The glutes are a powerful group of muscles that play important roles in big compound movements. Whether your goal is to improve your strength or round out your physique, glute training can make a noticeable difference.
There are many benefits to doing glute exercises:
- Stability and posture: Strong glutes can help support your posture, provide stability, and support injury prevention. Your glutes help provide stability along your lower back and hips. By doing glute exercises you’re able to strengthen your posterior chain so that you don’t rely on just your lower back when doing movements that stress these muscles.
- Performance: The glutes play an important role in athletic movements like sprinting, jumping, and other explosive power movements. In addition to this, they’re involved in many of the everyday movements you’re likely to do like getting up from a chair or squatting down to pick something up. Training the glute muscles can have a positive impact on your athletic and functional performance.
- Body composition: If you compete in bodybuilding or just want an overall athletic look, doing glute exercises can help contribute to your physique goals.
Unfortunately, many people struggle to properly activate their glutes during exercises and find other body parts like their lower body absorbing most of the stress. Fortunately, there are key details you can follow when working out to make sure your glutes get targeted during your next lower body workout.
IFBB Pro Erin Stern gave us pointers on how to zone in on the glutes and maximize the mind-muscle connection during one of her legendary lower body workouts.
Before I get started, I have some C4 Ripped Sport, I need to get that energy and help with keeping my intensity high during my entire workout.
Glute Activation Warm-Up
Before we get into the first exercise it’s important to work on glute activation and make sure you’re properly warmed up. I do some drills like high knees, some piriformis stretching, some high kicks, and a couple of light sets. I like to do dynamic stretching. Dynamic stretching is stretching through an active range of motion where I’m actively trying to increase my range of motion.
Barbell Hip Thrust
Sets x Reps: 4 x 6-8
Ideally you want a bench that is about 14” tall, this is great for getting that range of motion and making sure everything is in proper position. I use 45 lb. plates at the base of the bench to keep it from slipping back. And I like to use a bar pad for cushion. For the hip thrusts, it’s four total sets but really three working sets, one set is a warmup set that’s nice and light.
If your gym has a bench that is too high, I recommend elevating your feet as much as possible. Another option is to get on a decline bench if your bench has one. And the last option is if your gym has a bench press area with a platform, that can be useful, and you place a balance pad on your back too.
- You want the bar to be a little below your hipbone not right over it.
- You want your upper back on the bench, chin tucked, and core tight and hands on the bar.
- When you come up with the bar, you want to look for that 90-degree angle where your lower leg is perpendicular to the ground.
Squat Machine RDL
Sets x Reps: 3 x 8-12
If you don’t have this machine, you can do barbell RDLs or dumbbell RDLs, both work perfectly fine.
There are a couple of cues you really want to think about:
- Keep your back nice and flat.
- Keep your spine neutral.
- If you’d like to engage your glutes more and you’re working with barbells or dumbbells, you can tuck your chin at the top and slightly round your shoulders.
- Push your weight through your heels, anytime you do this it better activates the posterior chain.
- Make sure you keep your range of motion limited to keep your back flat so that you feel this exercise in your glutes/hamstrings not your lower back.
Horizontal Leg Press
Sets x Reps: 3 x 10-15
If you don’t have this piece of equipment, you can do regular leg press, hack squats, dumbbell deadlifts, or Zercher squats. We really focus on mind-muscle connection on this exercise, so we keep the tempo nice and slow. I have a balance pad and feel it more in my glutes if I tend to get my hips up off the pad. So, if you’re doing a leg press try using a balance pad to get a different angle and see if it helps you engage your glutes a bit more.
With an exercise like this the quads, hamstrings, calves and even lower back all contribute. By going slowly, working on my weight distribution, and pushing through the heels I keep my mind on my glutes to make sure they’re the driving force of this exercise.
Glute Kickback
Sets x Reps: 3 x 15
This is a glute kickback with an abductor focus. We turn our toes out and our knees out to hit our upper glutes. You want to go light to focus on the squeeze. The idea with this exercise is to turn the knee out, the knees follow the direction of the toes. By getting a little external rotation you can feel it in your upper glute.
Today’s workout was on the heavier side so we’re focusing more on those fast twitch muscles in the 5-10 rep range. We’re also working on time under tension, every single rep should be maintaining that contraction and mind muscle connection.
If your mind starts to drift it could be a wasted rep, make every rep count.
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