When You Need to Do Activation Exercises (and When You Don’t)
“Activation” exercises are often recommended at the beginning of workouts. You may be under the impression—whether from random TikTok videos or the trainer you pay for their expertise—that activation exercises are essential for your muscles to fire properly and maximize the benefits of the upcoming workout. However, this isn’t entirely true, so let’s take a closer look at what activation exercises actually do.
What does it mean to “activate” muscles?
The most common explanation is that our muscles—especially the glutes—”forget” how to contract properly. But this doesn’t actually happen, as physical therapist Tyler Detmer explained to Lifehacker, discussing so-called gluteal amnesia . Our muscles don’t need special exercises to contract properly.
But this doesn’t mean warm-up exercises are useless; it’s better to think of these movements as a warm-up with a specific purpose. As I’ve written before , warm-up exercises range from the general (for example, running on a treadmill before squats) to the specific (doing light squats before heavier ones).
Warm-up exercises, sometimes called “activation exercises,” fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum. They can help you prepare for the heavier exercises of the day because they’re quite specific to the muscles involved. If the person who designed your workout is good at their job, this is a great way to prepare for the actual work. Unfortunately, not all activation exercises are an efficient use of your time. So, here are some instances when activation exercises are beneficial, and some when they’re not.
Activation exercises help you “feel” the muscle.
If you’re planning to perform isolation exercises, it’s helpful to know how to properly engage this muscle. Let’s return to the glutes: side-lying leg raises can be performed either by actively engaging the glutes (with the leg slightly behind you) or by distributing the load to other muscles (for example, with the leg slightly in front). When performing these leg raises, you can pay attention to whether you feel your glutes working, but to do this, you need to know how they work.
This is where activation exercises come in handy. You perform a movement that’s difficult to do without engaging your glutes, and you feel the associated sensations. You might feel a burning sensation as the muscle begins to fatigue, or a tight, full feeling as the muscle fills with fluid (what bodybuilders call a “pump”). All of this helps direct your attention to the muscle and how it feels. The next time you perform the exercise, you’ll remember this sensation.
Activation exercises are additional workouts in disguise.
The more work you do with a muscle, the bigger and stronger it typically becomes. We often call this amount of work “volume” and measure it by the number of sets: you’ll build more muscle mass if you do six sets of squats per workout than if you only do three.
Activation exercises, if challenging enough, can count toward these sets. Imagine two people in the gym: one does three sets of resistance band walks and single-leg glute bridges (both exercises are often considered activation exercises), followed by three sets of barbell hip thrusts. The other does only hip thrusts. The first person will engage the glutes more than the second, regardless of the exercise’s name.
However, to use activation exercises in this way, they must be sufficiently challenging. If you perform activation exercises with such a weight that you’re at or near failure by the end of each set, they increase the overall volume of the workout. But if they’re light and simple, and you simply perform them mechanically, they don’t really add anything.
Activation exercises are not required but can be helpful.
I’ve described several ways activation exercises can enhance your workouts, but that doesn’t mean they should be skipped. You don’t need to feel a muscle working to know you’re training it well. And if you want to increase the volume of a particular muscle group, you can perform additional sets before, after, or during your main workout; they don’t necessarily have to be performed during the “activation” phase at the beginning.
So, if you haven’t warmed up before, that’s okay. Just make sure you’re doing it properly. (If you’re unsure, check out this guide I wrote on how to create an effective warm-up . A warm-up is what gets you ready for work, and it should be tailored to your body and your workout.)
But if your trainer gave you muscle activation exercises, or if you found a few options online that you’d like to try, go ahead and try them. They’ll provide additional stress on the target muscle, and you might find that they help you feel ready to begin the main sets of your workout.