Glutes. Everyone’s working to make their body bootylicious. While a great behind can make heads turn, strong glute muscles are also imperative for lower body strength and stability. Achieving optimal muscle mass, however, requires more than just a few squats or butt workouts.
To get the most out of your glute training, it’s crucial to employ some specific techniques and strategies, considering compound movements, nutrition, and variety to help you supercharge your supersets.
Mind-Muscle Connection
Before you even start your workout, you need to ensure you have a strong mindset. If you’re going into a workout distracted, you won’t be creating the vital mind-muscle connection you need for your exercises. While you stretch, focus on the contractions and shifts your body makes.
Continue this as you start your workout, considering how each movement affects your glutes. By focusing on these muscles mentally, you’ll be more likely to pick up on incorrect form, and you can increase weight, significantly enhancing muscle activation and growth.
Follow Proper Form
Those instructional videos aren’t just a suggestion. Following proper form is essential to both prevent injury and effectively target the glutes. It may take some time to perfect the exact movements of each exercise, even if you are performing them once a week.
Use mirrors and instructional videos every time you start a new exercise to check that you have the motions correct. If desired, you can even seek guidance from a certified trainer to perfect your form.
Start with Activation Exercises
As you’re preparing to check your form, get started with some stretches. Warm up your muscles with glute activation exercises like clamshells, lateral band walks, or banded squats. These activation drills are an alarm bell for your glute, preparing them for better engagement during your primary workout.
Progressive Overload
Gradually increasing the weight, reps, or intensity of your exercises over time is key to muscle growth. As you grow your booty week after week, continue to challenge yourself while listening to your body to stimulate continuous adaptation and growth. Feel the burn!
Use Variety in Resistance
Don’t keep to the same routine! Experiment with different types of resistance, including resistance bands, cables, free weights, and machines to effectively target your glutes from more angles and ensure comprehensive muscle activation.
Focus on the Full Range of Motion
When you follow your exercises, extend to your full range of motion, unless stated otherwise, to maximize your muscle activation. For example, extending the hips to the top of your range during hip thrusts can help engage the glutes more effectively, leading to better results.
Prioritize Compound Movements
The best way to ensure you’re really hitting all those lovely muscles in your behind is by prioritizing compound exercises. Movements like squats, hip thrusts, and lunges engage multiple muscle groups within the glutes, meaning you’re basically getting a 2-for-1 deal with every workout.
Superset for Glutes
Performing supersets is another way to get more bang for your booty.
Here are a few superset examples that you might employ to “round” out your glutes:
- Superset 1: Banded Glute Bridges & Reverse Lunges.
- Superset 2: Single-Leg Deadlifts & Banded lateral walks.
- Superset 3: Bulgarian Split Squats & Donkey Kicks.
Isolation Exercises
If you want to take it a step even further, engage in isolation exercises like glute bridges, donkey kicks, and cable kickbacks to specifically target your gluteus maximus.
Include Plyometrics
Plyometrics, or exercises with short bursts of energy, are great for providing explosive power. Jump squats or box jumps are a great way to target fast-twitch muscle fibers to increase your speed and jumping height.
Frequency and Consistency
Just like eating one salad won’t make you skinny, doing one glute exercise won’t perfect your behind. While it may take a while to see results, don’t let the appearance of a lack of progress stop you from achieving your goals.
Aim to train your glutes at least 2-3 times each week, allowing sufficient rest between sessions for recovery and growth. These consistent training sessions, with appropriate rest, will help you yield better results over time.
Sufficient Rest and Recovery
It’s so important it gets its own bullet. Growing muscles requires rest. While you may want to work out your glutes every day and believe that that’s the best or fastest way to achieve results, working out muscles too consistently can actually impede your progress and increase the risk of injury.
Instead, ensure you’re getting enough sleep and allow your muscles to recover between workouts, hitting your glutes, at most, every other day.
Nutrition and Hydration
A great workout doesn’t just happen within the confines of a gym. A healthy diet is just as important as any high-intensity squatting session. When you prepare your meals, be sure to follow the basic building blocks of the food pyramid.
Essential Nutrition
- Protein: Proteins are vital for muscle growth. Without protein, you can kiss your dreams of having a kick-ass booty behind. Lean protein like chicken breast, turkey, fish, eggs, tofu, and legumes can help you power your behind. Aim for a protein intake of around 0.8-1 gram per pound of body weight.
- Healthy Fats: Don’t be afraid of fats! Healthy fats like those in avocadoes, nuts, seeds, and olive oil, and fatty fish like salmon are great sources of healthy fat, help regulate hormones, and reduce inflammation.
- Carbohydrates: Complex carbohydrates, like those found in sweet potatoes, quinoa, brown rice, and oats, give you plenty of energy to sustain you through tough workouts. While they shouldn’t make up all your diet, they are an energy essential.
Training your glutes requires a combination of various exercises, techniques, and strategies. By following the tips in this article and tailoring your routine to your body’s needs, stay committed, and you’ll be able to see your glutes transform.
