8 Indispensable Glute Exercises For Lower Back P-Pain

If you’ve been suffering from chronic lower back and/or hip pain, strengthening your glutes and core is one of the most important things to do. And today I want to introduce you to 8 amazing glute exercises that’ll help you get lower back pain relief.

There are a ton of exercises available online on how to strengthen the glutes. Word of caution, don’t try to do too many at once thinking you’ll get faster results…

You’ll just fatigue your muscles and start compensating with your lower back…leading to more lower back pain. Focus on 1-3 exercises and focus on doing them consistently before adding more

Below you’ll find a list of one of 8 glute exercises to activate and integrate the gluteus medius, gluteus maximums, and the gluteus minimus. Strengthening this muscle group will stabilize and support the spine taking the load off the discs and leading to long-term relief from lower back pain.

You’ll also be engaging the core muscles which like to work with the glutes.

Can Strong Glutes Help You Get Relief From Lower Back Pain?

Absolutely and here’s why… The gluteus maximum – one of the 3 major glute muscles – is the biggest muscle in your body. It’s designed to be the strongest. That should tell you how important this muscle is to stabilize the whole lumbar-pelvic-hip complex. But there is a huge problem…

Our sedentary lifestyle, in general, doesn’t contribute to stronger glute muscles. Most people spend long hours sitting which immediately shuts down the glutes and weakness the whole posterior chain (glutes, hamstrings, deep core muscles).

Over time this leads to glute amnesia or dormant butt syndrome (yes, that’s actually a thing). And once glutes aren’t firing up when needed, guess who’s gonna take up the slack? the lower back, hips, and eventually the knees too. 

This whole website is dedicated to helping you strengthen your glutes and core and healing from chronic lower back pain so you’re definitely in the right place. And without further ado, I want to introduce you to 8 back-friendly exercises to strengthen your glutes.

8 Glute Exercises For Lower Back Pain

Choose 1-3 beginner-intermediate exercises first. Complete between 7-15 repetitions with proper form. If you can only do 7 that’s Okay. Remember that what matters here is the quality of each repetition, not how many you’re doing. 3 good quality reps are better than 10 reps done with bad form.

You can introduce some of the advanced variations once you feel you built a strong foundation and one exercise at a time. Scroll below the video to read full exercise instructions:

Glutes Exercises Breakdown:

Video Exercise Demonstrations start at “01:20” or start from the beginning if you want to watch my short demo 🙂

The deadlift is a great exercise to start training the hips to fire up every time you’re bending over, sitting, standing from sitting or getting in and out of your car. You need the glutes to fire up in all those situations. You can hold a ball or any item in your hands to keep you stable. Engage your core and glutes and breath deeply. Once you come up, keep your glutes engage. You shouldn’t be feeling anything in your lower back.

Superman (Beginner-Intermediate)

This exercise will activate and engage the gluteus maximum and the deep core muscles. One important thing here…you don’t have to lift your leg up too high. The important thing is to keep your glutes engaged, keep that contraction on and also keep your core tight. If you feel tired or fatigued, feel free to take a break. What’s important here is to activate not to complete as many reps as possible.

Swimmers (Intermediate)

This is an advanced variation of the superman exercise. You’ll be engaging your arms here which adds more challenge. Keep your core engaged the whole time so you’re not transferring force to your lower back or hips.

The Bridge (Intermediate)

The bridge exercise is one of the best exercises for lower back pain. Make sure you’re not engaging your lower back here. You want to do that by taking your time before starting the movement. Tighten up your core and glutes and then push through your heels up. Keep your glutes tight all through the movement.

Click here to read more about the bridge and how this exercise can help you eliminate hip and lower back pain.  

Band Pullouts (Intermediate-Advanced)

This is another advanced variation to the superman, only this time we’re also engaging the glute medius. You’ll need a loop resistance band to make sure you’re engaging the gluteus medius properly. Again, keep your core engaged the whole time.

Backward Lunge (Intermediate)

The backward lunge is a great lower body exercise that’ll engage and integrate the glutes and help you restore proper movement patterns. You want to be stable here so feel free to hold on to the wall or chair if you need to.

One-legged Bridge (Advanced)

This is an advanced variation of the bridge and this exercise should be avoided if you haven’t mastered the bridge exercise first. So take your time building a strong glute foundation first before tempting this exercise. Some important notes: you want to have a straight line from your knees-hips-chest. If as you lift your leg your hips drop, you’ll be engaging your lower back to do the work.

Glute Extensions (Beginner-Intermediate)

This is a fantastic glute maximum isolation exercise with additional core work. You’ll be using the stability ball to challenge your balance and fire up the deep intrinsic core muscles. If you don’t have a stability ball, you can do this exercise on the floor, you want to disengage your arms here to keep the contraction on the glutes so keep your back neutral.

Here’s a recent post of 9 additional glutes and hip strengthening exercises to reduce lower back pain and stabilize your spine. You’ll discover some great new variations to add to your workouts.

As you strengthen and work on building strong glutes, don’t forget about your deep core muscles. Ultimately, you want to build routines to work both the core and the glutes at the same time. Here are some resources to help you with that:

• The Back Pain Bootcamp Program
• The Deep Core Mini-training
• The Ultimate Guide To Strengthening A Week Core

I hope you found this post helpful. Leave me a comment with your questions or general feedback…