Gym-Goer, 24, Snaps Her Hip Attempting Booty-Boosting Exercise: ‘Like Someone Had Taken a Chainsaw to My Leg’

• Kristina Schmidt, 24, was at the gym attempting a hip thrust with a weighted barbell to increase the size of her glutes
• She began experiencing pain, but dismissed it — until the pain was so bad, she compared it to someone taking a “chainsaw to my leg”
• Schmidt underwent surgery — then developed sepsis — losing months to recovery

A fitness influencer, 24, suffered a debilitating injury while doing an exercise that’s meant to increase the size of the glutes and thighs — and now, she’s warning others about getting proper guidance for exercises at the gym.

As Kristina Schmidt shared in a TikTok outlining her injury, she wanted to “enter my glutes era,” so she started doing the hip thrust in January 2023. The Malibu native, who was studying at Hokkaido University in Japan at the time, explains that it’s something of a meme in the online gym community, which shares images of people lying across a bench and hip thrusting in the air with a weighted barbell across the pelvis.

She never had a coach or professional gym guidance, she said. “I just saw people doing the hip thrust online. I never saw people talking about what to do if you’re more quad dominant, like I am,” Schmidt tells Kennedy News and Media via The Daily Mail,

“’It was more of a one-size-fits-all approach, like, “If you want big glutes then you should do this,” she told the outlet, which reports that she quickly worked her way up to 308 lbs.

But as Schmidt shared online, a month after starting the exercise, “randomly, I’d get this sharp shooting pain” in her right hip — but it wasn’t alarming enough to make her seek medical care. “I was suspicious at the time but it wasn’t something where I was like, ‘Oh crap, I need to see a doctor.’ It was more like, ‘I can deal with this if I just rest a bit more.’ ”

That all changed in March, she explained, when “things began escalating.” The pain was “constant, like something was grinding in my hip,” she said in another TikTok. “I just kind of gaslit myself into thinking, ‘It could be worse. Don’t complain about it.’ ”

But it did get worse, she shared, during a getaway with friends to Kansai where sightseeing and a night dancing was “so excruciatingly painful … I couldn’t physically stand on my right leg anymore.” Upon returning to Tokyo, when Schmidt stepped out of the car, “I screamed so loud.”

“It was like someone had taken a chainsaw to my leg and was trying to rip it off.”

When she finally went for an MRI, the test showed multiple injuries: Schmidt had a stress fracture in her right hip, cracks in the bones in the hip joint and neck of her femur, and as The Daily Mail adds, “The space between my hip bone and femur shrank so much that my bones were grinding on each other,” she said.

Schmidt underwent surgery — but developed sepsis, a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body responds to an infection improperly.

“I needed surgery to clean out the joint, and after that I was on crutches and still could not walk for weeks,” she said, adding that she was put on antibiotics for months.

She’s now urging people to get proper guidance before trying a workout they saw on social media. “You have to be quite careful about what you see online now. Just because it works for one person, doesn’t mean it works for everyone,” she said. “Having guidance from someone who is certified and who knows what they’re doing is really important.”

And, she added online, don’t worry about trying to impress people by lifting too heavy of a weight: “Ego lifting is NEVER worth the price you pay.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.