Will strengthening your glutes fix your running form?

By Sam Carey, Founder of Run Love Sprint.

If you've ever had a running injury, there's a good chance someone has told you your glutes are weak. Strengthening the muscles on the side of your hips, the hip abductors, has become one of the most common pieces of advice in running, on the theory that weak hips let your pelvis drop and your knee roll inwards with every stride, putting strain on everything below. It makes intuitive sense. But a new review has looked at whether the evidence actually backs it up, and the answer is more surprising than you might expect.

The research

The review, Influence of Hip Abductor Strength on Running Biomechanics in Healthy Populations (opens in a new tab), was published in Sports Medicine – Open in March 2026 by Sebastian Landauer and Florian Kurt Paternoster of the Technical University of Munich and Andreas Konrad of the University of Graz. It's a scoping review, which means the authors set out to map all the research on the question, and they found 19 studies involving 683 healthy runners. The studies measured how strong runners' hips were and then looked at how they ran, using 3D motion capture to track the movement of the trunk, pelvis, hips, knees and ankles.

What they found

The short answer is that there's no consistent link. Across the studies, stronger hips didn't reliably go along with better running mechanics. Most of the comparisons, whether looking at hip movement, pelvic drop or knee position, found no meaningful relationship at all. Where links did show up, they tended to come from single studies that hadn't been repeated, or appeared only under particular conditions.

Just as importantly, only two studies had actually tested whether a hip-strengthening programme changes the way people run, and both had significant flaws. One had no comparison group, and the two produced conflicting results. The authors conclude that there's no convincing evidence that strengthening these muscles alone leads to systematic or predictable changes in running form, and that this challenges assumptions that are widely held in running.

Where hip strength might matter

There were some interesting hints. One study found that hip strength was linked to how runners moved only after they'd been fatigued by a hard run, not when they were fresh. Another found that the weakest runners showed a little more inward movement at the knee than the strongest. The authors suggest that hip strength may only matter below a certain level, or when you're tired or running fast, which is exactly when your muscles are under the most strain. That's a theory that still needs testing, but it fits with what many runners feel late in a long race.

What this doesn't mean

This review isn't a reason to give up on strength training. It looked only at running mechanics in healthy, uninjured runners, not at injury prevention, rehabilitation or performance. There are plenty of other good reasons to get stronger, and as Matthew Wright and Jonathan Taylor of Teesside University explain in an article we've republished on the Playbook, strength training can improve running economy and may help reduce overuse injuries. Hip strengthening is also a well-established part of treatment for some injuries, and if a physiotherapist has given you exercises for a specific problem, keep doing them.

It also doesn't mean your running form can't change. Several of our partners, including Performance Logic and Podium Physiotherapy, work with runners on technique, and that usually involves much more than strength alone, from movement retraining and drills to video analysis and changes in training. Notably, one of the two intervention studies combined strength work with movement education, which may be closer to what actually helps.

My take

What I take from this is that the popular story of "weak glutes cause bad form, so strengthen your glutes and your form will improve" is too simple. Getting stronger is still worth doing, for lots of reasons, but it probably won't change how you run on its own. If you're worried about your form or you keep picking up the same injury, an assessment with a physiotherapist or running coach who can watch you run is likely to be far more useful than a generic set of glute exercises.

And if you do strength work, it may matter most for the end of your long runs and races, when fatigue sets in and your body needs every bit of support it can get.

This article is for general information and isn't a substitute for advice from a physiotherapist or healthcare professional.