In this episode of the podcast, we are going to be talking about
big butts and I cannot lie, sorry, I had to do it.
Specifically, we're going to be discussing how to train for a
bigger booty. Whether you are a guy looking
for glute gains to help with your performance and strength
because the glutes are one of the most important muscles for
generating power and force, which is crucial for strength
and performance. Or you are just the lady in the
gym looking for booty gains because you want a bigger and
more round butt. Well, today I'm going to give
you my three-step system that I have used to help countless
clients maximize growth in their glutes, and I'm going to teach
you how to implement it for yourself today.
The greatest things in life all start with a challenge.
You must accept that everything is hard before it gets easy.
Every, every, every, everything you want in life begins with a
hard path. Let's dive in.
First, we have to understand what are we doing when we are
targeting the glutes, meaning the movement patterns.
So the first step is really learning the right fundamental
movement patterns, the primary exercises that are going to lead
to targeting the glutes. We want to isolate the glutes.
We want to put more volume to the glutes.
We're going to train the glutes more frequently.
All of these things, which I'm going to cover here in a minute.
But first we have to understand how do we even target the glutes
properly? And some of you might see me go
through these movement patterns and recognize certain ones that
stand out more to you because that has worked well for you.
Or when you do that exercise, you feel your glutes more.
However, just because you might feel your glutes more doesn't
always mean you're training optimally for glute gains, which
I'm going to to explain as I go through these three movement
patterns that are going to be the fundamental or the the
primary movement patterns that target the glutes best.
So the first movement pattern we want to target and focus on for
the glutes is going to be hip extension.
This is when we're primarily shortening the glute muscle.
Now we're not going to go into the different heads of the
glute, glute Max, glute, me, things like that.
What we're really going to talk about today is program design.
So I want to 1st just lay out the movement patterns that you
need to understand so you know where to place them throughout
the week in your weekly training split.
We don't need to get into the deep dive science.
We just need to give you practical information that you
can literally put into your training program and start
growing your glutes right away. So the first movement is hip
extension. This is when we're shortening
the muscle. And so you'll feel this
primarily at the top of something like a hip thrust, for
example. This is when we're bridging to
the top. Our hips are in complete
extension, so we basically have a flat line from our shoulders
all the way to our knees, which are in a 90° angle to the
ground. So we're driving our heels into
the floor, bridging our hips up to the ceiling, locking out the
hips, squeezing the glutes. That is when you're going to
feel the glutes the most. Now, this is a shortened
position for the muscle. We know based on tons of
different research on tons of different muscle groups now that
the length and position is going to be more beneficial for
growth. So although the hip thrust still
should be a primary exercise in your plan, it is not necessarily
the most optimal for stimulating hypertrophy.
So to stimulate hypertrophy, we want to lengthen the muscle.
And you're going to get this on a hip thrust, especially if you
use something like a hip thrust machine.
The hip thrust machine is set up in a way where the platform is
typically angled, the bottom is a little bit lower so you can
unrack and bridge, and you can get pretty low.
So if your gym has a hip thrust machine, definitely use it.
It is one of the best ways to both stretch and shorten the OR
stretch and contract or lengthen and shorten the glutes
themselves. When you're using a barbell, the
plates are going to hit the ground before you get into a
deep stretch with the glutes at the bottom of that movement.
And so it kind of limits how much hypertrophy we can have in
the glutes from a hip thrust. However, I will say this, Brett
Contreras, the glute guy has a lot of content on this.
He invented the hip thrust. He invented the hip thrust
machine. He's been on my podcast as well.
Very informative guy, really, really good and I like his work.
He has shown in research that the hip thrust is better than a
lot of exercises. It's one of the best exercises
you can do. I do not know if they use hip
thrusts machines in all the studies.
I got to doubt they did because that hasn't been around forever
and they started studying this stuff a while back.
But none the less, it is debatable.
Not everybody's going to get in that length and position.
And the reason I say this is because we need to have this
movement to emphasize that shortened position of the glutes
in hip extension. But we're also going to need to
choose exercises that guarantee we can put the glutes in a
stretch position no matter what gym we're at with no matter what
equipment is available. And so we have movement #1 hip
extension, shortening the muscle.
This is going to be something like a hip thrust #2 is going to
focus on that stretch position. And that is hip flexion.
This is when we're lengthening the muscle.
So we have a few examples here. You can use a squat, and as you
see in the bottom of this squat, my glutes would be in a
stretched position because my hips are completely flexed.
Now I have platform based shoes, lifting shoes and I have a very
upright torso because of how long my legs are, they're not
very long at all. So I'm a very quad dominant
squatter. So I'm still not going to get as
much glutes from this and I'm going to be targeting more quads
and that's how some people are. If you have a longer femurs or
you don't elevate your heels and you can sit back into it and
create a really big stretch on the glutes in this deep squat,
you absolutely can see a lot of growth.
And This is why there is a lot of people who swear by squats
for glutes and there's a lot of people who squat all the time
and have huge quads and no glutes at all.
The reality is, is that everybody's limb lengths are
different. And so your posture and the
length of your tibia and your femurs is going to really
dictate how much glute you get in a squat.
But the point with this is we need to choose a movement in
general that creates hip flexion.
So the hip bending as much as we can to create that big stretch
on the glutes at the bottom of a movement.
And we want to emphasize that stretch while under load because
that's what research shows to be the most hypertrophic position
in any range of motion. If you can't do a squat and get
into a glute dominant position because of limb length postures,
the thing that I mentioned, you could do something like as seen
here, Coach Holly is doing a split squat variation.
So she has her rear foot elevated, but she's modeling
more of like an RDL position. She's sitting back into it and
let instead of letting her knee roll forward a ton, when her
knee rolls forward a ton, we're going to get more stretch
emphasis on the quads because there's going to be more knee
flexion. When there's knee flexion, all
that stretch and tension goes to the quads.
It's going to be great for quad hypertrophy, but for glute
hypertrophy, we want to have less forward knee movement and
more hip backward movement. So she's sitting back into it
towards the box that she has her other foot on, and that is
creating a very large stretch on her glutes and that's going to
cause a lot of tension in the stretch position for the glute
muscle, leading to more hypertrophy.
Then we have another example of the RDL.
You can do a stiff leg RDL and it's going to be a lot more
glutes. Or you can sit back and as you
can see here behind the plates, my knees are bending quite a
bit, letting my hips travel back.
You can even put a band around your waist that pulls you back
if you need to, so that you get both stretched and shortened by
driving your hips forward against the band, creating a
hard contraction at the top. But regardless, what we see here
is I'm sitting back into it and I'm going to get a big stretch
on my hamstrings, of course, but also clearly on my glutes
because I'm trying to reach my hips far back to stretch the
glutes under load. So those are all great examples
of hip flexion creating a lengthened and stretched
position on the glutes in the range of motion of those
exercises. And the last movement is hip
abduction, right? This is again a shortened
position. We're shortening the muscle.
We're going to target a little bit more of a different head on
the glutes compared to something like a hip thrust in that
shortened and hip extended position.
And with this we're abducting which is moving away from the
midline. So if our midlines here and
we're abducting moving away, taking away, we are moving
outward, right? Good girl, bad girl machine is
what we mostly call this. And this is where you just
pushing your legs in and out and that resistance is driving your
legs in and you're pushing that resistance out, creating hip
abduction and firing the glutes in that process.
This is primarily going to cause a shortened range.
You could do this standing as well if you have a ankle strap
that you can attach to a cable machine, which would allow you
to have a stretch position. And I highly recommend that
because now I can stand, I can do a single leg hip abduction
and let the cable pull my leg laterally and actually cross my
mid line causing it to stretch. With a hip abduction machine
where you're bilateral with two legs, I can only go till my legs
are put back together and that does not cause a stretch
position by crossing that midline again while under load.
Now that we understand the movement patterns and exercises
associated with those movement patterns, and again, I say
movement patterns, not exercise selection because you have to
know the movement and then find the best exercise for you.
I have another video talking about how to find the best
exercises for you and it goes over numerous metrics and things
that you can assess to make sure that you're choosing exercises
that agree with your body, your mind, muscle connection, how you
can progress them properly. You need to take what I'm saying
here with the movements, flexion, extension, abduction,
and then watch a video like that to figure out what works best
individually for you based on those movement patterns.
Step 2 we're getting into is increasing frequency.
Frequency is how often you train and exercise or target a muscle.
In the case of body composition, bodybuilding, hypertrophy, we're
going to be talking about muscles, not exercises.
If you're a power lifter, you need to have a high frequency of
barbell bench press, not because you're targeting the chest, but
because you need to be at the skill of bench pressing for your
competition. When we talk about bodybuilding,
we need to have a higher frequency of training the chest
with barbell exercises, but also chest flies, machines, things
like that. And so in the case of building
your glutes, that's how we're going to look at it.
We want to increase the frequency at which we train our
glutes. What research has shown to be
optimal is going to be anywhere between two to three times a
week. There has been some research
that shows even four times a week can be optimal or can be
ideal. However, for looking at a
program design method in in just looking at some practical terms,
not inside of a study, but actually working with real
people. Two to three times almost always
works better based on how often people can get to the gym, what
kind of training sessions they're doing between full body,
upper, lower, things like that, and also their energy in the
gym, how much fatigue is generated throughout a session,
so on and so forth. So looking at targeting the
glutes with optimal frequency, we're going to train them two to
three times per week depending on the split.
We're going to target the glutes first in every training session
when we do that. And the reason for that is
because we don't want to have other fatigue metrics causing
the exercises we do for our glutes to be underperformed or
have a lower volume because we're already fatigued.
Example of this would be simple. We could do a hamstring curl and
a RDL targeting the hamstrings and then we go to do our hip
thrusts and our hamstrings are firing and it's taking a lot of
attention away from the glutes. Our mind muscle connection is
going to be more poor because we can't target the glutes.
When our hamstrings are so pumped and fired up, it's hard
for us to lose that connection to target the glutes.
Whereas if you did the hip dust first, you're going to easily be
able to isolate the glutes because it's the first exercise
and muscle group you target. And then when you go to the RDL,
you might actually get the benefit of targeting the glutes
a little bit during that RDL. And there's nothing wrong with
that if your goal is to build the glutes.
Now on the other side, if you do a full body program and you
train your back and your chest and shoulders and all this other
stuff, you might go to do the glute training and you just
can't lift this heavy, which also might happen in the prior
example. But in this example, you're just
metabolically and neurologically fatigued.
You're just tired. You've been training, you've
already done 5 or 6 sets of other exercises, and then you go
to do the hip thrusts and your load drops because you are
fatigued in general. So rather than being fatigued
going into it, be fresh going into it because it's the most
important exercise because your main goal is to build your
glutes. The next thing to focus on here
is making sure you perform two to three exercises in any given
session. I would probably start on the
lower end of it. Start with two.
You don't need to do 3. It's better to do three to four
sets of two specific exercises per session than it is to do one
to two sets of three exercises. More variation on exercises is
not better unless you've already maxed out your volume landmarks,
which we'll get into next. But the big key here is choosing
2 to three good exercises for you in each of those sessions.
That is going to happen two to three times a week, and you're
going to spread those movement patterns we talked about out
throughout those sessions. So session one we might have a
hip abduction and a hip flexion movement.
Then session two we might have another hip flexion and a hip
extension. And then session three, we might
just have a hip flexion or we might have a hip flexion and a
hip extension movement. And the reason I say hip flexion
each of time is because the length and position of the
muscle, as I said before, is the most beneficial for hypertrophy.
So if we're targeting the muscle three times a week, we want to
make sure each of those sessions has at least one exercise that
causes a stretch on the glutes. And then we'll fill in the other
one to two exercises with a hip abduction or a hip extension
movement. This allows us to spread the
movement patterns out. We're doing two to three
exercises in each of those sessions, which is happening two
to three times per week. And we're really just trying to
focus and emphasize the glutes first in every single one of
those sessions to make sure that we're fresh and we can increase
the load on those given days. And the third step is going to
be progressing volume. And so there is a popular term
called the volume landmarks, which has been made popular with
Mike Izzertel, another person I've had on the podcast to
discuss this. And essentially we have this,
this really it's like a bell curve, but we have 10 on the
lower side, 20 on the higher side, meaning 10 sets per muscle
group per week and 20 sets per muscle group per week being the
range of sets per week we want to use to target the glutes for
optimal growth. I say it's a bell curve because
a lot of times we'll start as a beginner in a place where we
have closer to the 10, then we move to an intermediate.
We might get closer to the 20, but as we get stronger and we
get more skilled at lifting and targeting the muscle and the
muscle and fatiguing it, meaning training to maximum failure, we
might actually have to drop those sets again because we're
stimulating more, stimulating the muscle more than we were
able to when we were an intermediate or beginner.
But for the most part, just know that 10s on the low end, 20s on
the high end, you're going to fall somewhere in there and you
might have to get all the way to 20 and then come back down a
little bit if you notice a lot of damaging training or just low
recovery from that higher amount of sets per week.
And so when we're looking at this, we want to make sure we're
progressing it. So you're going to start at the
low end, 10 sets per week for glutes.
So again, if you're training the muscle group two to three times
a week, just take the exercises you're doing in those two to
three sessions and make sure you're doing around 10 sets
total for the week. If you're an intermediate, go
closer to 15. If you're advanced, you can go
all the way up to 20 per week, then you're going to increase by
one to three sets, especially if you're on the lower end.
So if you're in that 10 to 15 range, you can absolutely
increase by one to three sets per week.
And you're going to do this every mesocycle and it's going
to be based on recovery and growth.
And so by mesocycle, I mean block of training.
So if you have a block of training, let's say four to six
weeks, which is pretty ideal and in common for a hypertrophy
program, we're going to have a set number of sets and a set
amount of volume per week for the glutes for that entire four
to six week program. So that we can actually see if
it works, if it's enough, if it's not increased by 1:00 to
3:00 throughout the week, spread evenly across those sessions and
reassess at the end of that block.
How was your recovery and how was your growth?
And then last, you're going to simultaneously increase your
load as often as you were able to.
So in those sessions, if you can add 5 lbs, if you can add a
couple reps, whatever it may be, you're going to do that because
volume is also tonnage sets times reps times load.
So you don't only have to increase reps or only increase
sets per week to grow. You could also increase load.
Really what we should be doing here is increasing whichever one
we can because all of them are going to work in our advantage
to build more muscle. The sets per week is probably
the most difficult because it takes more total work and it
causes more fatigue and it might make you spend more time in the
gym, but it might also stimulate the most growth of all those
options, which is why we want to aim for that at the end of every
block. And then in between those
blocks, day-to-day session to session, we're going to be
trying to increase the load or adding an extra Rep or two here
and there when we are able to. And there you have it.
That is 3 specific steps to really take this glute growth
goal of yours and make it as simple as possible.
You want to make sure that you are using the right exercises.
You want to train them with a high frequency, so two to three
times a week. And you want to make sure that
you are tracking your volume on a weekly basis and progressing
that volume block to block. If you do this, I promise you,
you are definitely going to grow your glutes.
They're going to get stronger and you are going to see
noticeable size difference. So make sure you're either
taking progress pictures or you are measuring with a measurement
tool so that you can see the gains you are making when doing
this.