Glute Stretches to Improve Your Flexibility

In this guide, you get six glute stretches that can improve your flexibility and range of motion, plus a quick and simple stretching routine.

What Are the Glutes?

Your butt muscles – the glutes – are a trio of muscles that control your hips and allow you to stay upright.

• The gluteus maximus is the largest of all muscles and the strongest of the three. It extends your hip so you can sprint and jump and do squats on leg day.
• The gluteus medius moves your leg to the side and keeps your pelvis level when you walk or stand on one leg.
• The gluteus minimus is the smallest and deepest of the three, but it doesn’t let that stop it from helping with hip abduction and rotation.

Together, they generate force and keep your lower body stable, with maximus being power and medius/minimus being stability and control.

Every squat you do depends on them being there for you.

Should You Stretch Your Glutes?

If your glutes feel like two blocks of concrete by 5 PM, it’s easy to think of stretching as the salvation. But is it always?

Not necessarily. It feels great right there and then, but let’s look at what’s really happening back there.

Your glutes could be tightening up because they’re too weak or to compensate for a lack of strength or control somewhere else around your hips.

And if that’s the real reason, you need strength, not just stretching. If you pull on an already overstretched rubber band, you get a looser and weaker rubber band. Just like that, stretching can be a temporary band-aid, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

In the case of a weak butt or weak muscles around the butt, the real solution is strength training. Squats, lunges, hip thrusts, and Romanian deadlifts should take care of things surprisingly quickly.

It used to be that lifting weights made you stiff and inflexible, or so people thought (and some are still misinformed), but that’s not the case.

On the contrary. Strength training through a full range of motion is just as effective for improving your flexibility as stretching. Perhaps even more so.^{1 2}

And the best thing is that it builds muscle and strength at the same time as it keeps the tightness and stiffness away.

That doesn’t mean that you should never stretch your glutes. Stretching can absolutely have a place, and it does improve flexibility. Plus, it can feel really nice. It just shouldn’t be your first line of action if you have glutes that tighten up on a regular basis.

For a lifter, stretching your glutes can help you move better during your leg workouts. And limber up afterward. But if that tightness keeps coming back, stretching alone might not do the trick.

6 Great Glute Stretches

These stretches are for when you feel normal tightness and for when you want to improve your range of motion, not if you have an injury and want to try to “stretch it out.”

Because that doesn’t usually work. If anything, stretching an injured muscle can make the healing take longer, not speed it up. So, unless your physio has told you to stretch an injury, stick to getting blood to the muscle with non-painful movement instead.

1. Lying Knee Hug

This is one of the easiest and gentlest glute stretches around. It’s also very nice for a stiff lower back.

Definitely one more for relaxing the muscles than for developing circus-level flexibility.

How to Do the Lying Knee Hug

1. Lie down on your back.
2. Bring both knees up and clasp your hands around your shins or wrap them behind your thighs.
3. Draw your knees to your chest until you feel a stretch in your glutes and lower back.
4. Hold the stretch.

2. Deep Squat Stretch

Another beginner-level glute stretch, this one is also great for the adductors (inner thighs) and for ankle mobility. It’s often called a yoga squat.

Speaking of ankle mobility, if you don’t yet have enough of it, you can place small weight plates under your heels so you can squat down far enough to feel it in your glutes.

How to Do the Deep Squat Stretch

1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and your toes slightly outward.
2. Bend your knees and lower yourself into a deep squat.
3. Keep your heels on the floor if you can.
4. Bring your hands together in front of your chest.
5. Place your elbows inside your knees and lightly press them outward.
6. Hold the stretch.

3. Spinal Twist

This stretch combines a good glute stretch with spinal rotation. Try it if you’ve been sitting in front of a screen or driving all day – it really loosens up the stiffness.

You can do it either with both legs at the same time or with one leg at a time. The latter variant is a bit more intense, with more rotation and hip stretch.

1. Lie on your back with both legs straight.
2. Bring one knee toward your chest.
3. Use the opposite arm to guide that knee across your body.
4. Hold the stretch.
5. Repeat with the other leg.

4. Seated Side Twist Glute Stretch

The seated side twist is one of the most popular glute stretches. It also targets the hips and lower back.

You can do it several ways: bending one leg while twisting your torso, or keeping your torso straight while pulling your bent leg across your body.

The first involves more of a hip stretch with trunk rotation, while the latter loads your glute and hip muscles more without the same spinal twist.

How to Do Seated Side Twists

1. Sit with your legs extended out in front of you.
2. Bend one knee and bring your foot up close to your butt.
3. Cross the bent leg’s foot over the opposite leg and pull the bent leg across your body (optional).
4. Keep your torso facing forward for more glute focus, or twist toward the bent leg for more rotation.
5. Hold the stretch.
6. Switch sides and repeat.

5. Figure-4 Stretch

This is a lying stretch for both the glutes and the hip rotators, like the piriformis. The name comes from your legs forming the shape of the number 4 when you do it. It’s also called the reclining pigeon in yoga.

The more you pull, the more stretch you get, but don’t lift your tailbone while you’re at it. If your lower back rounds off, you lose some of the hip stretch.

How to Do the Figure-4 Stretch

1. Lie on your back.
2. Bend both knees and place one ankle across the opposite thigh, just above the knee.
3. Clasp your hands behind the hamstring or over the shin of the uncrossed leg.
4. Draw the leg toward your chest.
5. Hold the stretch.

You can also do a figure-4 stretch seated, sitting on a chair and placing one ankle over the opposite knee. From there, hinge forward from your hips. A more discreet version when you have to loosen up at work instead of lying down like a beetle on the office floor.

6. Pigeon Pose

Look like a pigeon that has crash-landed with this classic stretching exercise! Good thing it’s actually very effective for stretching your glutes.

It’s a really nice and deep glute and hip stretch, though not beginner-level.

How to Do the Pigeon Pose

1. Start on your hands and knees.
2. Bring your right knee toward your right wrist.
3. Place your right foot toward your left side.
4. Slide your left leg straight back behind you.
5. Keep your hips facing forward.
6. Stay upright, or fold forward over your front leg and onto your forearms.
7. Hold the stretch.
8. Repeat on the other side.

Don’t force your front knee into an uncomfortable or painful angle.

If you don’t yet have the flexibility to get into the standard pigeon pose, you can do the reclining pigeon pose instead.

It’s very similar, but you lie on your back and can control the intensity of the stretch more easily.

How to Do the Reclining Pigeon Pose

1. Lie on your back.
2. Bend your right leg and bring it toward your chest.
3. Grab your right foot with your left hand.
4. Grab your right knee with your right hand.
5. Pull your right shin toward you.
6. Hold the stretch.
7. Repeat on the other side.

When to Stretch Your Glutes

When your glutes feel tight, it can be tempting to drop into a pigeon stretch to loosen up before training.

But don’t do it. Before lifting, you don’t want to relax your glutes, and that’s what static stretching does (plus, it might make you a bit weaker for a few hours).³

You want them warm and ready to produce as much force as possible, and that means dynamic mobility.⁴ Some good examples include leg swings, bodyweight lunges, air squats, and glute bridges.

That all being said, static stretching has its place, too. It improves range of motion very well, and the less flexibility you start with, the more effective it is.⁵

But save your longer static glute stretches for after your workouts or for another time entirely, instead of tanking your power output right before a heavy set.

Avoid These Stretching Mistakes

Stretching your glutes is tough enough as it is, with them being so strong and dense. Don’t make it even harder by making these mistakes.

1. Twisting your pelvis. If you rotate your pelvis to try to get deeper, you might feel like you’re getting a better effect, but chances are you’re turning your glute stretch into a lower back or hip stretch instead. Not necessarily wrong, but not what you were going for.
2. Forcing range. Ties into #1. Stop when you get that good stretch in your glutes, but not to the point where you compensate somewhere else, or you’ll round your lower back or put a knee into a weird angle.
3. Pulling your foot too hard in the lying pigeon pose or figure-4, for example, is a big blunder. Your glutes don’t connect to your lower leg. Pulling your foot twists your knee (which it wasn’t made for), but it doesn’t do much for your glute. Hold your foot, but pull higher up.
4. Stretching cold does have its uses, but only if you know what you’re doing and why. Besides, with a dense muscle like a glute, you might not even get into an effective stretch range cold.
5. Stretching weak glutes. If they go back to feeling tight soon after stretching, you might be dealing with weak or underactive glutes, not actually short ones. Try full-ROM strength training, like Romanian deadlifts and deep Bulgarian split squats (as deep as you can, anyway) instead.

A Simple Glute Stretch Routine

A good post-leg-workout glute stretch routine can be very simple, like this:

Stretch	Time
Lying Knee Hug	45–60 seconds
Figure-4	45–60 seconds
Seated Side Twist	45–60 seconds

You can add a kneeling hip flexor stretch to the above. It’s not a glute stretch per se, but it fits in nicely after squats, deadlifts, or lunges. Tuck your pelvis, and squeeze the glute of the kneeling leg instead of pushing your hips hard forward and down.

One or two rounds are enough.

It works on a separate mobility day, too. Be sure to warm up first, with walking, jumping rope, cycling, or something similar.

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You can find all the glute stretches in this guide in our free workout log app, StrengthLog, along with many other neat mobility exercises for the entire body.

But where the app really shines is for tracking your training. If you don’t track your training, making progress becomes much more of a challenge than it needs to be.

If you need workouts to build a stronger butt, check out the StrengthLog app for that, too. We’ve got:

• Glute Workout: A great stand-alone glute workout.
• Bootybuilding: A 2-day glute-heavy program.
• THICC: Our popular lower-body-focused program.

All are free in the app.

Final Rep

Glutes locked up tighter than a bank vault? That’s no good. They’ll lock up your entire body and prevent you from performing your best.

If yours feel tight because they’re not strong enough or you spend too much time sitting on your butt, stretching isn’t the answer, at least not on its own. You need to make them stronger first.

But if you have that strength and stability and need extra range for the gym, a sport, or to loosen up after a long day at the desk, try a few of these stretches.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your training (and stretching).

And for more great stretching exercises, check out these resources:

• Adductor Stretches to Improve Your Flexibility
• Hamstring Stretches to Improve Your Flexibility

Last reviewed: 2026-09-21

References

1. Healthcare (Basel). 2021 Apr 7;9(4):427. Strength Training versus Stretching for Improving Range of Motion: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
2. Sports Med. 2023 Jan 9;53(3):707–722. Resistance Training Induces Improvements in Range of Motion: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
3. J Sport Health Sci. 2024 May 10;13(6):805–819. Revisiting the stretch-induced force deficit: A systematic review with multilevel meta-analysis of acute effects.
4. BMC Sports Sci Med Rehabil. 2023 Aug 29;15(1):106. A systematic review and net meta-analysis of the effects of different warm-up methods on the acute effects of lower limb explosive strength.
5. Sports Med. 2025 Mar;55(3):597-617. Optimising the Dose of Static Stretching to Improve Flexibility: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis and Multivariate Meta-regression.