Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 354: My Top 7 Glute Exercises

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host Danny Matranga. And in today's episode, you're going to be joining me on a trip to the gym. This is actually the audio from a YouTube video I filmed going over my seven favorite movements for glute growth. I think you'll quite like this in podcast and audio format too, because it will feel like being alive at a seminar with me in my gym while I work through all of my favorite movements for glute development. I know that building big glutes is really important for many of your physique goals, but it's also super, super critical for developing a strong, functional, pain-free physique. Your glutes do a lot more than just look good. But if you want a program to help you develop the maximum amount

of glutes possible, I recommend scrolling down to the show notes and checking out Elite Physique. It's my women's elite group hypertrophy focus program with a huge emphasis on the glutes, back, hamstrings, etc. That's probably the best bet for applying everything we're going to talk about today directly into your training. But regardless of your goals, doing more glutes is going to help you feel strong, feel fit, and get after it in life. So enjoy the episode. This podcast has some awesome partners. And one of my favorite, of course, is Legion Athletics. Legion is my go-to supplement manufacturer for what I like to call my big rock supplements.

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We're at the studio. We're going to rip through my seven favorite glute exercises. I don't have a ton of machines here. I mostly use free weights and cables, so should be pretty applicable. You could do this in any gym that has dumbbells, barbells. You might even be able to get away with it with a Smith machine, but you don't need tons of equipment. These are my seven favorite glute lifts. I think we're going to start with hip thrusts. They are not my number one favorite. These are not in order, but they are the lift that most people think of these days when you think about glutes. At the infancy of kind of online fitness culture, I want to say like right around the time I got into fitness as a fan or just into working out

or like the idea of how my body could change. So probably around 2010, there were so many memes about if you want a big ass squat. And we're going to talk about squats today. That shouldn't surprise you. But around 2015, I'd say the hip thrust got huge. It became a big movement thanks to Brett Contreras really popularized it. And then it became huge on online fitness. YouTube, Instagram was really big and a lot of girls were crediting their glute growth to these huge hip thrusts. And so it belongs on the list 100%

because I think it's a lift that you can load a lot of weight up. You can reach what we call terminal hip extension. Okay, so maxing out your hip extension and even getting into what we call posterior pelvic tilt. This position right here loads the glutes a ton where they're really strong and in what we would call the shortened position. So you always get a really fat pump when you do hip thrusts. Like you get a bigger pump in your glutes doing this than probably any other leg exercise. And a lot of the movements you do that

are hardest when they're shortened, you get these big pumps. We tend to like them. So for many years, many women have allocated a ton of their training resources to the hip thrusts, men too, and they develop good glutes. I don't know if it's the best, but I will tell you this. It's a good one. You can do it bilaterally like this. I like my feet at about 10 to 15 degrees out. At the top, you want a vertical shin. You want your eyes pointed straight ahead. Now you can also do this single-legged. You can do this B stance.

And I actually like all of these. So, you know, when I think about exercises and exercises that have subcategories that I like all of these. So you know when I think about exercises and exercises that have subcategories that I like all of them, the hip thrust makes the list. You can also do these, I'll show you because I have two in the gym, I think this is a great way to do it. You can also do these banded. A lot of people don't like this and I've heard different takes. So you'll hear some takes where people say like,

"'Don't do them banded because when you're abducting or pushing out, we'll talk about this in a minute, when you're abducting and you're pushing out, you're losing how much of the extension effect you can get because you're partitioning energy to abducting and maybe you're creating instability and i hear that loud and clear i think that might mean that maybe you don't do any banded hip thrusting however i have found that a lot of people really like this and it adds to that pump effect and maybe you want that in your training it might not be as effective as

like purely driving mechanical tension which we'll get to when we talk in my opinion uh or about my personal favorite the rdl but a good exercise to play with might be doing some variations of your hip thrust banded and body weight i know a lot of coaches who have had tons of success doing banded and body weight. I know a lot of coaches who have had tons of success doing banded body weight or single leg hip thrusting. So don't throw the baby out with the bath water. You might still get to use the band, but that's the number one exercise on the list, not the number one overall. The number two exercise on the list, which would probably be my number one overall, My number one overall is the RDL, the Romanian deadlift. So, this is a pure hinge movement in that the traditional deadlift from the floor, if I had a barbell, is going to bend the knees.

The sumo deadlift is also going to bend the knees from more of an abducted stance. I'm wider, I'm more open. But the RDL is really about pushing the hips back and pushing the hips forward. And in this position right here, the bottom of the RDL, the weight is very far from your body. There's a huge stretch on your hamstrings and on your ass and your glutes. To pull up from here using glutes and hamstrings. I'll show you guys on a barbell because it just makes for a better descriptor or a better visual. But I think the key when you're doing these and you're focusing on this hinge and you're thinking about how the hell could an RDL be a better exercise for my ass than a hip thrust? Because when I do a hip thrust, man,

I feel my ass like crazy. But when I do an RDL, oh shit, I feel it fucking everywhere. Well, what's crazy about the RDL is right here in this position, just before you hit the ground, okay, this position, your glutes are so stretched, your hamstrings are so stretched that when you come up out of that position, they are lifting a tremendous amount of weight and they're stretching under a ton of weight. that on the hip thrust, we just don't stretch the glutes quite as much under load through as much range of motion. So it's like really hard here, which is great for the pumps. But when you do this, you really load in that stretched lengthened position and you develop the hamstrings, which is really important. Those are a super important muscle. I think lost in the goal we have to grow our glutes is the foundational importance of the hamstrings as a muscle and the glutes as something that provides strength.

So we think, okay, like I want big glutes, but we also want strong glutes. And in fact, we want a whole strong posterior chain. This will give you that great hamstrings, probably a top three hamstring exercise for anybody, any adaptation, period. Like, oh, you're an old person. You want to be able to hinge your hips? You want to be able to bend over and not have a bulging disc or a paraspinal muscle spasm? Okay, be able to hinge. Oh, you're an athlete. You want to be able to,

you know, make plays off the edge in the NFL, beat guys off the line. You want to be able to get first to third on a, on a gapper. You want to be able to dunk. You need strong hamstrings. So athletes check. You want a great looking posterior chain, bodybuilders check. You want to be better at deadlifting. RDLs help with that. Powerlifting, it's great for anybody, any sport, any adaptation. That is a key pattern, this hinge. And a strong hinge always builds huge glutes. So RDL, number two. Number three, again, in no particular order, I'm going to call this just lunges in general because I quite like walking lunges. I quite like reverse lunges. When I say walking, I mean like this. That's my favorite. My least favorite is that one, the forward lunge. It's not bad. I just don't love it.

I really like the reverse lunge. But when we talk about why I like these for glutes, it's a little bit similar to why I like it for the RDL. When I step back and I stretch this glute and decelerate with this glute and then I push up off this leg, I'm really taking that hip through a big range of motion and I'm really stretching that glute. Now, if I can be stable in a walking lunge with dumbbells, again, taking that glute through a big range of motion, the benefit of the single leg exercises often is the extra range of motion. If you rotate into a walking lunge,

and we'll talk about this more with another favorite, if you rotate into a walking lunge like this and you stretch that glute even more, you can get quite a bit out of these movements. And I have found personally, this is probably the one where if you said, show me the data, show me the evidence, show me that it kills your glutes. I would be like, okay, honestly, I don't have like all the fucking papers and the studies, but what I do have is a ton of experience having clients do these. And I've done them a lot myself.

And I've noticed my glutes have always been disproportionately bigger when I include lots of walking lunges compared to when I don't. And I've seen so many bodybuilders doing walking lunges. I see so much explosive track work and plyometric work that's done from the single stances. The lunge seems to be really tethered to great physiques with big glutes. So I'm a huge fan of those. Those are probably the one that I love in my heart the most because I feel like they don't get a lot of love, which bums me out. And I do love the RDL, lot of love, which bums me out. And I do love the RDL, but lunges are just so much, they get so much hate. So I always give them a little bit from my heart. Taking a break from this episode to tell

you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength, as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can

try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. Number four is in many ways a lunge, even though it's called the Bulgarian split squat or the rear foot elevated split squat, not the Bulgarian lunge, which is kind of shitty because it should be the Bulgarian lunge. But really a split squat is a single leg squat. So a lot of the work is coming from this front leg, this stance leg.

And again, why does this exercise make the list? Why is it winning over something like, I don't know, the booty kickback? You know, which fucking big surprise, the booty kickback didn't make the list. Split squat. In this position, I'm getting a lot of stretch. And that's usually going to be good for muscle growth. Another thing that's cool about this and the lunge, it's going to make your RDL better,

your squat better, and squat's coming, your hip thrust, okay, your walking lunge. All of these movements, a lot of your physical day-to-day life become easier, more stable, and feel better when you do more unilateral work. And this one, because it has that nice rear foot stability, it gives you the ability to really load it up. So you can do these with some heavy dumbbells. Big, big fan. Okay, let's talk about the squat since we know it's on the list.

I like squatting because much like deadlifting and hip thrusting, you can do it heavy. And so let's throw leg pressing into this category for those of you who maybe aren't comfortable with a barbell squat, but we'll show a goblet squat. So I can squat super deep. Most of you can't squat this deep. It's not like that. It's just fucking like, okay, it really sucks because a lot of what drives your squat depth is like, are you short? Yes. Okay. You're going to have a great squat. Are you tall? No, then you're not. And I'm only 5'8". So I have good squat mobility and I work on ankle mobility. So

down here, my glutes are super stretched. And when I come up, they have to work hard to get me out of that position. If you can only squat like this deep, you might not get as good of results out of your squats as you might lunges or hip thrusts or an RDL. Doesn't mean you shouldn't squat. You might try something like a leg press, which is a similar kind of bilateral movement, right? Like, but it's just done like this. I don't have a leg press in here. You get the point. And with the squat, because you get that big stretch, it's going to strengthen your quads. It's going to strengthen your adductors, your back, your core. It'll make you overall stronger in the gym, which will contribute

to helping you build better glutes. It helps to be strong overall. But the squat is great for people who are able to get deep or for people who just based on the way they're built can really feel a squat. Now, if you have a barbell, you might position it differently on your back. This barbell is on the floor and I don't want to adjust the J-cup, so I'll use a mobility stick. But if you have a barbell and it's up really, really high, you tend to sit more vertical. The same thing is true of doing a front squat than if you have the bar really low on your back, in which case you tend to sit a little more back.

A lot of people would call this a low bar squat. This is a high bar squat. The lower it is on your back, the more you kind of set the hips back, the more you hinge it, just like the RDL, the more you're going to work the glutes. Unless you have like crazy good alien short person depth and that a lot of it, you can work

towards it, but some of it comes natural for others more than it does for most. You're not going to have as good of results in my opinion with tons and tons of squatting as you would with tons and tons of Romanian deadlifting. If I had to pick between the two big compounds that are done with a barbell. But squats for sure make the list. They're super duper good. Okay, we'll go to the cable machine for number six. Hip abduction. These are hilarious hilarious these are funny to film because they're so damn hard and they're hard for almost everybody that i know i'm gonna get tired just showing them to you because what's what's true of most people and i see this a lot, especially with the PT,

this is a muscle that's really weak. This lateral portion of your hip, that's where you're going to find it. And it moves the hip out and away from the body. Okay, you want to think of it like the deltoid in a way. You go out and away. So it's kind of like a hip abduction is kind of like a lateral raise

in that you're using this muscle that kind of caps the ball and socket of the hip, just like this caps the ball and socket of the arm to do a little abduction. And when you do this slow and you do this under control, you work your glutes, you even work some of your gluteus maximus, but you start to slowly develop better stability

in your hip. You start to feel more comfortable in these positions down here. And here you can recruit more stability to your hip. You start to feel more comfortable in these positions down here. And here you can recruit more stability to train hard. So this is cool. This is like a lot of people are like, oh, is it going to give me this big round bubbly butt because it hits right here? It will contribute to growth here. Of course, it's going to give you a little bit more meat on your glutes, but not a ton, just like your delt. It's kind of a flat muscle, but what it will do is it'll make all your other big lifts better. It'll help keep you training without as many problems because I'll tell you what a lot of high volume compound lower

body work is going to take its toll on you if you're doing it long term and you're not taking care of those smaller muscles. The gluteus medius will help you look a little bit better in the glutes, but it'll help you perform better in life. Okay, step ups. Okay, this is a good one. I always forget these. And if you are somebody who's just sick of all the exercises I named, which I know many of you probably are, but you should still do them because I truly think those exercises and exercises like them, and there might be better

versions of them, you know, are worth doing. But the step up is cool because, again, it's going to help you build a little bit more strength. I think you'll feel that your tissue is more resilient. You're more stable, it has these properties that are semi-athletic, so you kind of feel a little bit more athletic if you do them for a while, but again, you get a lot of good stretch into that glute. It's a good amount of quad, you come down slow and controlled.

You can load it with dumbbells, you can load it with a vest. Honestly, it's just hard enough as it is. Body weight pushing mostly through that top leg. Great for glutes, great for quads. You're in this hip flex, super flexed position. So I think it actually helps develop squat depth over time. And it's just great for certain populations if you're not a huge fan of loading your spine or machine.

So those are the ones that I would do folks. If you want big glutes, strong glutes, a physique that's more resilient in the long-term, deadlifting, particularly Romanian deadlifting, hip thrusting, great for glutes in that shortened position, getting a pump, squatting, very, very much one of those, I can do it heavy, I can use a lot of muscles, including my glutes moves,

hard to get that much load on tissue. Elsewhere, we can throw leg pressing in the mix, lunges, split squats, step ups and abductions. We like all those. If you liked the video, be sure to hit subscribe, hit the thumbs up button and hit the bell so you'll be notified when more hit the uh hit the channel thanks