How to Build Bigger & Stronger Glutes
Building your glutes isn’t just for aesthetics; we all need adequate glute strength for walking, running, going up steps, standing up, and lifting objects off the ground — and these are skills that we need for the rest of our life — to literally carry us through life. Our glutes are considered part of our core and are crucial for stabilizing the upper and lower body.
In today’s sedentary world, many individuals struggle with weak and tight glutes because there is a lot more sitting than standing and moving. This often leads to dysfunction of movement patterns in the hips and glutes. For example, glute weakness can cause your knees to cave inwards when you squat or sit down; this is considered a dysfunction of the glutes and can lead to further dysfunction, pain, and injury if left unresolved.
Today we’re going to cover what should be included in your training program, and how to structure it, to build upon your strength and muscle in the glutes.
Understanding your glute Anatomy
Your “glutes” are composed of three different muscles — the glute maximus, medius, and minimus. While they are all part of the same muscle group, the three individual muscles have different movement actions they perform. For a well-rounded program, you’ll want to be sure to include these different movement actions to ensure you’re biasing all three parts of your glutes.
The Glute Max
Your glute maximus is the largest muscle in our body — its in charge of hip extension, or pushing your legs back behind our body. This is the main mover of the glutes when walking (forward), running (forward), sitting down, or picking something up from the ground.
You will target your glute max in training through movements like squats, deadlifts, hip thrusts, lunges, and step-ups. You can work with a wide variation of these exercises and still assume you’ll be targeting your glute max over the other two as the main mover when doing so.
That said, you can additionally target the glute med and min through certain variations of these movements (such as single-leg or wide-stance/toes out variations). For example, if you want or need more glute med activation, you can consider movements like sumo deadlifts over conventional deadlifts — or single leg hip thrusts over standard.
Nonetheless, the prime mover will still generally be the glute maximus when doing movements like these.
The Glute Med & Min
Your glute medius and minimus operate more similarly to one another because they are positioned on the outside of your hips. They are both in charge of hip abduction, or moving your leg away from the center of your body.
In addition to that, they’re also important for stabilizing your pelvis when we shift from side to side during movements like walking, running, and other single-leg movements like lunges. When you step or dodge to the side in daily activities, this is the action of the glute medius and minimus at work.
Your glute med is larger and positioned over your glute min, so it has more range of motion for activation and muscle growth. Your glute min is deeper in your glutes and has more involvement with deep stability for the hips.
They can be targeted with movements like banded clamshells, machine hip abductions, banded side steps, monster walks, Copenhagen side planks (pushing your hips to the ceiling), and choosing single-leg exercises — like single-leg glute bridges, lateral lunges, curtsy lunges, split squats, or pistol squats that require more stability and activation from the glute med and min.
Building A well-rounded Glute Program
In order to completely “fill out” your glutes for hypertrophy & strength — it’s important to consider and include these different movement actions when choosing your exercises. Sticking to one style of movement throughout the program will not train your glutes functionally, nor will it benefit you to the capacity you may hope if your goal is to build some strong and thiccc glutes.
For example, you don’t want to rely solely on hip thrusts to build your glutes because this primarily biases the glute maximus, and doesn’t work your hips and glutes through their other ranges of motion abilities.
In order to have a more complete build for the glutes, you’ll want to include variations of movements that work the glute max, med, and min. You don’t have to stress about being perfect with this, just be logical and think through why you’re choosing the movements that you are.
When choosing your glute exercises, you can use the following as a guide in order to achieve this:
Functional compound movements (2-3 total)
Isolation & accessory movements (1-4 total)
Multi-planar movements (moving or stepping to the side vs. forward or back) (1 total)
Between 4-6 glute exercises in the workout, total
Choosing your Primary movements
Primary movements are the exercises that you’re going to prioritize first in your workout session. These movements will generally be your compound movements — where you’ll challenge your strength and skills the most over the weeks.
Compound movements are exercises like squats, deadlifts, and lunges that target multiple joints at once. These movements are important because they are more aligned with our fundamental movement patterns. They help you to get and stay strong in areas where you’ll experience real life transfer from the gym to other hobbies, activities, and daily life.
When you’re choosing these movements you’ll want to consider what types of movement patterns you’re already doing in your daily life— and which types of movements you need more practice and/or volume.
For example, if you’re doing a lot of hiking you may choose to opt out of movements like step-ups and reverse lunges as a main movement and focus more on strength around your squats and deadlifts to create healthy diversity between your movement patterns. On the other hand, maybe you do choose a variation of lunges or step-ups to practice technique and strengthening your glute medius if you experience weakness and compensations with knee cave.
The movements you choose all depends on where you are at in your journey. Ultimately, you’re going to get comfortable with all or most of these movements over time, though!
Some examples of popular compound exercises include:
Deadlift variations: RDL, Sumo, Conventional, Good-mornings
Squat variations: Back squat, Pause squat, Sumo squat, Hack squat
Hip thrust variations: Barbell hip thrust, Machine hip thrust, KAS glute bridge
Lunge variations: Bulgarian split squats, Forward-leaning reverse lunge, Lateral lunges
Step-up variations: Forward-leaning cable step-ups, Weighted step-downs, Lateral step-downs
Choose 2-3 compound exercises to start in your routine. Generally, you’ll only choose one item per category to create diversity in your movement patterns for each day.
With your main movements, you can work with a wide range of: sets, reps, and intensities to meet your hypertrophy and strength goals. It can range from anywhere between 2-6 sets and 4-12 reps, with your training intensity being anywhere from 70-90% of your 1RM — or RPEs 7-9.
Choosing your Accessory MOvements
If compound movements are the base to your cake, then accessories are the icing and cherry on top. Your accessory movements come after your compounds — and they may include isolation movements and/or additional compound exercise variations.
Isolation movements are exercises that will strictly target your glutes (if you’re doing them properly). Popular glute isolation exercises include:
Glute kickbacks: Banded, Cables, Machine, Donkey kicks
Hip abductions: Hip abduction machine, Banded side steps, Clamshells
Back extensions: 45 degree back extensions with feet turned out, Yoga ball back extensions, Reverse hyperextensions
These exercises are intended to have a focus on hypertrophy and some muscular endurance with higher reps. Sets and reps for these exercises can range anywhere from 2-4 sets and 12-20 reps. Choose 1-3 accessory exercises to include towards the end of your workout.
You’ll choose items in this category based on both your goals and needs — needs come first. For example, your glute medius can be targeted with glute med kickbacks to help the knees from caving inwards during squats, if that’s something you struggle with. That said, that same exercise can also be used for someone else to better develop their “side glutes” for bodybuilding or aesthetic goals.
Compound exercises can also be included as accessories. That said, if they are in this category, then that means their goal is to aid in the strength of the main movements or to burn-out the glutes at the end. You’ll follow the same set and rep ranges as the rest of the accessories in this category.
With burn-out sets, be careful with overdoing workouts and training to complete failure and fatigue at the end of the session — this can be an occasional strategy, but it can also cause injuries when done too often because you can cause too much breakdown and have opposite results when you’re not able to recover.
Finalizing the Exercises
Ideally you’ll have anywhere from 4-6 exercises total in a workout, including compounds and accessories. After a certain amount of muscle breakdown in your training, you’ll see zero returns and have a harder time recovering. Don’t over do it.
At the end of the day, you want your program to come together in order to achieve the following. As a reminder, this is a guide you can use to build your plan:
Functional compound movements (2-3 total)
Isolation & accessory movements (1-4 total)
Multi-planar movements (moving or stepping to the side vs. forward or back) (1 total)
Between 4-6 glute exercises in the workout, total
This ensures enough variation, volume, and recovery. Recovery is just as important — don’t overdo it with 10+ exercises per workout. After a certain amount of muscle breakdown in your training, you’ll see zero returns, feel depleted, and have a harder time recovering physically and metabolically. Don’t over do it.
How to Progress Your Workouts Each Week
In order to make true progress in your glute strength and muscle mass, you don’t just want to repeat these same exercises week after week; you want to repeat them with small progressions known as progressive overload.
Progressive overload is a term that is used to describe the slow and steady progressions that you want to aim for in your training. As a beginner, you may have heard how, “its easy to see 5 pound jumps in weight each week” with your compound lifts. This is true, but you can also make progress by increasing the following variables in your training plan each week: sets, reps, training intensity (how close to failure you are), or time under tension during the exercise — in addition to increasing the weight lifted.
With isolation movements, you’ll generally progress with volume (sets, reps, weight) and/or increasing time under tension. With compound movements, you can interchange between increasing training volume and increasing intensity (strength). You’ll eventually want to cycle between the two phases as you get more advanced in your skills and technique. Doing so will help you continue seeing progress and unlocking new levels to your strengths.
Adjusting your Nutrition for your goals
Up until now, we have mostly focused on what goes on in the gym, but the truth is that nutrition it is one of the most important parts to improving your muscle mass and strength (along with sleep). Protein, carbs, and calories are the name of the game.
Protein Intake
Protein is what allows our glutes to repair and grow stronger after the breakdown from training. Without it, you’ll have poor recovery and little glute gains to show for your hard work and efforts. If you’re not maintaining enough protein intake, there’s a chance you can see zero returns and even some muscle breakdown when not properly fueled with protein.
My general recommendation is 20-30% of your diet makes up protein if your goal is to build muscle and strength in your glutes. Although healthy ranges are between 10-35% of your diet. Keep in mind, if you have more needs for muscular repair, your needs for protein also go up.
Carb Intake
For healthy individuals who lift weights and move their bodies regularly, carbs get stored in the muscle and are then used for powerful energy. Carbs provide us the type of energy that helps us to move our bodies and muscles explosively & quickly. This is especially important around training sessions, both before and after lifting.
My recommendation is anywhere from 50-65% of your diet makes up carbs. A healthy range overall is between 45-65%, but again the lower end generally isn’t recommended because more energy is needed in this department for impactful movement.
Calorie intake
While there are absolutely examples of people who have gained muscle mass while not in a caloric deficit, this is a rare occasion and usually has something to do with them still being at the start of their journey (newbie gains) or roids.
Without a proper caloric surplus, your body won’t be ensured enough energy to recover and rebuild. A small caloric surplus (100-200 calories over your maintenance) can be just enough. You can and should always adjust based on how your progress moves each week.
Final Notes
Gaining muscle is a slower process than losing fat. When it comes to building muscle, it takes about a month to see anywhere from 0.5-2 pounds of muscle gain (genetics & sex also matter). For most people, it will take around 8-12 weeks to see visible progress in your glute progress.
Take progress pics and glute (hip) measurements to monitor your progress over the weeks. If you’re recovering well and making progress each week in your training, this is a good sign that you’re building muscle and strength.
This is all about patience. Continue to focus on the aspects that you have under control — the above variables. If you’re interested in a plan that is already built out for you, you can check out our glute-building plan as well. Good luck & good lifting!
Our glute-building program is a 5 day program designed for men and women who want to primarily target glute strength and mass.
There are three glute-focused training days and two upper body focused days to bring in balance and functionality for your full body.
Inside the program, you will find a mix of heavier compound lifts along with hypertrophy and isolation movements in order to maximize mass and power.
