When You Should Do Activation Exercises (and When You Shouldn’t)

Activation exercises are often recommended at the beginning of training. You might get the idea—from random TikToks or from a trainer you’re paying for their expertise—that activations are necessary to ensure your muscles are working properly so they can benefit from the workout ahead. However, that’s not entirely true, so let’s dive into what activations actually do.

What does it mean to “activate” muscles?

The explanation you’ll hear most often is that our muscles – especially the gluteal or gluteal muscles – “forget” how to shoot properly. But that doesn’t actually happen, as physical therapist Tyler Detmer told our own Rachel Fairbank while discussing so-called gluteal amnesia . Our muscles do not need special exercises to contract properly.

But this does not mean that activation exercises are useless. It’s best to think of these movements as a warm-up with a purpose. As I’ve written before , warm-up exercises run the gamut from general (like running on the treadmill before doing squats) to specific (doing light squats before doing heavier squats).

Warm-ups, sometimes called “activation exercises,” fall in the middle of this continuum. They can help you prepare for the tougher exercises of the day because they are quite specific to the muscles involved. And sometimes they can really help. So here are some cases where activation exercises are beneficial and some are not.

Activation exercises will help you “feel” the muscle

If you’re going to be doing isolation exercises, it’s helpful to know what it feels like to properly work the muscles. Again using the glutes as an example, side leg raises can be performed in ways that really engage the glutes (with your leg slightly behind you) or in ways that distribute some of the load to other muscles (with your leg slightly behind you, for example). slightly in front of you). When you do leg raises, you can pay attention to whether you can feel your glutes, but to do this you need to know what it feels like to train your glutes.

This is where activation exercises come to the rescue. You are doing a movement that is difficult to do without using your glutes, and you feel the sensations that accompany using that muscle. You may feel a burning sensation as the muscle begins to fatigue, or a feeling of tightness and fullness as the muscle fills with fluid (what bodybuilders call a “pump”). All of this helps direct your attention to that muscle and how it feels. When you do the following exercise, you will remember this feeling.

Activation exercises are hidden extra volume.

The more work you give a muscle, the bigger and stronger it becomes. We often call this amount of work “volume” and measure it by number of sets: you’ll build more muscle if you do six sets of squats every workout than if you do only three.

Activation exercises, if challenging enough, can count toward these sets. Imagine there are two people in the gym: one does three sets of band walks and single-leg glute bridges (both often classified as activation exercises), and then does three sets of barbell hip thrusts. The other one simply thrusts his hips. This first person gives the glutes more work than the second, regardless of what the exercises are called.

However, to use activation exercises in this way, they must be challenging. If you perform your activations hard enough and are at or near failure by the end of each set, they increase your overall volume. But if they’re light and simple and you’re just going through the motions, they don’t really add anything.

Activation exercises are never needed

I’ve outlined a few ways activation exercises can help your training, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be skipped. You don’t need to feel your muscles working to know you’re training them well. And if you’re looking to get more volume on a particular body part, you can perform these additional sets before, after, or during your main workout; they do not necessarily have to occur during the “activation” phase at the beginning.

So if you haven’t done any activations, it’s okay. Just make sure you warm up in an appropriate way. (If you’re not sure, read this guide I wrote to create an effective warm-up . A warm-up is what gets you ready for work, and it really needs to be tailored to your body and your workout.)

But if your trainer has given you activation exercises or you’ve seen some you’d like to try online, go ahead and do them. They will give you extra challenge on the target muscle, and you may find that they will help you feel ready to begin the main sets of the workout.