It should be noted that gluteus muscles are deep-lying muscles that are covered by fat tis- sue and skin. Therefore, the surface EMG activities of these muscles might be low. Kinetic analysis may be needed to precisely evaluate the torque produced by these muscles during the cycling.
-Randy D. Trumbower and Pouran D. Faghri
I am not going to say that cycling deactivates glute muscles, but it’s something to think about with conditioning on the bike. While some are frantically using exercises to wake things up, maybe need to look at why things make them get sleepy? Some would be surprised that I would advocate the hip thrust as I see it as an assistance exercise but it seems that we are seeing ironically less glutes now even as kids don’t bike as much. I would rather have little EMG activity than none! At the end of the day we need to understand what we are prescribing and even pedal location of the foot recruits muscles differently and those details add up over years.