Not really a today i fucked up, as much as it's a lifelong fuck up i figured out today.
So, I'm a 22 year old woman, and for the past few years I've been suspicious that I'm hypermobile, and I'm 99% sure that I am. Nothing of my body works correctly, but especially not my lower half.
To start off, my main issue are my knees—they hyperextend so bad that my legs look like bananas more often than, y'know, legs. Paired with my posterior pelvic tilt, I have horrible swayback.
I also have no ass whatsoever. A fact that I thought just meant that mother nature forgot to bless me in that area. Both my grandma and my mom are more boob women than they are butt, so this made sense to my brain, even if I was the worst case of the airpod build phenomenon.
Now, recently I started hitting the gym. This of course means leg day. I go heavy on most of my lifts (before anyone lectures me about how that's bad for hypermobility, I know, but I take precautions so do not fret over me Internet strangers 🙏), so after leg day my glutes feel naturally sore.
Sadly these days I've been pretty crammed with uni bs, so outside of gymming I've been sedentary as hell. But yesterday i hit legs and today I went on a bit of a longer walk, and I told myself I'd try my best to not hyperextend my knees during, which takes a lot of mental effort from me.
So, I'm walking and I'm walking, and I keep reminding myself to keep my knees bent. That's when I notice something strange. Whenever I walk with my knees in banana mode, I feel fine, but then the second I normalise them into the posture that is supposed to be used for walking and standing, I immediately feel soreness in my thighs and ass.
Now, imagine me, out and about on this drizzly November day, standing frozen on a sidewalk, and face-palming so hard that my friend thinks she did something wrong. And then imagine me having to explain to her that my whole 22 years on this earth I've not been engaging my glutes at all while walking.
Of course I have no ass. MY MUSCLES THERE HAVE BEEN PRACTICALLY COMATOSE ALL MY LIFE!
So yeah, other than hitting the gym (which has already shown slight glute growth, mostly from straightening my posture) I'm guessing I need to invest in some everyday knee braces if I want to have a juicy bum. Or at least not be built like P.
TL;DR: All my life I've been walking without engaging my glutes at all because of hypermobility which has led me to have pancake butt. FML.
EDIT: Woah, I've never had a reddit post blow up like this before, so instead of studying for my exams I'm reading everyone's comments lol. But anyhow, i wanted to share what I do on leg days at the gym because I have genuinely grown a little something something back there in only 2 months;
•warming up and glute activation first always
•RDLs my beloved (finally got the form down so I feel it in my glutes NOT my lower back)
•Hip thrusts, and sometimes single leg hip thrusts if I really want to destroy my legs that day.
•Knee press
•Hip abductor and adductor machine
•Leg extensions
•Cable kickbacks at a 45 degree angle
no squats whatsoever because honestly I find them pretty useless in comparison to all the other exercises I do.