Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 326: 9 Tips for Major Glute Growth (3 key exercises + Tips!)

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, we are going to be going over nine tips for optimizing glute growth. Now, most of you want strong, developed physiques overall. And I know many of you are very specific about your glutes in particular being muscles that you particularly would like to develop. We're going to go over every tactic, every trick from nutrition to training strategies, stuff I'm doing in 2023 to help my clients grow their glutes. You can use this in your own training, whether you're

a beginner or you're highly advanced, you can take these concepts and use them with your clients. And most importantly, you can apply them to almost every other muscle group. This is just a question I get very often. So I did want to make a standalone podcast that had some resources attached to it that people could come back to. And this is one that I'll update every couple of years as I change how it is that I train different muscle groups with the things I learn as I continue coaching in person and applying these principles with clients. So tons to learn today, talking nutrition, talking training concepts, talking training variability, and what you can do to maximize the growth and development of your glutes. It's going to be a good one. to maximize the growth and development of your glutes. It's going to be a good one.

This podcast wouldn't be possible if it wasn't thanks to support from our awesome partners, one of whom is Vivo Barefoot. Vivo makes the best barefoot training shoe on the market. For years, I stayed away from barefoot training shoes, despite knowing the benefit of low cushion, wide toe box shoes for the health of our feet, the intrinsic musculature that helps support everything that we do. I stayed away from these shoes because I thought they were ugly. But that was until, of course, Vivo started producing some absolutely gorgeous barefoot training shoes. These are low cushion, lightweight, breathable trainers that have a ton of bend, a ton of flex, low cushioning to provide for optimal stimulation of the proprioceptors at the bottom of your foot. Fun fact, 70% of the proprioceptive cells in your body, the cells that tell your body where it is

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offering listeners of this podcast a special 10% off order by using the code DANNY10 on vivobarefoot.com. You can just scroll down to the show notes and grab a pair, but these shoes are fantastic. They're beautiful. They train incredibly well. They're durable, and I promise they'll be the best pair of shoes you've ever had in the gym. Again, that's vivobarefoot.com, and check out using the promo code DANNY10 to save 10% on the best pair of shoes you've ever owned. on the best pair of shoes you've ever owned. So the first thing that I would recommend doing for anybody who is serious in any capacity about increasing muscular growth in any muscle. So if you want to build muscle anywhere in your body, before you consider adding more training volume, it might make sense to consider adding more

calories. Too many people make the mistake of trying to increase training volume, doing more sets, doing more reps without a corresponding nutritional stimulus, something like more protein or more calories to actually facilitate better muscle growth. So if you want to grow your glutes, if you want to develop your posterior chain, your pecs, your triceps, your lats, you name it, the first thing we do, or we have a tendency to do, is to increase training volume. And you'll actually, that is such a base level thing, it's not even on the list. Like if you wanted to talk about the most obvious things you can do to grow any muscle, increasing training volumes, obviously on there.

But one of the most common mistakes I see people make when it comes to building muscle is increasing training volume without a corresponding increase in nutritional input. Like I'm training more, more volume, more sets, more reps, more frequency, but I did nothing to increase nutrient availability. There is no increase in caloric intake. There's no increase in protein. And if you're trying to build muscle optimally, it's a good idea to have more carbohydrate and more protein. And this couldn't be more true for women who seem to be the primary demographic who like want to develop their glutes. And there is a little bit of, there's a little bit of a, you know, kind of baked in societal influence on women when it comes to making fitness decisions,

where eating more is oftentimes very daunting. You know, you, I've been coach, I've been coaching for 10 years. And I will say this, it is a lot easier to get women to train more and train harder than it is to get them to eat more because of some of these societal expectations and what it is that they've come to believe about food that quite frankly is sometimes harmful and flat out untrue. And one thing a lot of women do is they make an attempt at growing a muscle, particularly the glutes, and they try to do it with just simply too few calories and too few carbohydrates, too little protein to actually get meaningful, intense training for long periods of time. If you told me, if you walked up to me in the gym and you said, I want to grow my glutes,

I want to get big, juicy glutes. I would say, okay, until you can deadlift, let's say like, I think you could use these strength standards. Like if a woman wants to develop her glutes, two things you can work on immediately increase the strength of your Romanian deadlift that is training the glutes in their lengthened position and increase the strength of your glutes on something like a hip thrust where the glutes are working in the shortened position. With that, you need to increase your caloric intake. Eat 200 to 500 more calories per day. Get a good chunk of that from carbohydrates. That's your training fuel. And make sure that you're eating enough protein and getting enough sleep to build muscle. Two exercises, RDLs, hip thrusts, get strong, get really strong. I'm

talking about being able to move significant weight for sets of six, for sets of eight, for sets of 10. If you can get your Romanian deadlift up as a chick to 135, 185, 225 pounds, and you can get your hip thrust from maybe it's 185 to 225, 275, 315 plus, and you're eating 200 to 500 extra calories a day and you're eating protein, where do you think that's going to go? It's going to go right to your glutes. So the first thing you have to do if you want to build your glutes is get real about adjusting your caloric intake to match concurrently with your training volume increases, right? You want to grow your glutes. You've already made this decision. You're going to train them more. That's pretty obvious, but it might not be as obvious to you that whenever you

up the training volume, you need to up the nutritional input. Now, if you're really trying to lose fat at the same time, you got to have the calories input. Now, if you're really trying to lose fat at the same time, you got to have the calories low, you got to be in a deficit understandable, and the glute volume that you keep elevated will help you maintain and prevent muscle loss. So let's talk about another muscle growth tip does not get enough, in my opinion, enough credit for being an effective tool, and that is increasing training frequency. For natural lifters, training close to failure is very important, but you also need to make sure that you're not training too much. You're not doing too much volume, especially in one session.

Now, how many hard, challenging sets you can do close to failure in one session, that's going to vary quite a bit from lifter to lifter. But for the average natural lifter, I'd say you can get one to two sets per exercise, pretty close to failure. But if you're doing 20, 30 sets of workout, that can be tricky. So one thing I like to do is I like to train two to three times a week instead of just one, two to three times a week instead of just one, spread that volume out so I can get two to three different kind of attempts at increasing my exposure to that stimulus. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you want to get a tan and you say, I'd like to go from a pasty shade of Ron Weasley pale to a gorgeous Jason Momoa bronze. Would you want to go outside in the sun once a week for one hour or three times a week for 20 minutes? The same total time,

but you're spreading that out across three tanning sessions versus spreading it out across one. So here's the analogy in essence. When we talk about muscle growth, we're talking about stimulation, right? We're training to stimulate muscle growth, very similarly to how sitting in the sun stimulates the melanocytes in the body to produce more melanin because of the exposure to the sun. If you spend too much time in the sun, you'll get burned. Just like if you do too much volume at one time, you might not be able to recover from it. So in my book, the analogy is actually pretty simple. If you wanted to get a tan, you probably wouldn't want to try to do two hours of tanning in one session. You'd run too much of a risk of getting burned. But if you did that same amount of time spread out over a couple different sessions,

you probably won't run as high a risk of getting burned and you might end up actually producing more melanocytes. So when it comes to, or more melanin from the melanocytes, when it comes to training, especially a big, strong muscle like glutes, I like to spread that heavy, close to failure, hard work across a couple different sessions with the two days in between. So for elite physique, the female bodybuilding app that I have, you're going to see two to three times a week, we're going to train glutes, but we're going to allocate, you know, a few sets here, a few sets there, a few sets on the weekend, you know, versus like this whole day is nothing but glutes. Now, even when we have a day where

primary focus is glutes, maybe the session title is even like glutes, glutes and hamstrings, you're still going to see other muscles come to the table and you're still going to see the overall set volume make sense. So getting into the first key exercise, this is the third tip for glute growth. For years and years and years, I have heard the argument, what's better for glute growth, squats or hip thrusts? And it's always those two exercises being discussed. I think back to circa 2015 in the fitness industry. Around 2015 to 2018 is when this got big. Everybody wanted to grow their glutes. Everybody says like, I want to build big glutes. I want to get a huge glutes and are a huge ass. And, and the meme was like squat, squat, squat, squats, build a huge

glutes, uh, or squats, build huge glutes. So if you go back in time, squats were kind of the king. And then, you know, Brett Contreras and his, his philosophies around band work and hip thrusts. And those became very popular and kind of, you know, from 2015 to 2020, we saw the squat and the hip thrust really duking it out as the two primary exercises people were using to grow their glutes. But the literature and the science around hypertrophy kind of shifted in 2021. What you started to see was a greater emphasis in research on studying these lengthened positions where muscles are stretching and they're exposed to a greater stretch. And what we find is when muscles are stretching and they're lengthening, there seems to be a unique response and a positive

association with better growth. We love that. What compound movement stretches the glutes like crazy and helps develop the posterior chain? The Romanian deadlift. So everybody's out here arguing, is it squats or is it deadlifts or is it hip thrusts? It's usually squats and hip thrusts. They're debating. I think that it is deadlifts, but specifically the Romanian deadlift. That is the best exercise for glute growth. It's a compound movement. It drains the glutes in a lengthened position. It's fabulous for the hamstrings. It also strengthens the back and the core, and it helps develop a great posterior chain. And I'm not saying you're silly forever trying to just pick one exercise to begin with, but that's my number one. If you want big

glutes, you got to get good at your Romanian deadlift. And if you do have back issues that preclude you from going very heavy on Romanians, that's okay. There's awesome options like single legs, B stance, and even cables. But what we want to do is get stronger in the hip hinge position. get stronger in the hip hinge position. Another switch that I've absolutely loved, something that in fitness culture gets hammered is using the Smith machine. Everybody in fitness gets this bright idea that because free weights have so much data associated with positive fitness outcomes, strength outcomes, muscularity outcomes, range of motion outcomes that in every context imaginable, free weights are better than machines. Well, guess what? That's bullshit. The Smith machine is a machine that kind of lets you emulate a barbell. The only trade-off is the barbell is on a fixed path. It's going up and

down or slightly in and out. But here's something I love about the Smith machine. It's an extremely stable machine, and it lends itself amazing to one glute exercise in particular. So over the years of squats and hip thrusts and RDLs and all these exercises, I did a lot of hip thrusts with my clients. I really like them. I would say I program hip thrusts for myself less than I do for my clients because my glutes seem to respond like crazy to them. And I don't actually like how big my glutes are, which I know for some people is like weird. I respond really well to hip thrusts. I program hip thrusts all the time. And I used to bash on the Smith machine and machines. But then I found like an interesting crossover. And that is that when I was doing a lot of hip thrusts and getting really strong, I could feel that

balancing a bar with that much weight on each side is just kind of awkward. So think about this. You're in a hip thrust, uh, or you're doing a hip thrust. Your feet are planted. You're extending your hips. You have this big ass bar sitting on your lap. It's kind of uncomfortable. Wouldn't it be nice if you had one less thing to worry about in that position? And that's when it kind of clicked. It's like the Smith machine goes straight up and down. And that's exactly what you want with a hip thrust. You want a bar path that is straight up and down, loaded over the glutes, and it eliminates the need to stabilize the bar. So you kind of get to just lock in and feel really comfortable.

And I still do barbell hip thrusts. I still incorporate things like pauses, but I've really enjoyed having clients do more of their hip thrusts on Smith machines or just in general doing more hip thrusts that require less stability when you're going really, really heavy because as stable as a hip thrust feels, it's definitely not the best exercise. I think anybody will tell you this. It's definitely not the best exercise when you got a ton of weight on there. It's digging into your hip bones. It's definitely not the best exercise when you got a ton of weight on there. It's digging into your hip bones. It's like wobbling side to side. It's hard to get exactly in the middle of the bar.

Maybe you don't have the perfect bench for it. A Smith machine can simplify things, make it a little bit easier. And it doesn't really subtract from the movement, in my opinion, in any way, shape, or form. 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 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. The fourth tip I have for you was like switching more of your unstable stuff for stable stuff. We use the hip thrust as an example. Um, and I think you want to have a balance of highly stable work, maybe some with machines and some of that unstable work, single leg work. Like we love lunges and we love split squats. Um, but another balance you have to strike between like unstable and stable getting to tip five is shortened and lengthened. And we talked about the RDL really, really targeting the glutes and working them the

hardest when they're stretched or lengthened. But then you have on the flip side of that, you have like that shortened position work, the stuff where you get the nice pump and that's like hip thrust. So, you know, you're in, in fitness, people make a lot of money making things feel really, really complicated. And you'll hear two terms, a lot shortened position and lengthened position. And if you're not super fitness literate, that can be really, really confusing. Like what the fuck shortened versus lengthened? Like, isn't the muscle shortening and lengthening on every rep? That's 100% true. Here's the thing that you need to remember though.

It's about where the muscle's working the hardest. Is it working harder as it's shortening or is it working harder when it's lengthened? And when you train your glutes, for example, your glutes work very hard when they're lengthened on an RDL, and they work very hard when they're shortened on a hip thrust. And when you train, you probably want to train muscles in a way that they're challenged in both their lengthened and their shortened positions using different exercises. Shortened position exercises tend to help you get a really nice pump and lengthened position dominant exercises oftentimes contribute to that stretch feeling and can be, you know, better at generating DOMS and soreness the next day because of the eccentric component.

It can really be that simple. So for every muscle that you're training, you probably want to train some shortened and some lengthened exercises. And for glutes, I find people tend to lean more towards that pump, that sensation that comes with the shortened positioned exercises. So be sure that you balance it out. Step ups, lunges, all of those hinging exercises like Romanian deadlifts and Romanian deadlift variants are all challenging those glutes in their lengthened position. Now, the shortened ones are things like hip thrusts and 45 degree hip extensions, which I certainly would recommend you do. It's just about striking that balance. If you're not, you're going to have a hard time growing your glutes. Another thing that people forget when it comes to training the glutes is that there is

two functions outside of hip extension. So like on a squat, you extend your hips a little bit, work your glutes. On an RDL, it's all hip extension, working your glutes. But your glutes also perform abduction, just like a lateral raise. And they externally rotate. They point the toes away from the body. So things like abductions on the cable and even those banded abductions, we'll talk about band work a little bit towards the end of the podcast. These are really important exercises for developing strong glutes and the, at the potential for the lateral glute muscles. Like people do hip abduction and they do band work with the assumption that it's going

to grow their glutes. But you have to remember those muscles, the gluteus medius and minimus are small and much like the deltoid or the abs, they're flat in shape. They don't have huge potential for growth the way your gluteus maximus does. That's a big muscle that quite literally looks like half of a beach ball. But the beauty in training your abductors isn't in that they're going to grow to become extremely huge. And many people will lie to you and tell you you'll develop them enough to fill in your hip dips, which maybe you will, maybe you won't. But you'll get a very strong hip complex capable of producing tons of stability and function, both of which are critical for hypertrophy of the gluteus maximus. So you want bigger glutes, you want a stronger

hip thrust, you want a stronger RDL. Believe it or not, it makes sense to have stronger abductors to be able to create more stability, to be able to create more tension. And in the long run, you'll have much bigger, stronger glutes overall and happier hips and back. So don't neglect your abduction work. It's critical. It's important. And while it's not nearly as fun, it's definitely a nice way to break things up. And you can use a cable or a band to train hip abduction. Okay. I think that this one gets overlooked a lot. And that's like what exercises you should select on the basis of your height and specifically on the basis of your femur length. The longer your femurs are, the harder it is to squat deep. And therefore the less likely you're

going to get a deep stretch on your squats for glutes, but you can probably get that same stretch using single leg knee flexion exercises like lunges and leg press a little better. So for taller lifters, you might want to take advantage of that. For shorter lifters with great mobility and really short femurs, somebody like myself, I get amazing glute growth just from squatting, lunging, and leg pressing. Now, for most people, that's not going to be enough. Now, I also get a lot from RDLs too, but I think the shorter you are, the more you can leverage squatting and lunging with ease. And the taller you are, the more you might want to bias

towards lunging, unless you have a very deep squat. It isn't to say that squats aren't good. It's not at all what I'm trying to get at. You're just getting less glute when your squat isn't as deep. And if you're super tall and you're trying to grow your glutes and you're allocating tons and tons and tons of volume to squat, but they're not super deep, I think you're going to miss out. An eighth tip that I have for you, specifically for, and this is one that I've learned. In 2017, I went to San Diego and I went to Brett Contreras' glute lab and I learned the value of doing isometric holds and pauses. And I didn't really know it at the time because I didn't understand muscle physiology.

But going to what we talked about earlier, isometric holds are typically done when a muscle is shortened and those big lengthened stretches are typically done when a muscle is lengthened. So if you're pausing at the top, you're leaning into that shortened position. And this can actually be a great way to generate more muscle growth by spending more time under tension and without using more weight, putting that muscle through a greater stretch or forcing it to contract harder under load when it's shortened. And those things can be really effective at making exercises harder without changing anything on the profile in terms of like weight or range of motion. You're just holding your hip thrust a little longer at the top or lowering your RDL a little slower.

You might also call this tempo. Now, I think of an iso hold or a pulse slash stretch or an iso hold pause at the bottom as a little more than just like a tempo consideration. But what you want to make sure you're doing when you're growing a muscle is controlling the eccentric, which would be a slow tempo on the way down, pausing at the bottom, killing momentum. Okay. You can hold that pause longer if it's like a stretch lengthened exercise, like an RDL for more benefit. And as you contract and flex, you definitely want to be mindful. And on a shortened exercise, like a hip thrust, holding or iso holding at the top

can be really effective. So definitely want to use holds and pauses in your glute training and be mindful of your tempos. And then the last tip I have for you, and this is just one that, And then the last tip I have for you, and this is just one that, you know, you want to talk about fitness roller coasters. You want to talk about trends that have been up and down and up and down. You have to start with band work. Few things have been touted more sensationally than like bands for glute work, but also few things have been hammered more. Like some people will tell you bands are amazing. That's all they do. And other people will tell you they are a complete waste of time. But the person who gets it right, unsurprisingly, is one of the people who trains the most glutes ever. And that's Brett Contreras to bring him up again on the podcast.

He described band work to me in a way that makes so much sense when he called it penalty-free volume. Just to say, it's not going to fatigue your body or your nervous system the way heavy resistance training is, but it will allow you to amplify the metabolic stimulus you get from your glute training and apply more volume, develop better mind-muscle connection, get abduction into the glutes, which is good for growth and stability. So many good things happen when you do the right amount of band work. The key word is the right amount, or the key phrase is the right amount. You want to do enough to enhance your training, but not enough to subtract valuable time away from stuff that

works better. But the good news is it's penalty free. If you do RDL seven days a week, it won't be long before you can't train at all because of the fatigue and the demand. But if you do RDLs two days a week and fill in the gaps with something like mindful band work, you're going to end up in a great position to train your glutes more frequently, to get connected with that sensation, and hopefully to develop better intra and intermuscular coordination, which in the long term, you could definitely argue would help with muscle growth, especially in a muscle like the glutes. Okay, folks, there you have it. That is nine tips for improved muscle growth in your glutes. The first thing, just bullet point list, the nine things you need to do to grow your glutes. You need to eat more calories. You need to eat enough protein and you need to eat enough carbohydrates to train hard.

So suffice to say, number one, you need to eat enough to grow and you need enough of the right stuff to fuel training and recovery. Second thing, train them two to three times a week instead of one. Third thing, get stronger on RDLs. That is my favorite glute exercise. Number four, go to stable exercises and unstable exercises when appropriate. Make sure you strike a balance. Strike a balance between shortened and lengthened. That's number five. Don't neglect abduction and rotation. Number six, and take your height into consideration. Like don't lie to yourself if you're tall or if you're short, make the right choices based on your joints and limb lengths. Play with your iso holds and pauses and take advantage of penalty-free band work. Nine tips you can use to grow your glutes.

And most of those are going to lend themselves well to any other muscle. So some hypertrophy philosophy shared today, some tips and tricks. I hope you found value. Tons and tons of free resources in the show notes on the website, corecoachingmethod.com for coaching, for guides, for the episodes of the podcast, YouTube Danny Matranga for video and exercise tutorials, Instagram and TikTok Danny Matranga

for fun, educational, and inspirational content. Let's get more people buff, more people muscular, more people muscular, more people healthy. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to share this and tag me on Instagram so I can say thank you. I will catch you guys on the next episode.