Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How to Get a Bigger and Rounder Butt in Just 30 Days

Episode Date: November 14, 2017

Few things turn heads quite like a killer butt.We just can’t help but oogle and think carnal things when we see a pair of round, perky glutes.That’s why so many of us — guys and gals alike — want to know how to get our best butts ever.And if you’re one of them, you’ve come to the right place because by the end of this episode, you’re going to know exactly what you need to do for more butt gains in the next 30 days than you’ve seen in the last 3 months.(Hint: it’s more or less what you would think – train your backside a lot – but isn’t that simplistic.)I have to warn you, though — it’s not going to be easy.You can’t get a set of god(dess)-like glutes by “eating clean” and doing bodyweight squats and donkey kicks.So if you’re looking for “weird tricks” or “workout hacks,” then this isn’t for you.If, however, you’re ready to learn the simple science of building a badass butt, and if you’re ready to put in some work, you need to listen to this episode. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series where I answer one common question quickly and simply because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less. And that's what I do in these episodes. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And let's talk about something that I get asked quite frequently about these days, and that is butt building, how to get a bigger and stronger, but mainly just bigger butt. And fortunately, it is quite a bit simpler than some people would have you believe. You don't have to do a bunch of fancy exercises. You don't have to do like 82 variations of banded squats and lunges and

kickbacks and crawls and so forth. Also, you don't have to try to focus on, let's say, the upper or lower portions of the glutes because there's say the upper or lower portions of the glutes because there really aren't upper or lower portions. You have the gluteus maximus and you have the gluteus minimus. And your primary goal is really just to make those muscles stronger. And the stronger you make them, the bigger they will get. Another myth that is floating around out there about glute training is that you need to do certain types of exercises and usually certain types of cardio like stair stepping to burn the fat off of your glutes. And while that might seem to make sense on the surface, unfortunately, research shows that targeted fat loss is basically impossible. You have very, very minor local

effects that occur when you perform exercises. But on the whole, really what you can do is reduce your total body fat percentage. And eventually the area that you want to get leaner will get leaner. If it's a more stubborn area, it might take longer than you'd like. Like for us guys, that's usually our lower abs. And for girls, it's usually the thighs and the hips. But if you just keep getting leaner, you will get rid of the fat you want to get rid of. And one last little myth that deserves debunking is regarding sprinting, because many people think that sprints are a fantastic glute exercise and that if you want to have great glutes and you're not sprinting, then you're making a big mistake.

And that's simply not true. While many sprinters do have great butts, let's not forget that one, many of them are also genetic freaks and two, they also lift weights. So sprinting does involve the glutes. Yes, that's true. However, it's not nearly as effective over the longterm as just a well-designed resistance training program because you can't progressively overload your glutes in the same way with sprinting as you can with resistance training. And also, if you've ever done any maximum effort sprinting, you know how hard it is on your body, on your lower body in particular, and it makes really any sort of lower body weightlifting difficult to do

because for the next couple of days after a hard sprint session, you are not going to be squatting or deadlifting or really doing anything with your lower body other than recovering. Okay. So now let's talk about how to train your glutes correctly and then get to a workout that you can do for the next 30 days to see results. So the main principles here are, I want you to focus on exercises that allow you to safely progressively overload your glutes. And by that, I really mean just adding weight to the ball over time, getting stronger over time. That's progressive overload. You work your volume up to a point. So you work up to a certain number of reps and then you add weight, your reps go down,

your intensity goes up. You work with that until you get that volume up and then you add weight and so forth. That process repeated over time is the best way to progressively overload any muscle in your body. And that is the only way to continue gaining size and strength over the longer term. So in terms of butt workouts, that means that your bread and butter or your meat and potatoes, if you like, are going to be your heavy squatting and pulling. And then your dessert is going to be some supplementary stuff like kickbacks, hip thrusts, and split squats. So in terms of exercises, your best bets are going to be the

barbell squat, which is of course no surprise. But what you might not know is that research shows that the wider your stance is and the deeper you squat, the more it activates your glutes. So that's something to keep in mind when you are setting up. And then there is the barbell deadlift, which is not just a great glute exercise, but a great whole body exercise. And studies show that both conventional and sumo style activate the glutes more or less the same degree. So do whichever you prefer. And if you're not sure which one you should be doing or which is better for you, go to muscleforlife.com and search for sumo. And you'll see an article there wrote on sumo

pulling and how to determine if you should pull sumo or conventional. And a key point to highlight here is the importance of full glute activation while you're pulling, which many people don't do and don't even know about. So what you want to do is when you are pulling the bar off the ground, as you start to ascend, your glutes should start firing. You start feeling them contracting, and then you should feel them really contracting when you get to the last half of the lockout. So as you are really starting to stand up and reaching your top position, your glutes should be really squeezing as hard as possible. Hey, quickly, before we carry on,

if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. The next exercise that you should be working into your butt workouts is the hip thrust,

which you can do with a barbell. You can do with a dumbbell. You can do with bands, various ways to do it, but it is all the same basic movement. And the lunge is another great exercise. You can do the barbell lunge, you can do the dumbbell lunge, you can do it walking, or you can do it alternating. I prefer alternating barbell, but that's me. The Romanian deadlift is another great exercise. It is a type of deadlift that focuses a bit more on the hamstrings and the glutes. And then there's the Bulgarian split squat, which is a single leg variation of the squat. Very, very good exercise. I work them regularly into my lower body workouts. I'm usually not replacing my two leg, my bilateral squatting, but I'm doing it in addition. So I might do some

heavy back squats or some heavy front squats, and then some Bulgarian split squats. And lastly, the glute blaster machine is a good machine. It basically has you on your stomach or on your fours, and you put one of your feet on a platform and push it away from you. Okay. So let's turn all of this into a workout routine that you can follow for the next month or so to get results. So I'm going to give you a few workouts and explain how to do them. So the first day you are going to do what we can call lower a, and that's going to consist of the barbell back squat. You're going to warm up. And if you're not sure how to warm up, go to muscle for life and search for warm up and check out the article that I wrote on it. So once you've warmed up, then I want you to do three sets of about four to six reps. That is 80 to 85% of your one rep max, pretty heavy.

Then I want you to do the Romanian deadlift for three sets of eight to 10 reps, followed by the barbell or the banded hip thrust for three sets of eight to 10 reps. Then day two is going to be our upper A because we're not going to completely neglect the upper body and just train the lower body. So here, what we're going to do is the incline barbell bench press, warm up, and then do three sets of four to six reps, and then move to the close grip bench press, which puts a bit more of the emphasis on your triceps and do three sets of eight to 10 reps there. Then do the seated or standing military press. I'll leave it up to you. I would recommend doing a little warmup on

that as well, even if it's just one or two sets and then do three working sets, three heavier sets of eight to 10 reps. And lastly, do dips and do them the chest variation where you're leaned kind of forward as opposed to straight up and down, which is more of the triceps variation and do three sets of body weight to failure. And that takes us to day three, which we will do our lower B workout. And that starts with the barbell deadlift, warmup, and then do three sets of four to six reps followed by the barbell or the dumbbell lunge, walking or alternating, up to you. Three sets of eight to 10 reps, followed by the single leg hip thrust or single leg glute bridge. And again, if you're not familiar with any of these exercises, you can just look them up online and find good high quality videos on how to do all of them. They're pretty simple. And for this last exercise,

do three sets with your body weight to failure. And then day five is going to be our lower C workout. And that is barbell back squat, warmup, and then do three sets of eight to 10 reps followed by the Bulgarian split squat, three sets of eight to 10 reps followed by the glute blaster or hip thrust up to you. If your gym has a glute blaster machine, do it. If it doesn't, then do the hip thrust and just do one set of eight to 10 reps. And then days six and seven, you're off. Again, I recommend no intense physical exercise on these days so you can maximize recovery. If you want to do some light cardio or just be lightly active, that's great, but I wouldn't recommend a lot of high intensity exercise of any kind on those days. And just a few things that you should know when

you're doing these workouts. One is when I'm talking about rep ranges, like four to six reps or eight to 10 reps, what I mean is when you get to the top of those rep ranges. So when you can do six reps of a given exercise or 10 reps of a given exercise, it's time to add weight. It's time to put weight on the bar or grab heavier dumbbells. So for example, if you can squat 135 for 10 reps, you then add five pounds to each side in the bar. So now you're at 145, you rest and you should get seven or eight reps on your next set. And then you work with 145 until you can squat it for 10 reps. And then you add weight to up to 155 and so forth. Now, if you find that when you do that and you move up in weight, you can't get at least the number of reps that are on the bottom of your rep range. Let's say minus one. So if you get to 10

and you add weight and you get seven, but not eight, that's fine. But if you're getting like five or six, then you have two choices. One, you can reduce the amount of weight that you're adding. So in the case of barbell exercises, you can add five pounds by putting two and a half pound weights on either side of the bar, or you can go back to your original weight. So in our previous example, that'd be going back to 135 and working up to two sets of 10, and then you should have no problem moving on. Also, I want you to rest about three minutes in between your four to six rep sets and about two minutes in between your eight to 10 rep sets. That's probably a bit more than you're used to, but research shows that those are optimal rest times when you're working with those heavier weights to

fully recoup your strength so you can give maximum effort with each set. And lastly, you should know that you don't have to go to absolute muscle failure every set to make progress. And absolute muscle failure is where you have to abort a set where you cannot complete a rep because you just can't get it. Instead, you can go to the point where you're one or two reps shy of failure. And that's the point where it's hard, you're struggling, but you can finish the rep and you're not quite sure if you're going to actually be able to get another one, you can stop there. And lastly, let's talk supplements because whenever the topic of muscle building comes up, a lot of people wonder if supplements can help and i saved this for last because quite frankly it is the least important no amount of pills or powders can give

you a great physique only proper diet and training can do that however the right supplements can speed up the process and in this case the right supplements are creatine which is a natural substance that your body produces and it's also found in some foods like meat. And it's probably the most researched molecule in all of sports nutrition at this point. There are hundreds and hundreds of studies on it that conclusively prove that it can help you gain muscle and strength faster. It can improve anaerobic endurance and reduce muscle damage and muscle soreness resulting from your workouts. Now, in terms of what specific product to take, I myself use my own, which is a 100% natural post-workout supplement called Recharge. And it contains creatine as well as two other natural substances that are proven

to help you recover better and faster from your workouts. And if you want to learn more about it, just click on the link in the description. And if you want to learn more about it, just click on the link in the description. And the next supplement worth mentioning is a protein powder. Again, a protein powder is not necessary by any means, but if you want to gain muscle and strength anywhere in your body as quickly as possible, you have to eat quite a bit of protein. You have to eat about 0.8 to 1 gram per pound of body weight per day. And while you certainly can do that with whole food, it can be a bit tricky. Adding a powder into the mix makes it quite a bit easier. They're just convenient. And in terms of what type of protein powder to take, I like

whey isolate the most, which is a whey protein that has the lactose and the fat removed. So it's basically pure protein and it's also very well digested. It's very well absorbed. It's very rich in essential amino acids. It's pretty much ideal for our purposes. And in terms of specific products, I take my own, which is a 100% natural, 100% whey isolate protein called Whey Plus that you can learn more about by just clicking on the link in the description. And last on my list is the pre-workout drink. And if you've tried pre-workouts before and you didn't like it, if they made you jittery, if they made you nauseous, or maybe they just didn't do

anything, I do understand there are a lot of bad pre-workouts out there. And that's why I just made my own, which is called Pulse. And it is a 100% natural pre-workout, which means that not only are the active ingredients natural, it also is naturally sweetened. It's naturally flavored and it contains no artificial food dyes or unnecessary chemical junk. And really what makes it special is it has clinically effective dosages of six ingredients that have been proven to enhance your workout performance. And in a couple of cases like beta alanine and citrulline can actually directly impact your muscle building over time. And again, if you want to learn more about it and you want to learn about the science

behind the formulation, just click on the link in the description. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and

you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff

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