What Are Activation Exercises, and Do You Really Need Them?

“Activation” exercises are often recommended at the start of training. You might get the idea — whether from random TikToks or from a trainer you pay for their expertise — that activations are necessary for your muscles to function properly and be able to benefit from the upcoming workout. However, that’s not entirely true, so let’s take a look at what activations actually do.

What does it mean to “activate” your muscles?

The explanation you’ll hear most often is that our muscles – often especially our glutes or gluteal muscles – “forget” how to pull properly. But that’s not really a thing that happens, as physical therapist Tyler Detmer told Lifehacker when discussing so-called gluteal amnesia. Our muscles do not need specific exercises to be able to contract properly.

But that doesn’t mean activation exercises are useless; It’s best to think of these movements as warm-ups with a specific purpose. As I’ve written before, warm-up exercises cover a spectrum from general (like jogging on a treadmill before squats) to specific (doing lighter squats before doing heavier squats).

Warm-ups, sometimes called “activation” exercises, fall in the middle of this continuum. They can help you prepare for your most intense exercises of the day because they are quite specific to the muscles worked. If the person who designed your workout is good at their job, this is a great way to prepare for your working exercises. Unfortunately, not every activation is a good use of your time. So here are some cases where activation exercises are useful, and others where they are not.

Activation exercises help you “feel” a muscle

If you’re going to do isolation exercises, it’s helpful to know what it feels like to properly work the muscle. Using the glutes as an example again, a side leg raise can be performed in a way that actually uses the glutes (when your leg is slightly behind you) or in a way that distributes some of the load to other muscles (like when your leg is slightly in front of you). When you perform these leg lifts, you can pay attention to whether you feel your glutes, but to do that you need to know what it feels like to work your glutes.

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

The more work you give a muscle, the bigger and stronger it tends to become. We often call this amount of work “volume” and measure it in number of sets: you’ll build more muscle if you do six sets of squats each workout than if you do just three.

Activation exercises, if difficult enough, can be factored into these sets. Imagine we have two people in the gym: one performs three sets each of walking bands and single-leg glute bridges (both often classified as activation exercises) before doing three sets of dumbbell hip thrusts. The other just does the hip thrusts. This first person works their glutes more than the second, regardless of how the exercises are labeled.

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

Activation exercises are never necessarybut they can be useful

I’ve outlined a few ways activation exercises can help you in your workouts, but that doesn’t mean they’re a must-have. You don’t need to feel a muscle working to know you’re giving it a good workout. And if you want to get more volume for a body part, you can perform these extra 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 not a problem. Just make sure you warm up properly. (If you’re not sure, read this guide I wrote for setting up an effective warm-up. A warm-up is about what happens. You ready to work, and it really needs to be customized to your body and workout.)

But if your trainer has suggested activation exercises or you’ve seen a few you’d like to try online, go ahead and do them. They’ll give you extra work for the target muscle, and you may find that they help you feel ready by the time you begin the main sets of your workout.