ROUNDER GLUTES: 5 Mistakes Keeping Your Butt Flat

For most men and women, round, firm glutes are seen as more attractive than having a flat pancake butt. A nice looking butt isn't just important for turning heads though. The glutes are a key muscle for athletic performance, and keeping them strong can also go a long way to preventing back and hip pain. The problem is most people approach their glute training the wrong way. Whether you're chasing the next gymshark sponsorship, want to boost the public's performance, fix low back pain, or just look better in a pair of jeans, pay attention to the next five mistakes as I guarantee you're making at least one of them. Before we dive into the mistakes, it's important that we understand the anatomy of the glutes. Most people are unaware that the glutes are composed of three muscles, the gluteus maximus, the gluteus medius, and the gluteus minimus. As for which of these three muscles is most important to develop, let's take a look at this recent 2020 study. Researchers used MRI scans to compare the glute muscles in elite level sprinters, sub elite sprinters, and average untrained men. Here are the MRI scans of the three groups. The big orange area in the back represents the gluteus maximus, whereas these other two areas represent the gluteus medius and minimus. You can see just how much larger the gluteus maximus is compared to the other two regions. It's actually the largest and heaviest muscle in the human body. And what's interesting is that not only is it a big muscle, but but researchers also found that the size of the gluteus maximus was a strong predictor of sprint performance. In fact, the gluteus maximus in elite sprinters was on average 45% bigger than it was in sub elite sprinters. Since this muscle makes up most of your butt and seems to be the most important region for boosting athletic performance, it only makes sense to make it the focus of your training. But most people fail to do this because of the following five mistakes. The first mistake has to do with exercise selection. The primary function of the gluteus maximus is hip extension, the movement of driving your hips forward. Most glute exercises you'll find online either don't train hip extension at all and focus on the smaller glute muscles, or they'll train hip extension, but not in a way that enables you to use heavier and heavier weights over time. The best glute exercises are instead the ones that focus on hip extension and enable you to use heavier weight over time. And exercises like back squats, leg presses, Bulgarian split squats, deadlifts and hip thrusts. They're not fancy, but if you use the right form and get really strong with these over time, they're going to be the key to the glutes growth you're looking for. That said, even with the right exercises, if you don't perform them with the right form, you're going to end up working other muscles rather than the one you intended to. This brings me to the next two mistakes, which both have to do with exercise execution. The second mistake is working your quads more than your glutes whenever you do leg exercises. The reason for this has to do with the angle of your shin and the angle of your torso as you perform these exercises based on multiple kinematic analyses, the more forward your shin angle is, the greater the knee movement and the more the quads will be involved compared to the glutes. On the other hand, the more forward your torso is, the more the glutes will be involved because this increases the degree of hip extension in the movement, which, as you'll remember, is the main function of the gluteus maximus. Now, based on your anatomy, some of you will naturally squat in a way that is already more glute dominant with a vertical shin angle and lean forward torso, whereas others are going to squat in a way that's more quad dominant with a forward shin angle and upright torso. This is perfectly fine and the glutes will still be heavily involved either way. But in other exercises like leg presses and Bulgarian split squats, we do have a greater ability to adjust our form to better emphasize the glutes in the leg press. For example, if you were to place your feet higher up on the platform and stop each rep once your knees hit 90 degree, this would enable your shins to stay vertical over the foot throughout the movement and will also involve more hip extension, therefore emphasizing the glutes more than the quads. In fact, in muscle activation studies where they compared various foot stances, they found significantly greater glute activation with a higher foot stance and significantly greater quad activation with a lower foot stance. You can try these out one leg at a time as well, and you can also apply the same concept to lunges and Bulgarian split squats. Here, I'm performing the Bulgarian split squat with an upright torso and letting my shin travel forward to emphasize the quads more, Whereas here, by leaning forward and taking a slightly wider stance, my shin is able to remain vertical over my foot and I'm able to emphasize the glutes more. Just remember that my back is still neutral. I'm not rounding my back, but rather bending over slightly at my hip. Apply this tip to these exercises and you'll feel the difference right away. By the way, for all the ladies watching, before we move on to mistake number three, I can speak on behalf of all of us guys who are dying to know the answer to this. This how important is a nice athletic butt on a guy? Is it a turn on comment? Yes or no below and share your thoughts. And guys, no matter what they say in the comments, still train your glutes because they're important for so many other reasons. That said, let's move on to mistake number three. All right, so we talked about the quads taken over, but in other glute exercises, the lower back and hamstrings actually have a tendency to take over as well. Let's take a look at a great glutes exercise, the Romanian Deadlift. Although this exercise will work both the hamstrings and glutes, you can modify your form to emphasize one over the other. If you try to keep your legs completely straight on the way down, that's going to emphasize the hamstrings more. Instead, to emphasize the glutes, you want to use some knee bend. This incorporates more hip extension into the exercise, which, as you know, is the main function of the gluteus maximus. In addition to this, on the way down, many people try to go as low as possible, but you should only go down as far as your mobility allows you to. This is the point at which the hips stop moving backward on the way down. You can see here that once my hips stop moving back, if I try to get any lower than this, my lower back will start to round. This takes tension away from the glutes and places it on the lower back instead. Try to look in the mirror and spot the point where your hips can't move back any further and stop each rep as soon as you reach this point. For some of you, this will be around the level where your hands end up around your knees, whereas others will be able to go lower depending on your mobility. Okay, so we already covered what some of the best glute exercises are, but the way that you program these into your workouts is also very important. This is because different exercises challenge a muscle in different ways. Bulgarian split squats, for example. They challenge the glutes the most at the bottom position when the muscle is firing fully stretched at the top position, however there's no tension placed on the glutes. The same is true for back squats, leg presses and Romanian deadlifts. Now, while these are great glute builders, and while research does indicate that challenging a muscle when it's in a fully stretched position seems to be most important for growth, we may be missing out on some potential growth if that's the only way that we train our glutes. In fact, some research shows that challenging a muscle in different ways may lead to more complete growth in the various regions of that muscle. So in the case of the glutes, we'd want to add in an exercise that challenges a muscle when it's fully shortened or in other words, at the top part of the movement. Exercises like the hip Thrust and the 45 degree hip extension both do just that by providing little resistance to the bottom when the glutes are fully stretched and the most resistance at the top when the glutes are fully squeezed. Now, to apply this concept to your glute focused workouts, I'd recommend picking one to two exercises that challenge the glutes most at the bottom position when they're fully stretched, and then also include one that challenges the glutes most at the top position when they're fully squeezed. Although picking the right exercises and performing them correctly will set you up for success, some people, especially those of you who sit quite a lot, will still have a hard time activating and you feeling your glutes working. One way of improving this is with activation exercises. These are simple exercises that force the target muscle to carry the load so that your nervous system can learn how to use the target muscle and recruit it during your main glute movements. A recent 2022 paper provides some evidence behind this method. They had subjects perform glute activation exercises twice per day for a week and afterwards. Found that subjects were able to recruit their glutes with on average 50, 50% more activation during a bodyweight squat compared to before. As for the exercises that I recommend, I'd highly suggest giving this past video I did a watch. It'll cover a quick daily routine that you can do to start awakening your glutes so that you're better able to use them during the glute building exercises we covered earlier. I'll leave a link to this in the description box down below as well. And at the end of this video. Implement these five things and you'll very quickly start to feel, feel and see the difference in your glutes development. But it's important that you take the same step by step science based approach to all the muscles you train if you want to maximize your efforts for a plan that puts this all together for you, just head over to builtwithscience.com and take my analysis quiz to discover which of my step by step programs are best for you and your specific body. Also, you can click here to give this a video. Watch next if you need to waken your glutes or or click here if you'd like to figure out what mistakes you're making with your shoulder training. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you next time.