The 3 Best Exercises To Grow Your Glutes
There’s a whole cottage industry of asses.
Thousands of instagram accounts, infomercials and ads in print magazines for fitness programs.
But there’s only pictures of asses.
Now I’m not ripping on asses.
They’re hugely important.
Your glutes, it could be argued, are the engine of your body.
If you’re an athlete (thicc boi Eden Hazard), or just someone trying to look hotter your glutes are a non-negotiable body part to target.
The problem is there’s a lot of crap surrounding asses.
Sorry, that was bad.
There’s a lot of terrible training tips for your glutes. This happens whenever something in fitness or nutrition becomes trendy.
The content stops being designed to be helpful for you. It shifts to becoming attention grabbing for the person who posts it.
There’s a lot of 60 minute band workouts where you don’t touch a single weight.
That’s great for people who already have a muscled, large derriere but for those of us who are trying to BUILD glutes from pancakes it’s useless.
Your glutes are a muscle group that needs resistance (aka challenging weights) to grow- just like your biceps and your chest.
So here are the 3 best exercises you can perform to build your glutes.
Romanian Deadlift
When you look at a huge function of the glutes- it’s to extend your hips. Meaning to push your hips from a backward position to a forward position. There’s no better way to train this range of motion than with a hip hinge.
A hip hinge is exactly what it sounds like. It’s hinging at the hips. You do this by pushing your hips back toward the wall behind you, while allowing your knees to gently bend and keeping your back flat.
It’s the main movement pattern trained with a deadlift.
Now as I get older the more I hate deadlifting from the floor. It’s a great movement for building strength, but it’s an incredibly demanding exercise that takes time to recover from. The older I get the more focused I am on targeting specific muscles and recover quickly.
Basically, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze if your only goal is to build bigger glutes.
So I much, much prefer an RDL variation, not performed to the floor. It’s a joint-friendly way to build strong, big glutes.
You can use really anything to perform an RDL but the best options are with a barbell or DBs. The form remains the same.
Here’s how to do it:
Start standing tall with the weight touching your quads.
Push your hips back towards the wall behind you
Keep your back flat,
Gently allow your knees to naturally bend as you push the hips backward (not down toward the ground)
When you reach peak stretch start to push your hips forward
Contract your glutes as you push the hips forward and straighten the legs
Stand up nice and tall while squeezing your glutes as hard as you can
Stand tall at the top of the movement, don’t lean back!
The RDL changes the range of motion slightly so that you are ONLY targeting the glutes and hamstrings, and not touching the floor. It’s a much smaller range of motion that allows you to perfectly target your ass.
2. Hip Thrust
The hip thrust is another movement that specifically targets the glutes while keeping other vulnerable areas of your body- i.e your lower back- out of harm's way so you can perform it with intensity and recovery quickly.
It’s another movement where the risk-reward ratio is distinctly skewed in favor of reward. Meaning there is a great chance of muscular growth and a very low chance of injury.
The hip thrust works a very similar looking range of motion as the RDL except your body is in a different position. The name of the game is still loaded hip extension.
Here’s how to perform the hip thrust:
Set up with your butt on the ground and your shoulders on a bench, or a hip thrust platform.
You want the bench to be right in the middle of your shoulder blades, so your shoulders are fully supported
Bring your feet about 8-12 inches from your butt, with your soles flat on the ground
Squeeze your butt and lift your hips as high towards the ceiling as you can
Pause for 2-3 seconds as you squeeze your glutes as hard as you possibly can, then slowly release and gently lower your butt to the ground.
3. Bulgarian Split Squat
I think the Bulgarian Split Squat is the ultimate lower body exercise. It has everything you need to build strength, size, and athleticism.
It’s a single leg movement that will build posterior chain strength and size while correcting any left/right muscle imbalances in your hips.
As a bonus with this exercise, you load the weight in a couple of different ways to elicit a couple of different results. You can use a barbell or an SSB to REALLY load your legs. You can hold one DB to make it a challenging stability exercise, or you can use 2 heavier DBs to recruit some upper back.
It’s a really challenging and fun exercise that will get you some serious results.
Here’s how to do it:
Place your back foot on a bench, laces down
Set your front foot up far enough away from the bench so you can completely bend your knee while keeping the entirety of your foot flat on the ground
Once your set up take a second to find and feel your balance
Start to drop your back knee towards the ground
Allow your chest to lean forward as you’re going down
Once you reach the end range of your motion press your front foot entirely through the ground and use it to lift your body back upright
Wrapping It All Up
You’re getting a whole bunch of really bad glute training advice. If you really want to grow your glutes you need to focus on getting stronger in simple movement patterns like the 3 listed above.
Your glutes aren’t a special muscle. They don’t need to be activated, they don’t need crazy movements to target them. They need increasing resistance over time.
Focus on simple movements that target the actual function of your glutes, then try to get really strong at those movements. You’ll grow your ass in no time.
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