Weak Gluteal muscles in cyclists and runners

Most athletes who have had an injury or pain associated with running or cycling will have been told at some point that they have weak Gluteals. This can be true for a lot of people and for some of us it isn't just that the muscles are weak but they struggle to activate strong contractions all together.

Why?
As demonstrated in the above pictures we have multiple Gluteal muscles, most of them small stabilising muscles setting joint positions and one large power muscle, Gluteus Maximus. One thing you may or may not notice is that the orientation (direction) of these muscles varies between them but are largely horizontal in the standing position. This orientation means that the predominant movement that will cause these muscle to activate would be in rotation or ab/adduction of the hip. Cyclists and runners (particularly road runners) for the most part inherently don't put the hip under rotational or sideways forces as economy of movement requires as much energy as possible progressing in a forward direction.
The Gluteus Maximus muscle is a strong hip extensor as well but if it was the only extensor muscle it would always be pulling your leg into external rotation and abduction. Therefore, if the movement is uni-directional (forward) the hamstrings as a group are better suited. The downside is if you don't recruit all the muscles to work you lose some performance potential and injury protection.

What to do about it?
Do specific exercises to strengthen the Gluteal muscles! Social media is plastered with a variety of these exercise so I am not going to run through a list of them. What I want to ask all of you to do is to think about the activities or exercises you are doing and ask yourself, am I moving in a way that encourages sideways or rotational movement at my hip?
Runners can add this in fairly easily into general training by running over rough ground or changing direction of running rapidly and often to increase these forces. *Caution, if you just start to add these in start slowly and infrequently within a workout as injury risk will increase*
For cyclists this isn't as easily added in to current bike training so you will need to find a handful of good exercise that you can use specifically to strengthen the Gluteal muscles and use them pre-ride to "wake them up" increasing your force generating potential.
Lastly, the body is all about balance so if you are increasing your work on the Gluteals you also need to increase your work on your adductors (inner thigh) and hip flexors to compliment. Listen to your body and experiment so that you learn what needs strengthening and what needs mobilising/stretching.