How to: Grow your booty

Lets be honest - us ladies all want a great ass. It is on trend at the moment and for me personally when my butt is looking good, I feel great about myself, strong and sexy, and who doesn’t want that. When I ask women what they want to achieve physique wise in the gym, 99% of them will also say they want a bigger butt, or a more shapely, and toned booty. So I wanted to share my top 4 tips on how to grow your glutes.

1. Compound movements

These are so so important and I talk about them all the time. I literally wont ever be able to stress enough how important compound exercises are for every aspect of your body, and in particular your glutes. If I could only perform one form of exercise for the rest of my life it would be compound exercises. They have so so many benefits and work every single large muscle group in your body. Every single leg and booty day should involve compound movements. I would go as far to say centre your workouts around them. These are all forms of your squats, deadlifts and lunges. I would include 2-3 of these into your workout. And for optimal growth, you want to be training your legs around 3 times a week. But make sure you are getting adequate rest in between. Remember with these moves to also go HEAVY. This is where you will make the most gains.

2. Eat

Think of food as fuel. If you are only consuming enough to provide you with the energy expenditure you use per day, there is none left over to go towards anything else. Basically, if you don’t eat a significant amount, you wont put on size. Unfortunately we cannot control where we want the weight to go. But if you implement proper training along with a healthy balanced diet of a lot of food, you will make good gains. Of course, with increase in muscle comes increase in fat, we cant help this, so it really depends on your goals. We need to make sacrifices. If you want to gain muscle, you need to be prepared to put on a little bit of extra fluff, because like fat, muscle will only increase if it is fed. It’s the opposite on the other end of the scale, if you want to lose weight, you will have to sacrifice a bit of muscle mass for this also. So just figure out what is the most important to you at this point in time. But if you want a booty, you wont get very far if you are not eating in a slight surplus.

3. Activation

This is a big one and is something I am actually guilty of not implementing enough. Our glutes are such a large muscle group and it takes a long time to get them fired up. I am struggling to think of a good example to compare them to, if you can think of a good one, let me know in the comments below.

I am going to go with a grumpy teenager analogy. Think about how long it takes to wake up a teenager at 7am to get ready for school. They probably snooze their alarm, their parents come in a few times to try wake them up, and after all these little nags, eventually they are up. It is similar with our glutes, they are such a big muscle that it takes longer to get them to wake up and take over. Usually, when performing our compound movements, a lot of us will be quad dominant and have the quads take over. However, if you activate your glutes beforehand, this will help get them ready to be the dominant muscle used for the movement. You can activate your glutes through crab walks, leg raises, glute bridges etc. You can also add a band if you want to get that extra isolation activation before your workout. This also helps to engage the mind to muscle connection throughput your workout which makes a big difference.

4. Progression

The last one I want to talk about is progression. You simply wont get far if you are not progressing. So TRACK YOUR WORKOUTS. This is so important, so you make an active decision to lift heavier than you did last session. When I don’t track my workouts, 99% of the time I will just stick to the same weight or rep range, because I wont be thinking - ok so I did this much weight last week, so today lets push for this. This is why I also highly recommend following a program and not just going in doing whatever on the day. With a program, you will be progressing throughout - and practice makes perfect. Stick to one program for about 6-8 weeks, and then move onto another one. Don’t switch it up every week, you will just end up moving in a circle.

You also do not just have to increase the weight. There are so many other forms of progression, for example your range of motion (maybe you are aiming for a deeper squat), time under tension (adding a pause at the bottom of the movement), increasing the reps or increasing the sets etc etc. There is so much you can play with. Just keep the exercises consistent and TRACK.

Lastly, I want to note down a few of my favourite exercises that I like to implement on my leg and booty days, so you can give them a go too :)

• sumo dead lift

• stiff leg romanian deadlift

• squat (conventional, sumo and front)

• leg press

• glute pull through

• hip thrusts

• good mornings

Thank you so much for reading this and if you read my blog posts on a regular basis. I want to run a little competition to say thank you. I am going to give away a free 8 week workout guide tailored specifically to you. So if you would like a chance to have me design this for you, to enter all you need to do is take a screenshot of my blog and share it to your Instagram story! Also go onto my page and tag two friends in my most recent instagram post. I will announce the winner in next weeks blog :)

Also - I am sorry if this post seems messy and all over the place, I genuinely spent like an hour and a half writing it and then accidentally deleted the whole thing and tried to recreate it in 30 mins lol. But oh well, these things happen. I promise the next one will be much better quality.

Thank you so much again and see you next week xx