When it comes to working on your butt, the glute muscles are where things happen.
Your butt is composed of three glute muscles on each side – gluteus medius, gluteus maximus and gluteus minimus.
These are each located on a different part of your butt, and each need to be worked and strengthened in order to build that beautiful peach booty!
Here’s why you might not be getting the results you want:
1. You aren’t working your butt muscles
Here’s the thing: most of us have really weak glute muscles and because of this weakness, we tend to compensate with our hip flexors, hamstrings and quads.
This means, that when you are doing exercises that are meant to be working your glutes (i.e. building your butt), you may not actually be working your glutes at all.
To fix this, you have to consciously check in that you are activating your glutes and switching on your muscles (see below).
2. You forget to switch your muscles on
You may be thinking to yourself, “but if I’m working my muscles, aren’t they doing the switching on?”
Doing strength workout is never a passive thing.
You need to be engaged and activate your muscles.
This is especially true for the glutes, which as mentioned above, easily switch off and instead you are ending up with sore hip flexors.
When you are trying to build your butt and work your glutes, you should feel it in your glutes – this may be right in your butt or off to the side of your butt cheek.
3. You need to change it up
If you show up at the gym every day, doing the same exercises for your butt, eventually you will stop seeing results.
As they say, “nothing changes if nothing changes.”
Switch up your routine regularly, incorporating new exercises, completing a different number of reps or doing things in a different order.
Anything that is a change will help boost your results.
4. Your diet needs some tweaking
They say abs are made in the kitchen, but really, when it comes to making any progress in fitness, everything is made in the kitchen.
You can’t out-run, out-lift, or out-burn a bad diet.
Check in with what you are putting into your body, focusing on increasing your intake of plant based energy sources, reducing your consumption of processed foods, and drinking more water.
5. You don’t have enough rest
Rest and recovery are incredibly important in helping you reach your goals and build your butt.
Just as much as your glutes need to be worked, they need time to rest, as this is when your muscles actually repair and build up the muscle.
Make sure that you work your muscles to fatigue, but then that you also give them a rest.
This includes not only having days where you alternate out glute work for another option, such as upper body, but also where you take a day completely off and don’t do any workout at all!
By: Laura Peill, RHN, BScH – Viand Nutrition
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