The glutes are the muscles in your backside. They are amongst the biggest and most powerful muscles in your body. But how is it best to train them?
The glutes are popular muscles to train in the gym and there are a wide variety of exercises you can include in your glute workout. There are exercises you can do without weights from home and more complex ones that will require equipment.
The team of personal trainers working out of ABS gyms have come up with their favourite tips to help build your glute muscles:
- Activation work pre-workout.
- Get your glutes firing properly even before you train. This will be key to the muscle growing properly.
- SQUEEZE!
- Squeeze, squeeze and squeeze again! You need to create a great mind muscle connection when training your glutes and focus on contracting the muscle as hard as you can through the exercises.
- Start light and focus on high reps.
- Practice points one and two and master them. Then start to increase the weights as you feel more comfortable.
- Try adding pauses to the exercises in the contracted position.
- For example at the very top of a hip thrust, add in a 1-2 second pause each rep. You will begin to feel it after a few.
- Don’t forget single leg exercises. Especially single leg hip thrusts.
- Squat low!
- Half squats aren’t going to cut it unfortunately. Squatting low with good technique is going to activate your glutes a lot more and this is when you will begin to see them taking shape.
So they are some of the top tips to keep in mind when you are thinking about doing work on your glutes. So what about an example exercise. Here we have put on together for you.
EXAMPLE WORKOUT
Warm up:
3 sets. No rest
A1. Single leg glute kickbacks – x10 each leg
A2. Banded side steps – x 10 steps each way
Now – 4 sets. 12-15 reps each exercise. 60s rest at the end of each circuit
B1. Walking lunges
B2. Barbell incline hip thrust
B3. Cable pull through
B4. Reverse hyper
The finisher. 3 sets. 10 reps each leg. 30 seconds rest after each circuit
C1. Skaters.
C2. Decline single leg hip thrusts
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Generally this workout will be added onto a cardio day for our personal trainers.
If you are interested in finding out more, get in touch with our team who can answer all your questions: [email protected]
