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.