Call of Booty

I DON'T REALLY NOTICE the Preciosa clear chandeliers that beautify the Conrad Indianapolis Hotel until I'm collapsed on my aback on the antechamber floor. Five account ago, during a abbreviate breach from the NFL combine, I was aimless beyond this Hilton's marble circuitous entryway, adequate the accumulating of avant-garde art. Then, a allotment of the Warhols and Lichtensteins and accomplished Andy Reid lounging, abstractly, in a big amber covering chair, I bumped into Mark Verstegen, the author, trainer and architect of Athletes' Performance. I asked him what I anticipation was a simple, innocent question: What's the a lot of important allotment of an athlete's body?

A moment later, I'm on the antechamber floor, assuming contest that are either declared to serve as his acknowledgment or get us both arrested. Verstegen stands over me, his eyebrows bankrupt into an acute V. Drawing air aback in through pursed lips, he makes a loud, acute smooching complete while accompanying dabbling my ass cheeks with his fingertips, the way Cesar Millan shocks assertive canines aback to compliance.

"Fire!" Verstegen yells. "Fire those glutes!"

Instinctively my cheeks contract, and my physique rises off the carpet. Verstegen stretches his accoutrements out, award up, in a hallelujah pose. "The alfresco apple ability not allocution about them," says the man who accomplished the rear ends of No. 1 aces Andrew Luck and 62 added players taken in the 2012 draft. "But for us, for athletes, glutes are aggregate -- the complete epicenter and assertive of all able-bodied movement.

IT HAS BEEN all about the ass for added than two actor years. If archaic man aboriginal aloft his easily off the arena to become bipedal, it was the buttocks, confined as a amend to the chest, that accustomed our ancestors to angle erect, again actuate themselves to the top of the aliment chain. By 330 B.C., afterwards belief the animal and physiological appulse of the glutes, Aristotle became the aboriginal ass man of almanac if he angrily declared the anatomy a authentication of humanity. "Man needs a seat," he wrote.

Today, in accession to their cycle as the bigger and a lot of important beef accumulation in the athlete's body, the glutes serve as a antecedent of pride and backbiting in locker rooms, a acute concrete apparatus for communicating during antagonism and even an onboard computer, of sorts, at the racetrack. From the aurora of man to the aboriginal annular of the 2012 draft, no physique allotment has played a added cogent role in sports -- or been talked about beneath alfresco of it.

"Maybe accustomed humans don't altercate this all day long, but we abiding do," says Titans quarterback Matt Hasselbeck. "Every backbone drillmaster I've anytime been around, it's glute, glute, glute -- always, always, always. It's a torn record. I can't acquaint you how abounding times I've heard the byword 'You wish to attending bigger traveling than coming.'"

No one looks bigger in the rear appearance than Dontari Poe, the NFL's new gold accepted in badonkadonk. At the combine, the 346-pound adenoids accouterment from Memphis fabricated scouts' hearts chase afterwards he ran a 4.98 40-yard birr in a brace of impossibly ample compression shorts. Instantly, Poe's bouncing, assured balloon abject (also referred to in aloof chat as the shelf, top ass, assy, abundant hips, the abyss and the around-the-clock archetypal "big abundant to acreage airplanes on") angry the usually aloof fraternity of football scouts into a communicative band of Sir Mix-a-Lots.

Lombardi is absolutely right. The aggregate of any athlete's ability sits absolutely in the gluteus maximus. Roughly three times the admeasurement of the biceps, it is the better of the three gluteal muscles. It begins at the top of the abdomen (right abreast your rear pants pockets). Again it wraps about the basal of the hip, area it connects to the foreground ancillary of the femur. Besides giving the abject its girth, the glute max is mainly amenable for hip extension. That agency it provides the antecedent advance bare to get up from the basal of a squat, forth with the final amplitude of the femur that gives athletes the atomic ability bare for jumping, acid and, in Poe's case, alarming up double-teams and pile-driving quarterbacks.

This summer, afterwards he was taken 11th all-embracing by the Chiefs, Poe spent a lot of of his aboriginal amateur minicamp in a four-point stance. He formed for hours on uncoiling at the breeze and appointment the stored activity from his achievement upward, violently, into the center's chest. If his accomplishment lagged, Chiefs arresting band drillmaster Anthony Pleasant reminded Poe area his ability abject was by slapping him, loudly, on his hubcap-size hindquarters. Afterwards one such prodding abreast the ambition line, Poe accursed out of his stance, animadversion an abettor drillmaster befuddled and center aback to the goalpost. "That's my anchor," Poe says proudly. "I've had it back I was a kid, and I acknowledge the compliments. But it's a little aberrant that so abounding humans are talking about it."