Top Five Exercises to Strengthen and Tone Your Butt

By Aaron Boike, ACE Certified Personal Trainer and Health Coach, B.S. Kinesiology

I recently had a client ask me, “Why are glutes so important? It seems like we spend a lot of time on them!” She couldn’t have been more right, of the major muscle groups, I find that glutes are often the weakest link in many individuals. I tell my clients, the glutes are “the abs of the lower body,” and play just as vital of a role in having a strong core as the abs themselves do. The glutes play a vital role in one of the most fundamental movements that the body produces; hip extension. Hip extension is simply the act of bringing your hips into stacked position above your torso from a hinged position. To get a grip on this, stand a foot away from a wall and stick your butt back until it touches, then bring your hips forward under your torso. You just did hip extension. While this is a very basic form of hip extension, it mimics what we do during our gate cycle, and during a huge range of movements including squatting, lunging, and hinging. Without a strong set of glutes, we cannot have healthy hip extension. In addition to hip extension, the glutes also play an active role in leg abduction (bringing the leg out to the side) and stabilizing leg adduction (bringing the legs together).

Here are five exercises that will help you start to isolate your glutes to add strength and tone to you backside. With each of these movements, focus on squeezing your glutes (litterally done by squeezing the butt cheeks together). Once these exercises are mastered, try incorporating the strong hip extension you’ve learned into heavier weighted movements like barbell squats, weighted lunges, deadlifts etc.

Table Position Hip Press (Try 3 sets of 10, holding for a pause at the top of each repetition)