Glutes workout for muscle growth

Strong and toned booties entered the fitness community and social medias, as an extra thing to have, specially on social medias. Why does it comes difficult to engage and develop them for most?!

Have you ever spent time on it, training and reading, while you didn’t grow your glutes as you wanted? This is what to read so.

In order to understand how to train it, we need to understand its functions. It is placed on the lower half body, and it is one the posterior muscles. Spine erector, glutes, hamstrings and calves. As a posterior one, its role is to facilitate movements, that uses as joint of rotation, the hips.

Why is it widely misunderstood or it lacks of clarity on executions?! Because of misinterpretation of the most famous booty builder exercises. Squat, split squat, stiff leg deadlift, hip thrust, donkey kicks. Let’s see what happens here and what should happen instead.

SQUAT - SPLIT SQUAT

As one of the most famous, branded as glute builder, there is a big basic mistake. As performed in gyms and displayed on most socials, the execution presented has mainly quads engagement on lower body. Leading into a great quads muscle development while engaging as well glutes. How to correct that ?

• Core must be tight to avoid spine erector load.

• Knees and feet should be perpendicular to the floor

• Do not push the floor away as a pressing movement.

• Push your knees outwards like you want to stretch you legs back to standing

STIFF LEG DEADLIFT

It is potentially a very strong movement and it allows glutes to play a great role. Most commonly how displayed, the upper back raises bringing hips back to alignment, on a standing position. Leading to spine erector and some hamstrings to work. How to correct that?

• Upper body should not be sensed as loaded ( spine erector )

• Tense your core and glutes

• Retract your hips backwards, until you feel your glutes still engaged

• Don’t curl up your upper body using your lower back

• Move your hips forwards, on stiff legs, in order to bring the upper body back to alignment.

HIP THRUST

An other great movement for glutes workouts, but mostly misused starting from the work load. It happens to see very heavy hip thrusts, specially from social medias, but is it that load really going all on glutes? On a glute bridge you should, accordingly to what stated, engage glute muscles only. How is it so harder Squatting that hip thrust, if we are using a smaller muscle group? Because of cheating on points of pressure and spine erector support. Ending up with crazy heavy weights, and poor or none glutes engagement. How to correct that? machine or step/barbell

• You should sense your upper body relaxed

• Your back should be parallel to your legs when fully extended.

• Your feet should not be pressing or be tensed on the floor.

• The hips are the only thing that moves, in order to engage glutes.

• Range of motion means, from parallel to lowest movement you can reach, while you keep activated your glutes only.

DONKEY KICKS

One of the most used isolation movement from the booty building community, and also the less isolated in reality. As it stands on one foot, and grabbing a rail bar from a cable, it is the perfect biomechanics leverage, in order to compound push your foot back. Ending up into a stabilisation movement, activating spine erectors like crazy, hamstrings and all the upper body muscles that holds on the rail. Leaving none or little window for your glutes to activate. How to correct it?

• Start the activation of the movement on placing all your body weight on the standing leg.

• Keep the same leg absolutely stiff

• Lift your working leg until parallel to the floor, without moving anything else and keeping steady lock into your core.

• Imagine to raise only your heel, in function of your hips as joint of rotation.

• The leg never bend during the whole execution, moved by the glute.

FINAL STATEMENT

Genetic will play a role in it, for how long is your glute muscle, and where it’s inserting into the back of your leg. Need to keep an eye on your body structure.

If your booty it’s short, it will get very round quickly, but it won’t ever become a huge latina booty. It doesn’t have the anatomic structure for that.

If a glute instead is very long, and goes down deep into the hamstring, means the genetic to build a very thick, lean muscle.

No need to train it more than once x week if trained extremely well, otherwise i would suggest maximum 2 days a week 15/20 sets of work each. According to training skills and nutrition.

Understand which kind of movements you need. And focus on understanding the movement in function of your goal Shorter ones will do anything, longer ones will require multiple angle of work and time. If you want to train glutes, train it excluding any other stabilisation movement. You’ll see results pretty soon.