In a world where fitness '“influencer” numbers are increasing, it’s becoming more and more important to be able to distinguish good advice from bad. It seems that anyone can hop on instagram, post a few half naked pictures, and begin giving fitness advice even if they have no clue what they’re talking about.
This is especially true when it comes to building a great butt. Any good-looking girl with a decent bum will attract all sorts of attention and begin selling programs on how to build a better butt. Is there anything wrong with this? Well, it depends on what we’re talking about. But in my opinion it is our responsibility as consumers to be aware of what is being marketed to us. It is our job to understand what is sound advice and what is myth or hype.
Believe it or not, glute training is one of the most common places to find false information. The recommendations that most of these instagram models give simply don’t work. They may have the right intention when they are giving the advice, but they aren’t delivering the right message.
Because of this, I wanted to take the time to talk about three steps you should take to build bigger, stronger, better looking glutes based on years of experience coaching hundreds of clients. This stuff works.
STEP #1: Lift Heavy Using Compound Movements
Building better glutes simply means adding muscle order to make them look they way you want to. In order to build lean muscle, the body has to be put in an environment where it has no choice but to build muscle.
Our bodies were made to adapt to the environment we put them in. Take a look at long distance runners. They are on the skinnier side, not carrying much muscle as it is a disadvantage to run such long distances with lots of muscle. Take a look at sprinters. Sprinters are typically much more muscular, as sprinting and explosive movement requires lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Our body adapts, and we need to ask it to adapt by building more muscle in our glutes. We do so by sending a loud signal to the body.
Lifting weights sends that signal to our body telling it to get stronger and put on more lean muscle. The greater the load is, the stronger the signal is. Therefore, it is beneficial to use compound (multi-joint) movements to build your butt.
This is the biggest mistake I see on social media. Exercises that are promoted are things like pulse squats, jump lunges, and band work. There is nothing inherently wrong with those exercises, they’re just not going to send the butt-building signal we are looking for.
If you want to build a bigger, better-looking butt, you should program your workouts around squats, lunges, deadlifts, and thrusts. These lifts allow for the loudest muscle-building signal to be send to the glutes.
Think about it this way. If you knew a guy that wanted to build bigger arms and he spend his time bicep curling the air, you would say that’s ridiculous, right? He would be better off doing curls with heavier dumbbells or barbells. The same concept applies here. If you want to build your butt, focus on getting stronger and adding more weight to your squats, deadlifts, lunges, and thrusts using barbells and dumbbells.
Moves like banded kickbacks, jump lunges, and pulse squats will only make you feel the burn. Feeling the burn does not equate to building your butt.
STEP #2: Use Other Exercises to Improve Your Connection
Here is where it can be tricky.
You can do all the big lifts (squats, deadlifts, lunges, thrusts) you want, but if you don’t have a good connection to your glutes, you may not see them grow.
What does it mean to have a good connection to your glutes? It means you have the ability to feel your glutes working as you are doing the exercise through its entire range of motion. This is one of the areas that most people need improvement in. They do a bicep curl but feel it in their shoulders. They do a row but feel it in their arms rather than their back. They don’t know how to squeeze and work the muscles that need to be working.
If you have a hard time feeling your butt do the work, you need to improve your connection. There are a few things I recommend you do to make that happen.
Practice flexing. Seriously. If you are sitting down and I ask you to flex your glutes, you should be able to. If you are standing and I ask you to flex your glutes, you should be able to. If you are lying down and I ask you to flex your glutes, you should be able to. Practice flexing your glutes in order to teach your mind how to connect with the muscle. From there, reduce the weight on your bigger lifts, and practice squeezing your glutes throughout the full range of motion. For example, do a squat but practice squeezing your cheeks as you bring the weight up.
Use isometrics to help you focus on your glutes. Isometric movements happen when you hold a weight in a fixed position. So an isometric bicep curl would look like you holding the weight midway through a bicep curl for a certain period of time. To use isometrics to connect to you glutes, you could use a hip thrust and hold the weight at the top, squeezing your glutes as hard as you can for a set amount of time.
Slow down your movements and focus on the negative. A negative is when you slow down tremendously on the eccentric portion of the movement. This is when your target muscle is lengthening. For your glutes, you could do a lighter deadlift and focus on feeling your glutes squeeze as you come down from the top of the lift very slowly.
Use these methods to practice connecting with the muscles that should be working. Once you have that down, you will be able to send more of that muscle building signal to your glutes.
STEP #3: Use Frequency and Volume to Your Advantage
One of the ways we can measure growth is through muscle protein synthesis. When MPS is higher, more muscle building tends to occur. It is shown that MPS stays elevated for about 24-72 hours after training, varying from individual to individual.
If MPS stays elevated for 72 hours at most, it would be wise to train your glutes more than once per week. That way once MPS begins to fall back down to baseline, another training session can bring it back up.
Another thing that is important to discuss is volume. Volume in exercise is weights x sets x reps. Multiply those three numbers and you get your total volume for a muscle group. Slowly increasing your volume week by week has been shown to improve muscle growth. I recommend that you increase volume by aiming to lift more weight than you did the previous week.
More frequency and more volume can certainly help you build a better butt. However, this is one of those scenarios where more isn’t always better. The key here is finding the happy medium, the balance. You want to be at a place where you are not overtraining and have plenty of room to improve. The goal is to illicit the most amount of change with the least amount of work.
The best thing to do is start where you are, and incrementally add a little bit more. If you have never lifted before, going to the gym one day per week is more than enough. If you have lifted three days per week consistently for the past 6 months, you can either add a bit more glute work to those days. There really is no right or wrong. You just want to make sure you add a tad bit more than what you’re doing now, but not too much to the point of overtraining. You know you’re going too hard if you’re really sore the next day.
TAKEAWAYS
This can be a lot to take in, so let’s strip things down to some key takeaways.
Build your butt by lifting heavy with movements that will send the loudest muscle building signal to your body. This includes squats, lunges, deadlifts, and thrusts.
Use the above methods and accessory movements to develop a good connection to your glutes, ensuring that they are the muscles doing most of the work in those heavy lifts.
Slowly add more volume to your week, and use frequency to increase the volume incrementally. A simple way to do so is by adding five pounds to your lifts each week to slowly increase volume.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life.
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