When it comes to lower body muscles, nothing seems to quite capture the attention like the glutes. Aesthetic reasons aside, a set of strong glutes also help with posture, balance, and back health. Today, let’s talk about five exercises that can work well for targeting and growing those glutes.

Top Five Exercises for Growing the Glutes

What Do the Glutes Do?

Each muscle in the body is responsible for getting your skeleton to move in particular ways. This is accomplished by certain muscles shortening (contracting) and lengthening (relaxing) simultaneously, pulling on your bones. Therefore, if you’re looking to train a particular muscle group, you want to apply resistance against the motion it’s intended to do.

The glutes in of themselves help you move in a few different ways, but for our overall intents and purposes, they function as hip extensors. This consists of taking your hips from a bent, hinged state to being in line with your midline. Therefore, the best glute exercises focus primarily on this motion.

A Few Qualifiers

Before we move on to the exercises themselves, there are a couple of different things that I need to point out.

First, this list obviously isn’t universal. People will find that different exercises favor them better than others. This is due to variations in preferences, anthropometry, equipment availability, injuries, etc. As such, take these recommendations as a good place to start if you don’t know where to begin. When determining an appropriate exercise, it must meet three criteria:

• It targets the muscle group in question.
• It can be performed safely/feasibly.
• It can be progressively overloaded in a practical way.

That last point in particular is something that tends to be overlooked. The truth is that muscle development is contingent on far more than just exercise selection. Progressive overload is key for driving muscle growth, i.e., you must lift increasingly heavier weights over time to get the muscles to grow and adapt. It is generally a better idea to focus on getting stronger at a couple of different glute exercises vs. doing a ton of different exercises at a lower stimulus.

Finally, there’s more to getting the glutes to grow than the exercises themselves. Muscle growth requires three different factors:

• A sufficient stimulus, i.e., progressive overload (as mentioned above).
• Adequate energy intake. This is best met with a calorie surplus or at least a maintenance level.
• Sufficient protein intake. Dietary protein provides the amino acids necessary for constructing muscle tissue.

In short, you can train as hard as you can, but if your diet doesn’t align with your efforts, you’re probably not going to see the results you’re hoping for.

Now on to the exercises!

The Top Five Exercises

For each exercise, I’ll walk you through the basic setup and movement. If you’re ever unsure, it’s always better to start with less or no weight and focus on getting the technique right before adding load.

1. Hip Thrusts

Hip thrusts are likely the first movement that comes to mind when most think of a glute exercise. They involve lying back against an elevated surface and taking the hips into an upward thrusting motion. The resistance can be provided by a barbell, dumbbell, or machine.

2. Romanian Deadlifts

Romanian deadlifts are a variant of the traditional barbell deadlift that focuses more on the posterior chain/hip extension part of the lift, as well as emphasizing the eccentric (lowering) phase of the lift. They involve taking a weight at a standing position, then shifting the hips back to allow the weight to descend to one’s maximum range of motion. The movement is then reversed from the bottom of the lift.

It is also important to distinguish this movement from the stiff-legged deadlift, which focuses more on the lower back. This movement can be loaded with a barbell, dumbbells, or even cables.

3. Extensions

Extensions take the body from an anchored, bent-over state to full extension, against gravity. As with the Romanian vs. stiff-legged deadlift, this exercise can be used to focus more on the lower back vs. the glutes. To ensure the glutes are the target, keep the back slightly curled and set, and focus more on thrusting into the pad than lifting your body. To load this exercise, hold a weight to your chest.

4. Kickbacks

Kickbacks are an exercise done unilaterally, i.e., one leg at a time. As the name implies, they involve extending one’s leg backwards in a swinging motion against resistance. This gives a slightly different range of motion compared to a traditional leg press and puts more emphasis on the glutes. These are ideally done using cables or a machine of some sort to make loading easy.

5. Squats

It seems inevitable that squats would be on this list. However, as a glute exercise, squats aren’t always quite the king they’re made out to be.

The effectiveness of squats for glutes depend on how a person is built, their squat form, and the style of squat. This is because squats actually have two different main parts: hip extension and leg extension.

Bending and extending at the knee puts the work on the quadriceps, while hip extension incorporates the glutes. Thus, it is important to squat deep, i.e. hips dropping below the knees. This ensures maximal hip hinging during the movement.

Squats are very diverse, and can be loaded with barbells, dumbbells, and machines.

Conclusion

In the end, the glutes are like any other muscle. If you train them consistently and increasingly heavier, they’ll grow. Also, remember that muscle growth is a slow process, so you won’t see results overnight. If you stick with it on a balanced program, with a diet to match, you’ll likely be quite pleased with the end results.

Build that peach!