Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 24 - 4 Moves For Great Glutes, and WHY + Are Hip Thrusts Overhyped?

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

In this episode, Danny shares the FOUR best moves for developing glutes he has used with clients for years. Each movement's best features and biggest drawbacks will be explored in an effort to create the best understanding of why it is these movements are so effective.Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS: Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Welcome in everybody to the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host Danny Matranga and today we're talking all things glutes including is the hip thrust overrated? What are the best movements you can do for the glutes? And most importantly, why are these movements so effective? Now, I'm not going to dive too deeply into the science because, quite honestly, much of the glute science and much of the glute data that we have access to has been in many ways contaminated by individuals in the industry with a special interest and a very, very liberal interpretation of EMG data. So I'm not trying to take shots, but if you are a coach, you've been in the industry long enough, you know who the glute people are, you know how the science gets done, and you know that it's not always super reputable. What I like to look at is, hey, what does the science say? What does the application of that science say in the gym? What are people doing with clients? What are clients doing on their own? What are people doing that are having tremendous success developing the glutes? Because as somebody who works with mostly female clients, shit,

even 70% of my social media following is women. Glutes tend to be a topic that comes up a lot. And it's a part of the development of the female physique that many women are driven to, of course, achieve. Particularly in recent years, glutes have been very popular. You know, growing up, I don't recall glutes ever being really, you know, nearly as present in society as they are now, right? Like, they're borderline a meme, you know? It's something that a lot of women and men alike are making an effort to develop with their time in the gym and ensuring that you're training properly and selecting the right movements is really, really important. So I've actually compiled a list of glute exercises

that I particularly like. But before we dive into it, we need to first talk about what it is that the glutes really do. So when we talk about the glute muscles, we're talking primarily about three muscles. The biggest one is the gluteus maximus, right? Max, big, there you go. That's the main glute. It's the one that makes up the meat of your glutes. And it's primarily responsible for hip extension. Okay, that's moving your hips forward like you do at the top of the squat, at the top of a hip thrust, and at the top of a deadlift. Hip flexion is the opposite movement.

Hip extension is when the hips come forward. They also do some abduction or abduction. The reason a lot of coaches, doctors, physical therapists will say abduction or adduction. The reason a lot of coaches, doctors, physical therapists will say abduction or adduction is to clarify because abduction and adduction sound very similar. So saying abduction is a great way to make sure you're clarifying what it is you're referring to. So they also do abduction, which is moving the leg out or away from the body as if you're getting abducted, right? Abduct means something's usually moving away. Adduct, A-D-D, that's add,

usually means we're bringing something in. So that's a great way to remember abduction or abduction versus adduction. So moving the leg out as in a lateral leg kick, for example, or an example of abduction with the arm would be a lateral raise. Now they also play a role in external rotation, which is kind of just if you're standing straight up, rotating your hips outward so that your feet go from pointing straight ahead to pointing toward the more lateral side of your body. Now the other two are the glute medius and the gluteus minimus, which are going to, again, assist with that abduction and that external rotation. They're much smaller, and they're located kind of laterally on the outside

of the hip, and they don't contribute nearly as much to the development of that glute complex from a size standpoint, but they're really important muscles for the health, quote unquote, health of the hip, of the low back, for gait, which is walking, running. All of these things, they play a role, and developing them might require some particular adjustments to your training. For the example, the inclusion of bands is very popular to hit the glute med and the glute min. So now we've established what it is exactly that the glute muscles really do from a biomechanical or at least a functional standpoint. Now it's time to kind of break down how to get the most bang for your buck, particularly from a physique development standpoint. Given that

the medius and minimus are so small, we're really going to focus on movements that develop the gluteus maximus. Now, primarily talking about hip extension against some elements of external rotation and abduction, but we're really talking about things that load hip extension. So number one on the list is the barbell hip thrust. Now, talked a little bit about how this one might be slightly overrated, and I will talk more about that as we go. But let's talk about the pros first. It's great for hitting the glutes in the shortened position, okay? So that means when you really feel that hip thrust, is when those glutes are fully contracted, when your hips are extended, when you're squeezing

your glutes, that's that shortened position, okay? Now, that's not necessarily the best position to load an exercise in all the time. You want to load it in the mid-range, the lengthened position, and the shortened position, which is why we're choosing multiple exercises. But that sensation that the barbell hip thrust can elicit, we typically get a lot of sensation when we train something in the shortened position. Think of the straight arm pulldown, for example. That can really help new lifters really feel their glutes, develop a mind-muscle connection, which is a valuable tool over time. It's easy to progress and build confidence with

the hip thrust, right? You could take any schmuck off the gym floor and they can pretty much hip thrust their body weight on session one. And if you find somebody who's never done a hip thrust, but they can squat and deadlift quite a bit, they can probably hip thrust more than they squat and deadlift the first time they ever do the movement. It's got a very short lever arm. It makes it so that you can move a tremendous amount of weight with very little training, which can be good for building your confidence, right? Doing and developing the gluteus maximus and practicing hip extension, right, is a really good way to support long-term quote-unquote back and hip health, right? And it can help you a lot if your goal is to build up other lifts, right? Particularly if hip

extension is an issue on your clean, your squat, your deadlift, practicing isolated hip extension might be very valuable. Now, one of the areas where I think the hip thrust does fall a little bit short is it's hard to load it in the lengthened position, but we have other movements for that. The other thing I really like about the hip thrust is that you can load it in unique ways, right? Particularly with dumbbells, barbells, you can incorporate a band, which I used to be bigger on than I am now. I prefer to do them the way I learned from the N1 education school of thought, which is that you just move into hip extension with a very mild degree of posterior pelvic tilt. You don't hyper-exaggerate it like some teach, and you don't need to use the band. You just really practice initiation and cueing through the gluteus maximus. Now, that being said,

practice initiation and cueing through the gluteus maximus. Now, that being said, it's probably going to be at the top of most people's list because it's really popular right now, but I don't think it's independently enough to develop a fantastic set of glutes. I think it might be a great foundational exercise, but you'll do better in the long term to incorporate other things. So that takes us to exercise number two. That is the Romanian deadlift. I love the Romanian deadlift for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons I like it a lot is because when you think about where it puts a lot of stress on those glutes, it's usually when we're in that lengthened position. So when the bar is closer to the floor, we've extended our hips or flexed our hips back

as far as we can. And we need to use hip extension to get out of that position. We're going to use a lot of glute. We're going to use a lot of hamstring. Does a tremendous job of building the core, interior core musculature, like the transverse abdominus, as well as the back and upper back from holding the bar. But it's another one that just like the hip thrust, it's pretty easy to progress, right? You can move a lot of weight on it. And these first two are great because they really, really rely heavily on stability. Both of these movements are very stable for the most part, just primarily based on the direction that the load is moving and where we're holding

it relative to our center of mass. But you can move a lot of weight with a lot of stability. And stability is really important when we talk about creating the optimal environment to build muscle because a stable position, a stable joint will create a more powerful, powerful muscular contraction. And that's really important for long-term development. One of the issues though, with the barbell Romanian deadlift is there is a tendency for newer trainees to hyperality in the lumbar spine or the lowest section of your spine. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook.

But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Jamming your hips forward aggressively like a lot of younger lifters tend to do with the Romanian deadlift is a one-way ticket to over-developing some of the wrong musculature, particularly the lumbar musculature that helps with spinal extension. And then you're also going to be feeling it there for a couple days because you're going to fry that stuff and you're not really training the glutes and the hamstrings any more effectively than you would if you simply just thrusted forward into hip extension but met the bar and did not hyperextend the spine. So barbell hip thrusts and barbell RDL are not particularly number one and number two. They're

just the first two on the list. Number three is the barbell squat. Now, for quite some time, barbell squatting kind of got thrown to the side, particularly in the last couple years as an exercise that people kind of demonized for being too quad dominant, which it does tend to be for most people. And I'll explain why that is in a minute. So again, the hip thrust was championed for the last two or three years as the best movement and that the quads do most of the work on squatting, which takes away the glutes ability to really contribute. Now, if you don't have a particularly deep squat, it may be difficult for you to get optimal glute development with it

because a lot of the glute work is done in the deeper ranges of motion of traditional barbell back squatting. Now, that being said, you can work to develop that mobility, or even if you don't have the greatest quote-unquote astagrass squat, you'll still get some glutes. There was even a study done recently which was quite contentious, particularly because it unearthed what seemed to be an absolute mountain of shit surrounding one of the industry's most prominent figures who will go unnamed, but it essentially compared a barbell squat to a barbell hip thrust one rep max, a couple of different training groups. And what we saw was that the squat was actually better at developing the glutes than the barbell hip thrust. Now, this is one study and it does not replace an entire body of

anecdotal evidence or scientific evidence. But what it does tell us is that barbell squats certainly need to be considered as something that can help develop the glutes. Now, I like to do barbell squats quite a bit. It's the bulk of what I've done in my training, and I've developed a pretty considerable set of glutes doing mostly barbell squatting as my main lower body lift. But that's not ideal for everybody. prioritize it or you may move it down a little bit, but from a purely quote-unquote functional standpoint, it's a great movement pattern to train. You can train elements of triple extension, meaning ankle, knee, and hip that are valuable for sport. You can also train overall mobility, stability, and just generally, quote-unquote again, functional strength, right? A squat is something we do quite a bit, and reinforcing that pattern intelligently can be a really good thing for our long-term movement. So I quite like squats. They're a bread and butter movement for building up strength, particularly in the thighs, the core, and the mid-back. And they do an amazing

job of hitting the glutes in certain contexts, particularly if you get great depth. There's a lot of analogs or variations of squatting that are tremendous as well, like front squats or goblet squats. Even deficit squats seem to work exceptionally well for developing the glutes. So don't throw squats out. They tend to work beautifully at developing the glutes. I'm quite a fan. And that brings us now to exercise number four on this list. And I tell people all the time, if I could only do one leg movement, it may be this. And that movement is lunges, okay? Whether it's walking lunges, reverse lunges, or a split squat, or a rear foot elevated Bulgarian style split squat, what you get out of lunges is pretty unique. So the lead leg on a lunge is flexed, okay?

So that leg is in flexion, and we're getting a lot of knee extension. So we get a lot of quad. Now, the posterior leg or the back leg is usually extended. So we get a lot of glutes. So there's a tremendous balance spread across the body if we train lunges both sides, which, of course, I would highly recommend you doing. But what's really interesting is we get the added component of getting to train a little bit of stability, right? Lunges tend to build stability, but they're not insanely unstable.

So we can still get quite a bit of hypertrophy. What I really like about them as well is we can load them with dumbbells, barbells, or even body weight, okay? So it's basically what it comes down to is it's an opportunity for us to work on a tremendous number of things like stability as well as strength as well as developing musculature with little to no equipment all the way up to a ton of equipment. So of all these exercises, lunges may well be the best for the situation we're facing right now with COVID-19, which is of course unfortunate. And if you find this episode later, please do all three for, you know, whatever level of equipment and gym accessibility you have. But I tremendously, tremendously like to incorporate lunges with my clients. They're

excellent. They're great for overall strength development too. They have tremendous carry over to your other lifts. They seem to make everybody better at squats and deadlifts almost immediately when you incorporate them into a program that did not have them. They're tremendous for athletics. They're, uh, athletics, there's very little deleterious impact on the body. I mean lunges will – they do have a tendency to make people quite sore. But relatively speaking, they elicit very little muscle damage because the loading in the eccentric portion tends not to be the focus, right? Because they're not as stable and they're unilateral. We don't use as much weight.

So they're an excellent exercise for developing the glute. And even if you're here just like, hey, I'm a trainer and I want to help my female clients or my male clients grow their glutes, I'm not that interested in it. They're going to make anybody who you work on them with a better mover. Some of the limitations, again, are going to be stability related. So you might have to regress them giving somebody a base of support, something to hold on to. And you can really work your way from there if you have any degree of intuition or ingenuity. But those are the big four guys.

These are the bread and butter glute developers. There's simply nothing better out there, in my opinion, from both what's out there in the science, what's out there in the biomechanics space, what we know about muscles, how they tend to work, how they tend to be loaded, and of course, what people are doing in gyms all across the world. But again, the barbell hip thrust, the barbell Romania deadlift, some form of barbell squat, whether it's front or back, and some form of unilateral work that resembles a lunge, be it a walking lunge, reverse lunge, split squat, elevated rear foot split squat. All of these need to be included in your program, and you need to apply simple tenets of progressive overload, whether that's doing more

reps, more weight, more load. Maybe you want to do a little bit for everything. Maybe you want to build your hip thrust and your squat up from a strength standpoint. And so you do those two movements first. You want to increase the volume on your Romanian deadlift, or maybe work with some tempo there. And you increase the eccentric duration of lowering the weight. And maybe you just want to use a pure volume intensifier for lunges. And you just work on lunging a little bit further at the end of each leg workout. You can do a lot with these. You can get very creative, but at the end of the day, you have to progress them. Simply doing them is not enough to develop the glutes, and that's an

unfortunate thing that gets thrown out there. But the good news is there's no one way to progress a movement. There are several things you can play around with, and because all of these movements are somewhat unique and they do a different job of hitting different muscles, right? None of them are isolation movements. All of them work a ton of muscles. The hip thrust works a little bit of hamstring, but mostly glutes. The RDLs works a lot of the entire posterior chain all the way from your back down to your calves. Lunges work basically the entirety of the lower body as well as stability and squats may work a little bit more quad but they also work a ton of core upper back glutes and even some

hamstrings so they're all very global they're tremendous movements to be doing and they tend to be relatively easy to progress with variable models of progressive overload so play with it guys but at the end of the day, we cannot let hip thrusts be the only glute dominant movement we are doing. Okay, that's one of the problems I found is too many trainees are doing not, I don't want to say too many barbell hip thrusts, but not enough variation. I find that when you allow a muscle to be loaded at various points in its contractile range, meaning we really focus on movements that hit it in the shortened, like a hip thrust, or in the length, and like an RDL, or that are knee dominant, like a squat, or that are hip dominant, like a, you know,

torso dropped Bulgarian split squat, or that maybe they're a little bit more dynamic, like a traditional walking lunge. If we play around with a lot of different things, we'll probably give that muscle the best opportunity to grow. So guys, there you have it. Barbell hip thrust, barbell RDL, reverse lunges, walking lunges, split squats, whatever you want to do in barbell squats. Those are what you should be doing if you want to build your glutes. Bands and stuff are fun. Band work can be really effective, but these need to be your bread and butter. I really appreciate you guys tuning in today. Thank you so much. If you have listened this far to the podcast, I have a little bit of a bonus tidbit for you.

If you take a screenshot and share it to your Instagram story and tag me. I'm going to select five of you and send you out a copy of my female physique program that is tailored around building some of the musculature women want to develop the most like the upper back, shoulders, hamstrings, and yes, of course, the glutes. So five of you are going to get your hands on that completely free simply by sharing this to your Instagram story and tagging me. Thank you so much for listening. Have an awesome day.

And again, remember, it's always a good day to be a good person.