The glutes get plenty of attention in lower body training, and for good reason. Aesthetic motivation aside, strong glutes contribute to posture, balance, and back health, and they’re a primary driver in nearly every athletic movement. This article walks through five exercises that work well for targeting and growing the glutes, plus the framing you need to actually see results.

Top Five Exercises for Growing the Glutes

What Do the Glutes Do?

Each muscle in the body is responsible for moving your skeleton in particular ways. Muscles shorten (contracting) and lengthen (relaxing) to pull on bones. To train a particular muscle group effectively, you want to apply resistance against the motion it’s designed to do.

The glutes contribute to several movements, but for our purposes they primarily function as hip extensors. Hip extension is the motion of taking your hips from a bent, hinged position back to a position in line with your torso. The best glute exercises load this motion, with the muscle contracting hardest at the point where the hips are fully extended.

A Few Qualifiers

Before getting to the exercises, a few things worth flagging.

This list isn’t universal. People find that different exercises favor them differently due to preferences, anthropometry, equipment availability, and injury history. Take these as a solid starting point if you don’t know where to begin. The right exercises for any given person need to meet three criteria:

• It targets the muscle group in question.
• It can be performed safely and with good technique.
• It can be progressively overloaded in a practical way.

That last point is the one most people overlook. Muscle development is contingent on far more than exercise selection. Progressive overload is the key driver of growth, meaning you must lift heavier or do more work over time to keep the muscle adapting. It’s generally a better idea to focus on getting strong at a few well-chosen exercises than to rotate through a long list of different movements at a lower stimulus on each.

Finally, there’s more to building glutes than the exercises themselves. Muscle growth requires three factors working together:

• A sufficient training stimulus, which means progressive overload as covered above.
• Adequate energy intake. This is best met with a calorie surplus, or at minimum a maintenance level.
• Sufficient protein intake. Dietary protein provides the amino acids needed to build muscle tissue. Our guide to increasing daily protein covers how to get there if you’re not consistently hitting your target.

In short, you can train as hard as you like, but if your diet doesn’t align with the work you’re doing in the gym, the results won’t either.

Now on to the exercises.

The Top Five Exercises

For each exercise below, I’ll walk through the basic setup and movement. If you’re ever unsure, it’s better to start with no weight or very light weight and groove the technique before adding load.

1. Hip Thrusts

Hip thrusts are the first exercise that comes to mind when most people think about training the glutes, and with good reason. The setup involves bracing your upper back against an elevated surface (a bench works well) with feet planted, then driving the hips upward into a fully extended position before lowering under control. The resistance can come from a barbell across the hips, dumbbells, or a hip thrust machine. The fully shortened position at the top of the lift puts the glutes under maximum tension, which is exactly what you want.

2. Romanian Deadlifts

The Romanian deadlift (RDL) is a variant of the traditional deadlift that focuses on the posterior chain and emphasizes the eccentric (lowering) phase. Starting standing with a weight in hand, you shift the hips back to allow the weight to descend along the front of your legs to your maximum range of motion before reversing the movement.

Worth distinguishing the RDL from the stiff-legged deadlift, which keeps the legs nearly straight and shifts more emphasis onto the lower back. The RDL maintains a slight knee bend that keeps the work on the glutes and hamstrings, which is what you want for glute development. The movement can be loaded with a barbell, dumbbells, or cables.

3. Back Extensions

Back extensions take the body from an anchored, bent-over position to full extension against gravity. As with the RDL vs stiff-legged deadlift, the way you execute this exercise determines whether the work falls on the lower back or the glutes. To target the glutes, keep the back slightly rounded and braced, and focus on driving the hips into the pad rather than lifting your torso. To load this exercise, hold a weight (plate or dumbbell) at your chest.

4. Kickbacks

Kickbacks are a unilateral exercise, meaning you work one leg at a time. As the name suggests, you extend one leg backwards against resistance in a swinging motion that takes the hip from flexion into extension. This produces a slightly different range of motion compared to a traditional leg press and puts more direct emphasis on the glutes. These are best done using cables or a glute kickback machine, where loading is easy to adjust and the resistance profile fits the movement.

5. Squats

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

The effectiveness of squats for glute development depends heavily on individual structure, squat form, and squat variation. Squats actually have two main components: hip extension and leg (knee) extension. Bending and extending at the knee puts the work on the quadriceps, while hip extension recruits the glutes. To maximize glute involvement, squat deep (hips dropping below the knee crease) so the hip extension component is fully loaded.

Squats are versatile and can be loaded with barbells, dumbbells, machines, or specialty bars. The trade-offs between free weights and machines matter here, but in the context of glute training the priority is finding a squat variation you can perform deep and progressively load over time.

If you’d like a structured program built around developing the glutes and pushing the relevant lifts upward, our glute and strength specialization program runs these exercises through the kind of progressive structure that actually drives growth.

In Summary

The glutes are like any other muscle. Train them consistently, push the weight upward over time, eat enough to fuel growth, and they’ll respond. Just remember that muscle growth is a slow process. You won’t see overnight changes, but stick with a balanced program and a diet that matches and you’ll likely be pleased with where you end up six months down the road.

If you’d like a coach to handle the programming and dietary side together so you can focus on showing up to train, our fitness and nutrition coaching puts both pieces into one plan tailored to you.

Build that peach.