go through a lot of reps of that
but slowly controlled movement is what’s going to be your friend here because that’s what we really need to isolate the right muscle group . Otherwise you’re just putting yourself into a really bad position or and you’re not getting any purpose out of it
A little extra tip there if you’re using this as a booty building exercise, you’re wasting your time. There’s no load on the glutes whatsoever so you could do 5,000 reps of this you’re not going to be building any significant muscle there
if this is not just a warm-up exercise for you then you’re wasting your time doing it but if you are doing it to warm up the hip extensors and warm up the glue that makes you do it slow and controlled from a nice neutral spine in neutral pelvis position and you’ll get a lot more out of this exercise .
Maya Brown
This is a glute “activation” exercises this is what you would do before you start using weights to isolate your glute muscles. You can also add leg weights to this to make harder. This does work for glute isolation and glute building if you add weights. There are many videos and other * experts* who would argue otherwise. Do your research before you just go with one person’s opinion.
@ Maya Brown: Activation is very different from adaptation. This movement is difficult to load enough (safely) to induce much of a training effect for muscle growth. However, when performed correctly, this is a great exercise for activation (like I said in the video) or a high volume finisher.
Crowder Jay
I’ve done these everyday for 2 weeks and I got results.
@Crowder Jay :Getting results in 2 weeks is very different from seeing results over the long term. Anything will “Work” for the first few weeks of trying it, but with an exercise like this that is very difficult to load safely, what do you do when your muscles adapt (like they probably have already) and now you need a new stimulus to continue to grow. All that being said…if something is working for you then keep doing it! Hopefully you can use these tips to keep your pelvis and spine safe
