The 5 BEST Glute Building Exercises For a Round, Firm Bum.
Building bigger, rounder bums has become perhaps the biggest growth area (no pun intended) in women’s fitness over the last ten years.
Women’s fitness and training styles are making a paradigm shift away from being skinny and wanting a thigh gap to wanting a big, round, perky set of glutes and strong lean legs.
With this, however, has come the rise of the Instagram influencer 🤮and an exponential rise in the amount of completely random and nonsense glute training videos, glute exercises and booty band workouts.
Annoyingly more women seem to spend time on the “fluff” exercises rather than the basics that actually build your glutes.
With that, I will share My five best glute-building exercises, or I should say 5 better exercises than all the Instagram crap.
This is very much my personal opinion and how I choose to train my clients.
Go on any other top 5 glute exercise list, and it will likely be different from the last, but there will always be staple exercises like hip thrusts, squats and deadlifts.,
Building your glutes is like making a cake; your big compound exercises are the cake mix, the actual cake.
Without them, you have no cake, only icing.
All the other exercises, your isolation work, band work, pump work and weird Instagram exercises, are the icing on the cake.
They sweeten it up, make it look a little nicer and give it some shape…butt without the cake to go on, it’s just a thin layer of not very much….it’s certainly not a cake.
I’ve got a brilliant and handy CALORIE CALCULATOR on my website that will give you custom calorie targets, advice on macro splits and advice on either building muscle or burning fat; make sure you check it out.
Of course, don’t eat cake for extra calories! Fill up on nutritious lean proteins, vegetables, fruit, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats to build that booty.
And ditch the scales!
Building muscle is likely to increase your weight on the scale, at least at first, so ditch that bitch and focus on your gym numbers, not scale numbers.
Anyway, enough food analogies, in no particular order, let’s dive into the
Top 5 glute-building exercises for a bigger, firmer butt.
1. Hip Thrusts/Bridges/Kas
Since its inception by Bret Contreras in the early 2000’s it has helped revolutionised glute training. It may not be completely responsible for all the amazing glutes we see, but it has shepherded into a new era of glute-focused training.
The hip thrust is a glute-dominant exercise; the quads and hamstrings help but not as much as other exercises like squats and deadlifts.
The hip thrust activates and builds the upper glutes to a much greater extent than squats and even more than deadlifts, both of which hit the lower glutes hardest.
The hip thrust is one of the few moves that hit the glute muscle in its entirety, meaning more bang for your buck than ANY other isolation exercise for the glutes.
Hip thrusts help to build glute muscle through mechanical tension and metabolic stress.
The time the muscle spends under tension provided by the weight (barbell, dumbbell etc.) creates Mechanical Tension; metabolic stress comes from a build-up of blood and metabolic compounds in the muscle, otherwise known as the pump/burn.
The important thing to note is that hip thrusts won’t leave you as sore as squats and deadlifts because they don’t cause as much muscular damage.
If you are a little confused about the glute muscles, I suggest you read this blog post first.
Variations of the hip thrust I recommend are:
Banded hip thrusts
Double-banded hip thrusts
Single-leg hip thrusts
Feet elevated hip thrusts
Glute Bridges and Kas Glute Bridges
Single-leg glute bridges
Feet elevated glute bridges
Hip thrust/glute bridge with abductions
Kneeling hip thrust
Nautilus Glute Drive
2. Sumo Deadlift
The sumo deadlift is what we call a hamstring-dominant exercise, in that it works the hamstrings more than any other muscle. It also involves a lot of quad work, lower back and upper back/trap muscles, and of course, the glutes!
The glutes are targeted to a high degree by the sumo deadlift, primarily due to where you place your feet.
In a sumo deadlift, the feet are wide and are pointing outwards, otherwise known as external rotation.
External rotation of the leg is a primary action of the glutes, so this stance involves the glutes to a higher degree, making this a great movement to target the glutes.
Deadlift variations I recommend are:
Conventional deadlift
Romanian deadlift
Snatch grip deadlift
3. Bulgarian Split Squats
Our clients and, admittedly, Personal Trainers, too, have a kind of hate/love relationship with the split squat.
Often, this is when my clients tell me they hate me!
Very few exercises can match the lung-busting demand of the split squat.
Using only one leg at a time means to complete one set, you need to do double the work!
Split squats are a quad-dominant exercise, but they can be used to absolutely hammer the glutes.
For example, by leaning forward slightly, you increase the stretch on the glutes and increase the demand in the muscle.
Also, by focusing on pushing your weight through your heels, you place more emphasis on the glutes.
The split squat assists glute growth by causing muscular damage, tiny micro tears in the muscle; because the muscle is firing when it is stretched; basically, your glute muscles are working hardest when you are at the bottom of the squat.
Muscular damage leads to DOMS, the pain you often get post-workout.
Single-leg quad dominant exercises I recommend are:
Deficit reverse lunges
Walking lunges
Single-leg leg press
Strict form step ups
Curtsey lunges
Pistol squats
4. Romanian Deadlift (RDL)
If the squat is the King of quad exercises, then the RDL is the king of hamstring exercises, it is also one of my all-time favourite glute-building exercises.
No exercise works the entire posterior chain more effectively than the Romanian Dead Lift.
Whether you’re an elite athlete who wants to run faster, jump higher or prevent injury, or you’re a regular gym, Karen who wants a booty that’s the envy of all her friends, the RDL is the best lift you’re not doing that you can add to your program.
The hip-hinge motion is probably the most important pattern for overall movement health, and the RDL is great for boosting mobility in the hips, hamstrings, and lower back.
And, unlike a traditional deadlift, RDLs can be done with much less weight, minimising joint stress.
Much like the split squat, RDLs create a lot of muscular damage as the glutes work their hardest when they are being stretched, so they can leave you sore with DOMS. I would advise adding RDLs no more than 2x per week to your glute training.
Variations I recommend are:
Single leg deadlifts
B-Stance RDL’s
Leg curl with a machine/band/ball
5. Squats
The squat, King of leg exercises, a titan of strength and an amazing glute builder! (despite what you may have heard otherwise).
Squats are a crazy good quad builder; they hit your inner thighs (adductors) hard and give the glutes a good workout too.
Until the hip thrust came along, the squat was the go too for the glutes.
Squat variations should be 100% part of your glute routine.
One of the main issues is that, like the split squat and RDL, the squat works the glutes hardest at the bottom of the squat when the muscle is stretched.
However, many struggle to get deep enough in their squats to work the glutes fully.
This is a big issue; your glutes are not working hard enough, and your quads are getting all the gains.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid squats if your goal is for bigger and stronger glutes.
If you struggle to squat deep then I check out my article on why you can’t squat deep and how to fix it.
In fact, I suggest that you incorporate various exercises into your routine for optimal results.
In your glute-focused workouts, not only should you incorporate a variation of the above exercises, but you should also incorporate multiple squat and deadlift variations.
Although squats may not be the top exercise for glutes, there are ways to ensure you’re activating your glutes more effectively, especially in today’s world, where most people are seated and have trained their glutes to become inactive.
The top squat variations for glutes are:
Back Squat
3/4 Squats
1 1/2 Squats
Goblet squat variations
Sumo Squat
Bulgarian Split Squats
There you have it, my favourite big glute exercises.
If you picked a few of these to do in a workout and peppered some kickbacks, abductor work and band work on to the end you will have the recipe for a fantastic glute workout and be on the road to a bum so incredible that men get whiplash when you walk past.
If you are looking to make that change, work with a coach who understands and respects individuality and is trained to work with women then you should
apply for ONLINE COACHING HERE
And Check out a few of my client’s glutes below
Hi, I’m Aaron Schiavone, owner of Mind Muscle Personal Training. Over the past 5+ years I have helped women increase their self confidence, improve their relationship with food, improve their health, become stronger, fitter and happier.