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What does a good training program for your glutes look like? What exercises should you do, and how many sets and reps should you do?
In this article, you will read about a training program that will be effective not only for building bigger and stronger glutes, but that will make your entire lower body stronger and more muscular. Most of the exercises are heavy and require hard work on your part, but if you stick with it and increase the poundages regularly for a few months, you will reap great training results.
The program consists of two workouts which you will alternate between. You should train twice a week, meaning that in a given week you will do one each of the two workouts. If you feel that you recover fast and that you can increase the weights you are lifting even if you are training more often, you could try and bump the frequency up to three sessions per week. Still alternating between the two workouts, though.
Which Glute Exercises Should You Do?
The three largest muscles that make up your butt are the gluteus muscles:
- Gluteus maximus
- Gluteus medius
- Gluteus minimus
These three muscles all have wide, fan-shaped origins, which means that they can pull your thigh bone (femur) in many different directions depending on which muscle fibers are contracting.
To work as many of your glute muscle fibers as possible, this program includes exercises in which your glutes will be working in three different directions of movement:
- Vertically (like squats and deadlifts)
- Horizontally (like hip thrusts)
- Externally (like seated hip abductions or lateral walk with band)
If you include glute exercises for these three directions of resistance in your training, you will be working pretty much all the muscle fibers of your glutes, and get the best possible training effect.
The Training Program
To recap: the training program consists of two workouts per week. Spread your workouts out over the week, so that you get a couple of rest days in between. For example, you could train on Mondays and Thursdays.
Each workout begins with a warm-up which prepares you for the heavier training that follows. The training itself, then, mostly consists of classic barbell lifts but finishes off with some elastic band exercises.
Aim to increase your training weights in the basic barbell lifts every workout. If you can’t increase the weight, try to do one more rep than last time. Do this without compromising your technique. Your glute growth and your strength gains are completely depending on your ability to increase the weight you can lift or the reps you can do, and it should be your main priority every time you go to train. If you don’t increase the weight or reps, you won’t grow.
Workout 1
Warm-Up
3 rounds of:
- 10 glute bridge with a band around your knees
- 20 left-side clamshells with a band around your knees
- 10 left-side clamshells with a band around your knees, pumping in the top range of motion
- 20 right-side clamshells with a band around your knees
- 10 right-side clamshells with a band around your knees, pumping in the top range of motion
Main Workout
Rest 2–3 minutes between sets. Do all sets of an exercise before you move on to the next.
- Squat: 3 sets x 6 reps
- Hip Thrust: 3 sets x 8 reps
- Romanian Deadlift: 3 sets x 10 reps
- Hip Abduction Against Band: 3 sets x 20 reps
Workout 2
Warm-Up
3 rounds of:
- 30 banded side kicks per side
- 30 frog pumps
- 30 glute bridge with feet on a step-up board
Main Workout
Rest 2–3 minutes between sets. Do all sets of an exercise before you move on to the next.
- Deadlift: 3 sets x 6 reps
- Bulgarian Split Squats: 3 sets x 10 reps
- Hip Thrust with Band Around Knees: 3 sets x 12 reps
- Lateral Walk with Band: 3 sets x 20 reps/side
Progression
In addition to increasing the weights you use in the exercises, you can also increase the training volume as the weeks go by.
After three weeks of training, you can add one set of each of the exercises in the main part of the workout, so that you will be doing four sets of each. Don’t add to the warm-up, however, just keep it as it is. After another three weeks of training, you can add another set to the main exercises, putting them at five sets each.
After another three weeks, or when you can no longer increase the weights you are using, do a deload by going back to three sets per exercise. Also, decrease your training weights by 10–15% and start increasing them a little bit every workout again, eventually aiming to reach a new peak before you need to do another deload.
Summarized, it looks like this:
- Week 1–3: 3 sets/exercise
- Week 4–6: 4 sets/exercise
- Week 7–9: 5 sets/exercise
- Week 10: Deload and start over
And that’s it! A simple but very effective glute training program, that can give you great glute growth and strength gains if you give it your best effort.
This training program is available for free in our workout log app StrengthLog, which will also make it easy for you to keep track of the weight you used last time, as well as all your PR’s. The program is named “BootyBuilding” in the app.
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Read more about glute training in our guide How to Train Your Glute Muscles: Exercises & Workout.
