The ONLY 2 Exercises You Need to Fix Your Flat Butt

Get FREE 2-week access to smarter training with the BWS+ app: https://bws.plus/5a Weak, underdeveloped glutes are often the hidden reason your strength stalls, your posture breaks down, and that nagging back pain never goes away. But the good news is you only need two of the best glute exercises in your glutes workout to fix this, helping you look better, jump higher – and even run faster. Bonus: you’ll finally turn that flat butt into a round butt. Of course, who better to structure our glute workout than … Bret Contreras, AKA the Glute Guy, has a PhD in sports science and has spent his life studying and growing glutes. He explains that while your glutes are made up of three muscles, the largest muscle by far is the gluteus maximus. Its main function is hip extension – something you do when you deadlift or when you’re squatting – but many common “glute” exercises end up fatiguing everything else before your glutes actually get pushed close to failure. It’s easy to challenge your glutes when you include lunges, squats and deadlifts in your glutes workout, but they come with key problems. Most of these exercises are taxing compound movements that target multiple muscles at once. If your lower back or even your grip is giving out first, you could reach failure while your glutes still have 7 or 8 reps left in the tank. If you already have weak or “hard to activate” glutes, other muscles can “steal” your glute gains. Even if you’ve gotten really strong on squats and deadlifts, your glute growth may not reflect it. Then there’s soreness. Exercises like Bulgarian split squats can leave you so sore that it’s tough to recover before your next leg session, which makes it harder to train your glutes 2–3 times per week. That’s where the first exercise of our glute workout comes in: the Glute-Dominated Step Down. It looks similar to a lunge or split squat, but there’s one key difference — by keeping one leg in the air and following a few simple form tweaks, it forces your glutes to do almost all the work. For some reason, it doesn’t make you sore. Keep your knee from drifting too far forward and choose the right bench height so the front thigh is parallel at the bottom. This puts the gluteus maximus in a long stretch and keep it under tension where it grows best. The way it’s loaded – holding weight in the opposite hand – also forces your glutes to stabilize you, making this one of the best gluteus maximus exercises for both size and strength. The second exercise is the hip thrust. The first movement challenges your glutes the most at the bottom, when they’re fully stretched, and Bret believes that’s where you’ll build more of the lower glutes. But if you want that full, round butt – the kind of glutes they write country songs about – you’ll want to pair it with another exercise that challenges your glutes in the squeezed position and may help develop more of the upper region. That’s why the hip thrust is used as the squeeze-focused counterpart to the Glute-Dominated Step Down. In the past, the bias was toward only doing “stretch-focused” movements like the step down because they seemed to grow muscle faster. But a new study comparing training muscles in the stretch vs squeezed position, including the glutes, suggests that combining one stretch-focused and one squeeze-focused movement is likely to give you the biggest benefit. Hip thrusts help build extended range hip extension strength. When you have that, your body starts distributing stress better. Squats feel better. Other things feel better. You start taking longer strides when you walk. There are a few important setup details. Make sure your upper back is high up on the bench to maximize stability. Plant your feet far enough away such that at the top position, your knees are directly over your feet. If they’re too close, you’ll work more quads; if they’re too far away, you’ll work more hamstrings. Then brace your core, squeeze your glutes and drive your hips up. You can use a barbell, a hip thrust machine, or a more subtle, easy to set up alternative that works just as well: the single-leg dumbbell hip thrust. The final tip Bret shows is the difference between the hinge and scoop methods. With the pure hinge, your gaze goes from forward at the bottom to up at the top as you push as tall as you can. With the scoop method, you tuck your chin, move the sternum down, tilt the pelvis and focus on moving from the chest down. The key is to experiment with both methods in your glute workout to find what works best with your body. To save your flat butt, Bret recommends doing 3 sets of 8–12 reps, 2–3 times per week. Timestamps: 0:00 - 0:36 - Why Strong Glutes Matter 0:36 - 2:19 - The Problem With Most Exercises 2:20 - 5:11 - Exercise 1 5:12 - 7:20 - Exercise 2 7:21 - 9:19 - Bonus Training Technique 9:20 - Sample Glute Workout Click below to subscribe for more videos: https://www.youtube.com/jeremyethier/?sub_confirmation=1