Fix your glutes. Fix your life.

Two years is about the time it takes to become moderately proficient in a foreign language, obtain a college degree, or father an African elephant. This also happens to be the time I’ve recently spent pretending I can walk.

My problems began in the winter of 2023, when terrible weather and bouts of depression prompted me to sign up for a half marathon. I wasn’t an athlete – up to that point, my athletic abilities could best be described as “unrealized” or “aspirational” – but so many friends, writers, and influencers on LinkedIn were proselytizing running as a universal method of spiritual respite. Like a chess pawn or a kangaroo, I biologically have no ability to run backwards, so when I decided to become a runner, I immediately bought the necessary equipment in the required neon lights and went through a training program. On race day, overconfidence fueled me for all 13 miles on the ice. Triumph! Exercise – endorphin nirvana!

It wasn’t until the adrenaline wore off that I realized I had broken my tibia.

– Haven’t you noticed? – asked the orthopedist, who the next day was hitting my shin with a hammer, narrowly avoiding being hit by my reflex spasm of pain. “I just felt a twinge of discomfort,” I explained. “But why did you continue when it started hurting?” my partner asked as he helped me limp from bed to the fridge over the following weeks. (That was a rhetorical question. Living with me gave him a front-row seat to my stubbornness.) The orthopedist recommended bed rest, which I largely ignored.

I assumed the break would heal; that’s what the bones did. And so it happened. But one day, a few months later, I ran to catch the bus and my ankle was completely fine Other leg folded neatly inwards and sunken. What followed was 18 months of strange sprains, Whac-a-Mole tendonitis and a recurring pangea of ​​bruising.

So finally: swallowing my pride, visiting a physiotherapist. With saintly patience, my PT informed me that my tibia was in excellent condition. Probably even stronger than before the break. But I still suffered from crazy misalignment throughout the skeletal structure.

At the root of it all, said the PT, was my “frail posterior chain.” As it turns out, it was a polite way of saying, “Your lack of gluteal muscles is ruining your life.”

My porcelain-fragile buttocks – the cluster of tissue from hip to thigh that helps keep my body upright and sometimes pushes it forward – were causing domino damage, and had likely been doing so for some time. To compensate for the weakness of my buttocks, my ankles, knees, hips, and even my arms and shoulders had to shake wildly, taking on enormous and uneven pressure, often much greater than they were structurally capable of supporting: this was probably what broke my shin in the first place . And the subsequent weeks of limping and leaning on the other leg only made the cascade worse.

The PT recommended a stringent regimen of squats, lunges and lunges to get stronger. I reluctantly agreed, even though the diagnosis seemed suspicious to me: Surely, if the defects in my butt were that stern, so basicthen (sorry) they would have been raised earlier in my thirty years of life?

Physiotherapy, for anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure, is a kind of quick ego death, a frigid slap in the face for many things you may have believed to be true about yourself. It wasn’t until I started treating my “gluteal amnesia” (the real medical term) that it became clear how little I knew about basic things like walking, standing, and sitting (or life, for that matter). Within a week of the obligatory twisting, swinging and peeling of clams, my spine was noticeably straighter and smoother. Four weeks later I was finally able to walk without pain. It took me another three months to fully rebalance my loose muscles and move to an effortless jog, but once I did, I noticed a novel, wonderful power and spring in every step. My awakened thigh muscles were doing their job.

The shock of the discovery was twofold. Along with my newly activated glutes came an awareness of my own perilous hubris. Throughout my adult life, I have followed a specific and structured problem-solving logic: whenever a problem arose, I tended to gravitate toward a uncomplicated, quick, plug-and-play solution rather than making sure the basics were in order. In hindsight, trying to transform into a long-distance runner overnight was pointless. Running – while as meditative and enjoyable as promised – didn’t actually address any of the complaints and anxieties I was hoping to get rid of. Ultimately, all I managed to do was replace one set of problems with another.

Now, twice a week at the PT clinic, I do duck walks with a band around my thighs and try to stand on an inflatable ball while balancing weights in my hands (imagine a circus seal – yes). The first thing I do every morning when I wake up is do a “gluteus maximus burn” – a fun exercise where you stand stiff and elevated, lift one leg out to the side as high as you can, and keep it there until you feel you feel like you’re about to dim and die.

Of course you don’t die. You go on with your day, newly empowered, empowered, awakened to a part of yourself that you may not have noticed at all before.