Why Squeezing Your Glutes Limits Your Turnout Muscles in Ballet (And What Actually Helps)
While teachers are moving farther away from the cue "pinch the penny" in ballet class, there are still way too many people who think that engaging your turnout muscles means squeezing everything as tightly as possible. Sure, your glutes will be engaged, because they help keep you standing upright, but engaged is not the same thing as contracting as hard as possible. Think waking up on a weekend morning feeling refreshed and ready to go (engaged) v. coffee + a Red Bull (contracting).
Your Glutes Aren't Your Turnout Muscles
Your glutes are hip extensors. Their job is to move your leg backward, like in an arabesque, or to straighten the hip joint when it's flexed, like when you go up stairs. Your external rotators are actually underneath your glutes. So you can't poke your rotators with your finger, you can only poke your glutes and imagine a very long finger reaching the muscles beneath your glutes. Eventually you'll be able to feel the difference between external rotators and glutes, but for a lot of beginner dancers the two muscles groups get confused and mashed into one.
Here's what actually happens when you use your glutes for turnout in ballet class, one step at a time:
You squeeze your glutes hard for turnout. This large muscle group, engaged at full force, tends to pull the pelvis into a slight anterior tilt. Since you're standing on your legs, the muscles can't move those so the pelvis moves instead.
That tilt limits your actual turnout range of motion. The exact opposite of what you were trying to do.
So you clench your abs to correct the tilt. You notice that your pelvis is tilted (good job!) so you rightfully engage your abs to correct it. But because your glutes are still squeezing, you have to clench your abs. Which makes it hard to breathe into your abdomen.
You start breathing into your upper chest instead. A dancer's got to breathe, no matter what it takes. This upper chest breathing keeps you conscious but also raises your shoulders.
You contract your lats to pull your shoulders back down. Which creates neck tension.
Now it's hard to spot. A tense neck makes for a difficult spot. You're basically fighting your entire upper body throughout the entire combination.
It's a chain reaction of overcorrection, one compensation triggering the next, until you've clenched your way into less range of motion and more tension than when you started.
What to Do Instead
Notice when your glutes are contracting. (They will be. We all engage them to some degree. Remember how we're standing upright?) Then imagine the top of your glutes slowly melting down toward the ground, like hot fudge on ice cream. If your hands are warm, you can even rest them there and let the warmth encourage a little release.
Check in: did you lose any turnout? Probably not. Which means you now know you can use less effort here, and you're free to go looking for what else unlocks when you do.
If you are worried this will make your butt jiggle: it might, but almost certainly only enough for you to notice and not enough for anyone else to see. And once you're moving through space it will be virtually undetectable, even to the most trained eye. Besides, no one is in class to judge your butt.
Why This Works
This isn't just an imagery trick. It's an example of somatic awareness in action, the practice of actually feeling what your body is doing from the inside, rather than only judging it by how it looks. As you build this skill, you start noticing which muscles you actually need for a given movement and which ones are just along for the ride out of habit.
Squeezing everything, all the time, isn't discipline. It's often just a lack of information about what your body needs.
I write a lot more about somatic awareness, and how it connects to every other element of artistry, in Artistry Inside Ballet Technique, Volume 1 — if this kind of body-awareness work is interesting to you, that's where I go deeper.
The Takeaway
More effort isn't always the answer. Sometimes the more useful question isn't "how hard am I working," but "am I working the right muscles at all." Your turnout, and the rest of your technique, tends to improve fastest once you start asking that second question.
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