Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2770: 4 Reasons Your Butt Isn't Growing !

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Build Your Butt Masterclass Four reasons people aren't building their butts (DON'T make these mistakes): (1:34) 1. The wrong exercises. (2:33) 2. Not lifting heavy. (8:24) 3. Not eating in a bulk. (16:26) 4. Can't connect to glutes. (21:17) Related Links/Products Mentioned Build Your Butt Masterclass Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Code MINDPUMP Buy one, get one 50% off for new customers, and 20% cash back for returning customers! ** January Promotion: Code NEWYEAR50 at checkout for 50% off the following programs: MAPS Starter, Transform, Anabolic, and Performance! Mind Pump Store Mind Pump #1667: The Best Exercises You Can Do to Develop the Perfect Butt Mind Pump #2265: Why Powerlifting is Better Than Bodybuilding Mind Pump #2155: The Art & Science of Building Perfect Butts With Bret Contreras Mind Pump #1565: Why Women Should Bulk Mind Pump #2517: Hip Thrusts vs Squats… Which Builds a Rounder Butt? Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Bret Contreras PhD (@bretcontreras1) Instagram Corinne Schmiedhauser (@mindpumpcorinne) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode. It's all about building your butt. We talk about the reasons why you're struggling and we help you fix it. By the way, we have a free Build Your Butt masterclass.

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This is for you ladies out there. Here's what we did. We've identified the absolute most common reasons why people struggle building their butts. If you do what we say, they're going to build. You will have, by the end of the year, an amazing looking booty. But you've got to follow our advice. Don't make these mistakes. They're so common.

God, bless America. Step one. Wrong exercises. Yeah, yeah. Although, I will say this. This is a lot better. Way better. Yes.

Way better. I mean, this was something that when we all first started as trainers, you rarely ever saw anybody doing the right movements to build their butt. That's changed for sure. Yes. In fact, I don't think I go into a commercial gym and not see at least a handful of people. doing great movements to build their glutes, where it wasn't like that before.

Yeah, no. So I think it's important to kind of take a step back, right? So there's lots of exercises that activate and train and work the glutes, right? By the way, the glutes aren't just one muscle. There's several muscles that make up the glutes, the gluteus maximus, minimus, medius, and that makes up that kind of glute complex. And there's a lot of ways to work those muscles,

but some exercises just build the glutes and others just don't build a lot. And so you could categorize these exercises into two general categories. You have your main exercises. These are you like, these are meat and potatoes. Okay. These are what do most of the work when it comes to building your glutes. Then you have what are known as volume builders. Volume builders are exercises that you could add or throw on top of the main lifts,

if appropriate. I want to say that as well because sometimes it's not appropriate. Sometimes you're just adding extra work for no reason or in many cases tipping the balance from appropriate to too much and then you actually build less muscle. But volume builders are not the main exercises. No. And here's the thing, a lot of but building courses or programs or even content on social media. Now, yes, it's definitely changed out of, but you still see a lot of this, right? involve a lot of these volume builders, you know, these like, you know, abduction exercises and this new way to, you know, use bands to make you feel the glutes more or dog peas or kickbacks, which, you know, for correctional exercise purposes in some cases are great.

But you're not going to build your butt doing those as your main lifts. Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with they gain traction because people do feel that. That's right. that sensation. And so, you know, feel is a big, a big part of that that helps to sell it. However, you know, you're not really moving the needle like you would with these bigger lifts where you're actually adding a substantial amount of load for it to overcome, which actually, you know, helps to build that muscle substantially.

Well, I think you said it best when you said there's a difference between working a muscle and building a muscle. Yeah. Example with your legs would be running a marathon, working. your legs out. Yeah. Big time. You're going to feel your legs.

Oh, yeah. It'll burn. They'll get tired. They'll get sore. Yeah, they'll get tired. They'll get sore. You'll definitely feel them working. But if you ever seen a marathoner's legs, they're not built.

No. They're not buff. They're not big. They're not round. They're not shaped. They're not sculpted. Most people that are looking to build their glutes, they want them to look a certain way. They want them round.

They want them shapely. They want them bigger. And that, just like the example you gave with the, there's a difference between working them out and building them. Doing a lot of those exercises where you feel it, to Justin's point, where you feel the burn, you feel the movement, is like running a marathon for your glutes, and you're not going to build them that way.

There's specific exercises that do a good job of adding size to the glutes, which is what most people are trying to do. So they're looking for you. Yeah, when they say, I want to build my butt. That's right. And so you could really boil those main exercises down to, Not very many. And then maybe variations off of these.

So like squatting, squats, incredible butt building exercise. Dead lifts and deadlift variations. Incredible butt building exercises. Hip thrusts, incredible, especially loaded, and we're in particular loaded, butt building exercise. And then you have variations of them, right? Split stance squats are your lunge variations, your Bulgarian split stand squats. Dead lifts, you have stiff-legged dead lifts.

You have sumo deadlifts. You have conventional deadlifts. Those are all great butt building exercises. And hip thrusts are pretty straightforward. But that's essentially, and it's not a lot of exercises, you guys. So this is where people get kind of weird with this, is they think they need to throw all this crazy variety and lifts. When honestly, if you pick like three of those and just got really good at those,

you're going to build your butt. If you pick 15 or 20 of all of those other kind of volume builder exercise and avoid or don't focus on those main lifts, you're not going to build. You're not going to get very far. No, you're not going to get nearly as far. Well, that's the big, this big secret sauce to this is not a lot of complexity and variety.

It's focusing on a couple or a few at most of those exercises that you just listed. Literally two or three of those and getting really good and really strong. Just progress on the overload. alone will be far better than trying to do all of them and adding a bunch of other things to the regiment. And I think that's where people go wrong is they might do those and then they do a bunch of other. They do all this stuff in hopes that more is better.

And it's not. It's like do a couple of these really good movements that really build the glutes get really good and get really strong at it. And that is what's going to do. If you did barbell squats, dead lifts, either conventional or sumo, and hip thrust, and that's it? Yes. You would get phenomenal results with your glutes.

You could compare just those three to 30 volume builder exercises. You could put them all together, mix and match them. I don't care. Yeah. And they're not going to get close to what those three exercises are going to do. So, in other words, that is what your routine should be built off of. That's the foundation. and for many of you, that's all you do for your glutes.

And you don't even have to include all that other stuff. Totally. Now, next up is you're not lifting heavy. Now, here's where things get a little murky. People are like, oh, it's hard. It's intense. No, no, no. Lifting heavy isn't just how much weight you can lift, okay?

Lifting heavy, there's programming that goes to lifting heavy, which includes long rest periods. When we say lifting heavy, we're talking about you lift. a weight that is very challenging for anywhere between five to, let's say, 12 reps, sometimes lower if you want, but we'll stay five to 12, just keep it kind of there in the middle. And you're going heavy and you're resting three minutes in between sets. Yeah, three minutes. Because sometimes I say lifting heavy and what people will do is circuits or they're resting

20 seconds in between sets or they want to feel the burns. They go one from one extra. And they're like, no, no, it's challenging. I'm only doing 10 reps. but the rest period is what makes heavy lifting, heavy lifting. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to train an energy system of the body that is known as anaerobic.

Anerobic is not aerobic. Aerobic is the stamina endurance. Anerobic is a different energy system. And when you train that and then leave it alone and rest so you can continue coming back to it. Fully replenish. Because it burns out quickly. Okay. So strength, this energy system, if I did, you know, eight heavy reps of barbells,

squats, I'm anaerobic. If I go to 80, somewhere around 25 reps, maybe sooner, I'm going into aerobic. It's no longer strength training. It's now just stamina and endurance building. If that's what you want, that's cool, but you're listening to this because you want to build your butt. So you hit that anaerobic system. Then you wait and rest and let it replenish. And what that does is it trains the muscle fibers that grow. It doesn't, it trains all the muscle fibers, but it makes them bigger because when you get bigger muscle fibers, you get better at that kind of exercise. When you're training for stamina and endurance, bigger muscle fibers are actually disadvantageous. So in other words, circuit training and hit and doing all these crazy

supersets and short rest periods, not only do they not build as much, in many cases, they actually discourage your body to build because big muscle fibers tend to be less, it's less advantageous when it comes to standard. Yes, this is probably one of the most commonly, like, misused or overlooked part of trying to build the glutes, especially in this category. A lot of people would like to get that size. And to be able to do that, like to eliminate the conditioning element of it into the endurance portion of it to actually build, we need to get strong.

We need to get, you know, focused on strength. The only way you can focus on strength is really be adamant about these rest periods, even if you feel like your heart rate has gone down. You're going to. You're not going to feel exhausted with your heart rate. It's just going to be hard. It's just hard. This is such a major point that I like to take it to an even further extreme than the one that you recommended, which unless you are familiar with or have experience with training either with a power lifter or trained for a powerlifting meet, I oftentimes will teach clients that have this specific goal how to train.

singles, doubles, and triples. Yeah. Because most programming, even good programming, rarely, unless you were specific to power lifting. You don't get exposed to that. You don't get exposed to singles, doubles, and triples. Yeah, a set of two reps. Yes. And that's so out of the ordinary for the average person, especially someone who is focused

just on sculpting the body or losing body fat or just building muscle. It's very popular in the power lifting world. But the reason why I like to go to that extreme is because I introduce a, of a client most times to a very new form of training and stimulus and also really extend that rest period timeout or we'll go get a weight and they'll pick it up two times and then I'll make them rest at least three minutes and then hey how do you feel let's put another five pounds on there let's put another 10 pounds and I'll just keep trying to find where that limit is of them pulling the bar up just one or two times and a lot of times especially my female clients that have never

trained this way really surprise themselves at how much weight they can lift because they've trained in this, you know, short rest period. And because to them it is heavy. Yeah. So it's hard to say like it's that's, that's why the rest period is so important. Exactly. So it's real easy for us on the podcast to say this and communicate it. And then the average person to hear and go like, well, no, this is a heavy weight for me. But then I'm ready to go, you know, because their heart rate might have come down or they don't feel like they're sweating enough. And so then they go right back into it. And it's only been 60, 90 seconds. It's like, no, no, no, let's. rest even longer and weight, and let's see if we can stack more weight on.

And you know what? I don't even care if you can't get five. If I put on too much weight and you can only get three to four, that's okay. And I want to push in that direction. If you've never done that and you're listening to this, I can't urge you enough to go in that direction and see how beneficial this can be to your training. Really good coaches understand this. Brett Contreras, who's widely regarded as like the,

the, he's the most well-known guru when it comes to developing glutes. And he's a good trainer. He knows what he's doing. So he's not like these other social media fitness influencers that I wish would disappear. He knows what he's doing. He's a smart trainer.

And what he does works. And if you watch the women that he trains and you look at them posting their lifts and their PR, they are strong. Yeah. Because he knows. In fact, he puts them through blocks of really low rep training. Yes.

And he often posts their, one rep or two rep PRs and they get phenomenal because he understands strength equals muscle size so if you want great results in building your butt and you're not training this way

I mean good luck it's really it's gonna be really really hard I think that I think what that is more representation of two it's less because we've talked about on the podcast before that you can build a great body and never PR but I think it also

meaning that you don't have to chase you don't have to chase PRs but I think he like us from training so many people, especially female clients that want to build their glutes, have realized how few of them have ever trained in that direction. And so he's talked about that. So you get tremendous value by pushing that, that group into like chasing PRs because it is so foreign. And then, and they really surprise themselves on how strong and how much weight they can actually lift. And the, the benefits that they reap from training that way, because I remember when he was on the show,

I can't remember how often, but he, he encouraged. like hitting a PR more frequently than we normally do to General Pop. And so this isn't an area where we are at conflict or we disagree. Just because on our podcast, you hear us communicate a lot. They're like, no, you don't have to chase PRs and there's a safe way. But when we're talking specifically to somebody who has these goals of, I want to build my butt, I've struggled with it forever. That's right.

And getting that person to understand what it's like to pull a bar up with so much weight they can only do it one or two times has tremendous value. Huge value. It makes a big difference. And I remember back in the day when I would get female clients that did lots of strength training, but struggled in getting their bodies to change, you know, or building their butt. We would do an hour session and we would do a grand total of five or six sets in the whole hour, the whole hour. Now, thank God I can be quite convincing. But then once they saw the results, they didn't have to convince them anymore. They'd show up. And we'd show up. And we'd chill in between sets. And I'd look at the clock. Five minutes would go past. All right, let's do another set. So it was like five sets.

This included warm up and everything. And they got phenomenal. And they couldn't believe it. Like, this is so different than what I'm used to. I'm like, look, you want to build. This is how you trained to build. You want to go get lots of endurance. Keep doing what you were doing before.

But you came to me saying you wanted to see a difference in muscle development. This is how you do it. Now, this next one is by far, in my opinion, the biggest reason why women can't have struggle building their butt. And it's because they don't eat in a calorie surplus, but I'll put it differently. Women say, I want to build my butt and I want a six-pack. You're not going to be lean. It's not going to happen. You can't, you're not going to build if you're not eating enough. It's just not going to happen. So you can try to eat to get leaner and then the goal is to keep whatever muscle you have or you could try to build and you're going to gain some body fat. That's just the way it is.

Or if you have body fat, maybe you won't gain some body fat, but a lot of women who are like, I'm struggling to build my butt. They need to gain a little bit of body fat. They need to get their calories up. And by the way, this isn't just high protein, although that's a big part of it. You need to eat about a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. It makes a big difference.

You also got to eat carbs. Yeah. Because you'll also get this fear of, okay, cool, I want to build. All right, I'll eat more, but I don't want any carbohydrates. I don't want to get any body fat. Okay. You're also playing this on hard mode, extra hard mode.

eat the carbs, eat the protein, put yourself in a calorie surplus. I'm not telling you to eat garbage or eat in a way that's unhealthy, but you have to eat more calories than you're burning or your body's not going to build. It's just not going to happen. And I don't care how good your strength training program is. It won't happen. I'd have to agree that this is probably one of the more difficult ones. Just because you're right, most always, what's accompanied I want to build my butt is also I want to

shrink my waist. I want to shrink my waist. I want to build my butt. And both are very much so possible, but to focus on both of them at the same time is nearly impossible. Or as you put it, you're playing on hard mode. It doesn't mean it's not possible to do a very slow, gradual progress in both where you see a little bit of leaning out on the waist and you see a little bit of growth on your butt. But most people don't have the mental discipline to do it that way for a long period of time. You're far better off saying, okay, this is bulking time. The next six to eight weeks, I am going to dedicate myself to putting inches on my butt. I'm going to eat in a calorie surplus. I'm going to hit my grams of protein and do that consistently, not just once in a while

or every now and then, but consistently be in a surplus. That's okay. And then what's nice is as long as you don't do this in a dirty way, as you said, like eating a bunch of garbage, you won't really put body fat on. No. You know, and a little bit of the weight you put on, most time is a little bit of water that you're adding because you're increasing carbohydrates and calories. But if you do it correctly, you will put mostly all muscle on. And even if you put a little bit of body fat on, your metabolism is going to end up

up and speeding up anyways. Leaner later is easy. It's going to get lean. You're going to get leaner a lot easier. And so, but it is difficult to get over that hurdle, at least in my experience with my clients, they feared that I don't want my waist to grow. or I also want to have abs. And so, and many times that tends to be the thing they care about more,

but then they also want to build their butt. But you'll, I just want to make this point to the person who wants both, because I think they're both very common goals that come together. It'll serve you to focus on building the butt first and then leaning out, then it will to try and lean out first, then build the butt. Easier order. One is the metabolic rate, which helps the fat loss, the other one, not so much. Right.

And we do have, there's probably a little bit of a selection bias, the episode is how to build your butt. And so if you're listening intently, you probably struggle with this. And if you're probably struggling with this, then it's part of the reason why you struggle is you just don't, you're scared to eat enough to build your butt. And so I'm going to encourage you a little bit, okay? If you gained two inches around your butt and you gained a quarter inch around your waist,

your waist looks smaller than it did before. There is, this is what happens when you get the hip to waist ratio illusion. So even if you did gain a little bit around your waist, but you gain more around your butt, your waist now looks smaller than it did before because your butt is bigger. And this is what happens. This is what happens when you sculpt and shape your body.

But just to add to this, to try to build your butt without gaining any weight on the scale, huh? Yeah. What do you think you're doing when you're building? Yeah. You're going to gain some, you're going to gain a little bit of wave.

If you gain three pounds of muscle to your butt, it's a lot bigger, a lot rounder, but you're heavier on the scale. So you got to kind of get over that and make that decision and commit. You have to commit because what also happens with a lot of women is they'll be like, okay, cool, I'm going to try this. Then a week or two into it, they get scared.

Scale went up a couple pounds. Forget it. I'm going to back up a little bit. No, no, commit. Give yourself eight weeks. Give yourself 12 weeks. Make this happen. You won't regret it.

You won't regret it. And then lastly, this is where it gets really interesting, is that some people, and this is just for lack of a better way of saying this, can't connect to their glutes really well with some. of the exercises that I mentioned before. So when you do a, when you look at the studies on what builds the butt more, there's two exercises that tend to be compared to each other. There's two like, like great bump building exercise that tend to be put head to head, squats and hit thrust. And hip thrust. Yep.

And what the studies will show is that they're both equally as good. Okay. In fact, some studies might even show that the squat might be a little better because it loads in the stretch position. okay, but generally speaking, they're about the same. And yet, when you go and you do polls on what builds the butt more, a lot of women are like hip thrust, hands down. Well, here's what's happening. Barbell squats are a great glute exercise unless you're quad dominant.

Unless your body really places most of the load on your quads. Now, I can typically tell when I watch someone's form and technique. Yeah. But most people don't know, they don't know what's going on. So they do squats and they're like, man, I'm getting strong at squats. I know you said squats on my butt. Man, I'm squatting over 200 pounds. And the only thing that's gotten more shapely and built or my quads and my butt is just not working, hip thrusts become a superior exercise.

It's much easier to connect to your glutes with a hip thrust than it is with a barbell squat. It could be a very subtle variation in your mechanics. That's right. puts you like more front anterior focused. And again, it's not recognizable a lot of times. But yeah, if you feel that your quads are getting more activity. So there's a way to really redirect that whole sequence. And to do that, you know, requires a bit of mobility,

a bit of, you know, hip work and ankle work sometimes to be able to unlock, you know, that potential where your glutes will fire. I actually, I found this to be very common. And I think there's a, there's a, there's a handful of, of reasons. We're just, we're anteriorly driven, right? So we do everything in front of us.

A lot of women, it's in the past, even today, still run to get in shape. And so they do a lot of like, they've already trained it. So they've already trained that pattern of the quads firing.

It's like quads and calves. That's right. And so, and then you can also have, but I've seen some very pretty mechanically looking squats, but still be quad dominant. And I think that has a lot to do with it

is because, They've done a lot of running and sprinting and your quads take over in a movement like that so much. And so you're so used to using quads, they become so strong and dominant that you go do an exercise that incorporates your quads and your glutes and your quads go, oh, we got this, and they take over the movement.

And it's subconscious. You don't even realize it. So you could have this beautiful form and technique, but the quads are just taking over because you've trained them for so many years to be the strong dominant muscle. And then now you're starting to do these movements. I actually think this is what,

popularized the hip thrusts. That's right. They hit all those women that just didn't build their butts was a lot. Fly passes that whole process. Yes. And because a, and we did this well before the hip thrust even got popular were floor bridges. You know, you used to take a client who struggled to connect or feel their butts. So long before I knew who Breck-Kentreras was and that stuff got popular, you know, I'd take a client who I would do these great squats and I'd see her form.

And I'd be like, that's beautiful form. and she'd be like, I still just fill up my quads. We'd get down and we do these floor bridges and I'd have them do these isometric holds on a floor bridge and squeeze their butt to where they feel it. And so just helping that connection. Like that's where you want to feel this

when you do this movement. And so I think hip thrust really got popular because it kind of forces it. It almost became one of those trainer tricks that ended up being like, oh, this is the go-to move for people to build their butt. But Sal's absolutely right. If you're somebody who feels squats in your butt,

that's going to be one of the best exercises. If you don't, it doesn't mean that they're not a great exercise, but it just means that you lack that good connection there, and you're probably more quad-dominate, and then hip-thrust becomes probably the primary mover I'm going to focus on in the programming. Yeah, generally speaking, if your strength training three days a week, one of your days would be a hip-thrust day,

one of them would be a barbell squat day, and one of them would be a deadlift day, is what it would kind of look like. And I would say start your week out, the week, your hip thrust if you don't fear your glutes optimally otherwise start up with your squats now here's what we're going to do because there's more to what we're saying right there's detail there's coaching that's involved and you know one of the challenges with doing a podcast is i i'm not

here teaching you visually like i would uh as a trainer uh and there's just so much value in that so here's what we did uh adam and corin Corinne was one of our top trainer she also competes um as a physique competitor. Adam obviously was a pro and trained lots of people and his expertise at one point was building people's butts. They did a masterclass that you can actually watch and they're going to show you a lot of the things we're talking about and more and it's free. You go to mapsbooty.com. So mapsbooty.com you can watch the free butt, build your butt masterclass and you're getting the two of the best people in the industry are going to teach you a lot of what we're talking about, but they're going to show you and teach you so we can apply it yourself. So again, it's Maps Booty.

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