5 Tips to Build Stronger Glutes
Posted on 6th February 2020 at 08:25
How fed up are you having tried all the exercises under the sun to build your glutes, ‘butt’ yet you’re no further?
One of the most common goals written on a consultation form is, ‘I want to build a really good bum’
Don’t we all, amigo.
Today we share 5 considerations we believe will help you on your way to building a really strong set of glutes.
Don’t get ‘behind’ on implementing these ‘juicy’ considerations & start from tomorrow!
1) WARMING UP/ACTIVATION
This is vital should you wish to try & maximise on getting real glute connection & activation. Although always active & ‘firing’. The sequence in which the muscles fire will mean the glutes activate last, more than likely. Meaning the hamstrings, quads & hips will tend to be more dominant first. Utilise a medium to heavy resistance band around your ankles & start to make little steps side to side, forwards & backwards to help create some tension on the muscles. Keep the glutes clamped together & think about walking like John Wayne.
2) EXERCISE EXECUTION
Look, I know my market & ideal client off the back of my hand. I know where they eat, what shops they shop in, who they hang around with & so on. I also know that paying ‘too much’ attention to the tiny, minute, irrelvant details, isn’t actually necessary. However, when it comes down to hitting the glutes, the details matter.
9 times out of 10 clients have more force through the anterior plane of the body (front), which means they’re more inclined to push through their hips & quads. Not great when trying to recruit the old glutes.
Put yourself into a lunge or split squat, you place a lot of tension through the toes, which will naturally recruit the hip/quads. If you aim to place the weight through the back of the foot, you can almost feel the change in where you’re hitting. You have to really think, ‘what am i doing, what am i working, why’ You’ll start to think more about the function therefore create more tension, where we need it!
3) RANGE AVAILABLE
Let’s be honest, most of you who enter a gym don’t have very good range of motion, mobility or stablity. If you do, you’re gifted & you should maximise on that. However, the majority struggle to even get into the ranges we need, when it comes to building the glutes. When you squat, you’ll more than likely only go just above 90 degrees, this doesn’t take your glutes into a very lengthened range, which is very important, you’ll also feel a lot of tension on your quads. Possibly due to tight or weak hamstrings. Aim to utilise stretching & mobility 3 x per week on top of your sessions, this can be before work, or in the evening. Don’t neglect this!
4) TIME UNDER TENSION
I love time under tension. The most common reasons a lot of people struggle to build muscle & size is due to neglecting the importance of TUT. Creating load on a muscle, whilst under a prolonged period of time is a great way to stress the muscle & cause overload. Ideally if you’re on a hip thrust, look to extend the hips to the top range, contracting the glutes, & pausing for 2/3 seconds. When lowering the weight, look to slow it down for 4 seconds. This would look like 4021 on a tempo chart. Slowing things down could be the best thing you do from today! If i see anyone on their programmes ‘swinging’ on the weight, i instantly make them slow it down!
5) PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD
I used to see a lot of women stay in their comfort zones when it comes to training each week. That doesn’t mean ‘go hard or go home’ mentality. It just means you should be trying to stay away from lifting the exact same weights, reps, sets, rest time each week, It doesn’t mean you’ve got to PB each week. It just means, where you can, can you progressively overload the exercise. This can be by increasing your weight on 1 of the sets, it could be increasing the set amounts, it could be using a slower tempo than the week before.
If you’re seriously at the stage of giving up, do give these above tips a good read & try implementing into your programmes. If you’d like to know how we can help from programming perspective. Take a look at our online programmes that we offer!
Share this post: