How to Get a Bigger Butt in 30 Days

So you want a bigger (and rounder) butt with quick results? Happy to see you came to the right place if you want a bigger, stronger, and more bubbly and gravity-defying butt

There aren’t many things that turns heads quicker than a bigger butt. We just can’t help but oogle and think carnal things when we see a pair of round, perky glutes. That’s why so many of us — guys and gals alike — want to know how to get our best butts ever. In this article you’re going to know exactly what you need to do for more butt gains in the next 30 days than you’ve seen in the last 3 months.

It’s more or less what you would think – train your backside a lot – but isn’t that simplistic ?.

We have to warn you, it’s not going to be easy. If you’re looking for ‘weird tricks’ or a diet then this isn’t for you. You simply cannot have a bigger butt by eating or using supplements (companies state that you do are only scamming you).  If, however, you’re ready to learn the simple science of building a badass butt, and if you’re ready to put in some work, then keep reading.

The 3 Bigger Butt-Building Myths

There are many more wrong ways to go about butt building than right ways. And unfortunately, when you look at the bulk of the advice out there on the subject, the bad far outweighs the good. Let’s start, then, by busting a few of the bigger myths that you’ve probably heard and wondered about.

1. You can’t carve godlike glutes with “spot reduction” cardio.

Most people on a quest for the ultimate “Brazilian butt” slave away on cardio machines like the Stepmill or incline treadmill. They believe this will help by isolating and “sculpting” their butts, and while it might seem reasonable that lighting your butt on fire with an hour of climbing or walking would help make it leaner and better defined, it won’t.

Unfortunately, targeted fat loss is a myth, meaning that you can’t trim body fat in specific areas of your body.

You see, while training your muscles burns calories and builds muscle, both of which certainly can aid in fat loss, it doesn’t directly burn the fat covering them to any significant degree.

All you can do, then, is reduce your overall body fat levels and, as a result, every inch of you will lean out to one degree or another. The reason for this is fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion.

You create the proper internal weight loss environment (a caloric deficit), which then reduces fat stores all over the body (although not equally — some areas of the body shed fat faster than others).

That’s why you can do all the crunches you want and never have a six pack or, in this case, all the butt exercises in the world and not have the derriere of your dreams. That is, you can’t until you’ve reduced your body fat percentage to where it needs to be, and that’s more a function of proper dieting than anything else.

The bottom line is getting great glutes requires more or less the same process as any other body part:

Use proper training principles to build the right muscles up, and then use a proper dieting regimen to reduce your body fat percentage.

Do that and, voila, you now have a killer butt.

2. Sprints aren’t as great for building a butt as many people think.

Sprinters generally have great asses, which leads many people to assume that sprinting is the answer. And they’re (mostly) wrong. First, let’s not forget that many sprinters also lift weights, which is why they often have such impressively muscular physiques.

Sprinting alone doesn’t deliver results like that (check out the bodies of sprinters from a few decades ago, before track & field really caught on). Now, that isn’t to say that sprinting doesn’t train the glutes, because it does.

It doesn’t, however, build the butt muscles as effectively as resistance training and also doesn’t preferentially reduce the fat covering them.

Moreover, it’s extremely high-intensity, which means the more you do, the more you increases the risk of injury and overtraining. Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m a big fan of high-intensity interval training, but there are just better ways to train the glutes.

3. You don’t need to do a bunch of fancy exercises to get a bigger butt

“Muscle confusion” is a piece of marketing frippery that just won’t let die. And as long as it keeps selling pills, powders, and PDFs, we’ll keep hearing about it. The truth, however, is constantly changing up your workout routine offers little benefit. In fact, it’s probably more harmful than helpful.

The key to muscle development isn’t variety of exercises but progressive overload.

This applies to all weightlifting exercises, including “butt builders.” Another thing you should know is the gluteus maximus is one muscle. Here’s how it looks:

There’s no such thing as “upper” or “lower” regions of the glutes or “glute-ham tie-in muscles” or anything other than what you see above. Thus, when someone is throwing those types of terms around to try to sell you on their way of building a great butt, just know they’re either ignorant or lying.

Instead of trying to train nonexistent butt muscles in different ways, you need to focus on something much simpler:

Strengthening the gluteus maximus and minimus muscles along with the hamstrings.

And there it is: the “secret” to an awesome butt.

How to Get a Bigger Butt

Most people make two major mistakes in their butt workouts:

1. They mostly do the wrong butt exercises.

They spend far too much time on machines and isolation exercises and far too little time on compound movements like squats and deadlifts.

2. They do too much high-rep training.

They train more to get a nice pump rather than to get stronger, which is one of the easiest ways to hit a plateau.

(This applies to every major muscle group in the body, by the way — not just your glutes.)

And when they start doing the opposite – more compound exercises than isolation, and more heavy training and emphasis on progressive overload over pump –  they inevitably start seeing real changes in their butts (and entire physiques) for the first time in a long time.

This highlights one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about weightlifting and building muscle naturally:

If you want to build muscle consistently and effectively, you want to focus on heavy (80 to 85% of your one-rep max) compound weightlifting.

In terms of butt workouts, that means your bread and butter is heavy barbell and dumbbell squatting and pulling, and your dessert is supplementary work like hip thrusts, glute kickbacks, and split squats.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to have you do in the workouts in this article.

Before we get to that, though, let’s talk diet.

The Diet

You probably know that exercise alone isn’t enough to gain muscle and lose fat.

Ultimately, your success or failure is going to be decided by your diet.

If your body were a car, exercise is the gas pedal and diet is the fuel in the tank. You have to step on the gas (exercise) to get moving (improve your body composition). but how far will you get without enough of the right fuel?

My point is this:

If you know how to manage your fuel (diet) properly, building muscle and burning fat will be easy and straightforward.

If you don’t, it will be ridiculously difficult …if not impossible.

That’s why it’s not enough to just give you a 30-day butt workout routine. We need to set your diet up properly as well.

I already have explained how a good diet works in the following blog post, which I highly recommend you read.

If you don’t, you simply won’t get as much out of them as you should.

The Exercises

Browse the Internet for opinions on the best butt exercises and you’ll quickly be overwhelmed. I have good news, though:

Out of the hundreds you can choose from, very few are actually necessary for achieving your goals. Here they are:

• Squat
• Deadlift
• Romanian Deadlift
• Hip Thrust
• Lunge
• Bulgarian Split Squat
• Glute Blaster

Yup, that’s all you need. Forget the endless lunge and leg lift variations and everything else you see in those flashy Pinterest infographics.

Focus on getting stronger on those key movements above and your butt WILL grow bigger and better.

So, let’s take a closer look at how to do each of the butt exercises you’ll be doing in this 30-day routine.

Squat

There’s a reason why people with great physiques are always banging on about the importance of squatting regularly.

It’s just the single most effective movement for building total lower body strength and muscularity.

If you want great legs and a great ass, you want to take your squatting seriously.

There’s quite a bit that goes into a proper squat (this article will teach you what you need to know about proper form), but here are two key points that relate to butt building:

Squat deep to make your butt work even harder.

The deeper you squat, the more work your legs and butt have to do.

I recommend either full squats or parallel squats, but not half squats. Here’s a good example of proper depth:

A wider stance hits the butt more, too.

Research shows that, when squatting with relatively heavy weights, a wide stance increases the amount of activation in the quadriceps and glutes. Practically speaking, this means adopting a stance that is about 125 to 150% of shoulder-width. Here’s a visual:

Deadlift

If I could only do one exercise every week it would be the deadlift.

It trains everything in your body but your pressing muscles, it builds a tremendous amount of whole body strength and power, and it heavily involves both the hamstrings and glutes. It also lends itself particularly well to heavy lifting, which is crucial for building muscle as efficiently as possible. Like the squat, the deadlift is a fairly technical lift that takes some practice to master.

And in case you’re wondering, research shows that conventional and sumo deadlifts are about equally effective for training the glutes so you can’t go wrong either way. I prefer conventional deadlifting because of the increased range of motion (requiring more work to stand the weight up) but some people like to alternate between them and I don’t see anything wrong with that.

A key point worth calling out before we move on is the importance of full glute activation while deadlifting.

You should be squeezing your glutes as you lift the bar off the ground and should feel them especially involved in the upper half of the ascension and lockout.

This image shows both proper and improper lockout positions, which result in full and partial glute activation:

On the far left you can see the most common lockout mistake people make: the over-extension. This increases the risk of lumbar injury and reduces the amount of glute activation.

Moving right we see a good upright position at lockout but an over-zealous “chest out and shoulders back” position. Another common mistake.

Next on the mistakes is the shrugging lockout, which you want to avoid.

Last we see a proper lockout: upright position, no lumbar extension, no exaggerated chest puffing, and no shrugging. This is how you want to finish your deadlift.

Hip Thrust

The hip thrust is an awkward and embarrassing movement, but it’s also one of the best exercises you can do for isolating and overloading your glutes.

There’s a good reason you’ll you’ll find it just about every fitness competitor’s routine: it’s simple and it works.

There are tons of variations of hip thrusts that you can do but the barbell, band, and single-leg variations are what you want to focus on.

Here’s how to do the barbell hip thrust:

And here’s how to do the band variation:

And last but not least, the single-leg hip thrust:

Lunge

Although the lunge isn’t normally thought of as an effective butt exercise, research shows the glutes are very involved with pulling you back to a standing position.

Here’s the traditional forward lunge:

If you can’t do that due to knee issues, try a reverse lunge instead:

While I personally prefer barbell lunges, dumbbell lunges work well too:

Romanian Deadlift

The Romanian deadlift is a deadlift variation that particularly targets the hamstrings, making it a worthy addition to a glute routine.

(Remember the backside that you want is going to require both glute and hamstring development.)

Here’s how to do it:

Bulgarian Split Squat

Next on our short list of the best butt exercises is another type of squat: the Bulgarian split squat.

This lunge-like movement is very effective for targeting the quads and glutes and here’s how it works:

Glute Blaster

Most workout machines suck. They’re not as safe as many people think and you’ll get more out of free weight movements.

That said, the “Butt Blaster” is a good piece of equipment. It allows you to safely perform a glute-targeted movement that can’t be easily replicated with free weights.

Here it is:

The Workouts

We’ve covered a lot so far — the ideal approach to butt building, the physiology of muscle growth, how to eat right, and the best butt exercises for gaining muscle and strength.

It’s now time to hit the gym and make some butt gains!

Step one is outlining our goal for the next 30 days, and that’s focusing the majority of our time and energy on maximizing glute growth.

As you’ll see, we’re not going to neglect the rest of the body, but we’re going to dial everything else back (reducing both intensity and volume) so we can really hammer our posterior chain for a month.

That’s why this is a 30-day program, by the way.

It’s not a balanced whole-body routine that you should do for an extended period of time — it’s a tool you can use periodically to “shock” your bum into growing and, once that has been accomplished, that should be returned to the toolbox.

So, here’s the workout plan:

Day 1

Lower A

Barbell Back Squat

Warm up and 3 sets of 4 to 6 reps

Romanian Deadlift

3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Barbell or Band Hip Thrust

3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Day 2

Upper A

Incline Barbell Bench Press

Warm up and 3 sets of 4 to 6 reps

Close-Grip Bench Press

3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Seated or Standing Military Press

Warm up and 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Dip (Chest Variation)

3 sets of bodyweight to failure

(Not sure how to do these exercises? Check out this article.)

Day 3

Lower B

Deadlift

Warm up and 3 sets of 4 to 6 reps

Barbell or Dumbbell Lunge

3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Single-Leg Hip Thrust or Single-Leg Glute Bridge

3 sets of bodyweight to failure

Day 4

Rest

 Day 5

Lower B

Barbell Back Squat

Warm up and 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Bulgarian Split Squat

3 sets of 8 to 10 reps

Glute Blaster or Hip Thrust

1 set of 8 to 10 reps

Day 6

Rest

Day 7

Rest

Take measurements, do four weeks of those workouts, and measure again. I promise you that your butt will be bigger. (I also recommend that you take a week to deload before resuming your normal training as your body will probably need a break.) A few points to keep in mind while you’re doing these workouts…

Rest 3 minutes in between your 4-to-6-rep sets and 2 minutes in between your 8-to-10-rep sets.

This will give your muscles enough time to fully recoup their strength so you can give maximum effort each set.

You don’t have to push to absolute muscle failure every set, but you need to come close.

The subject of whether to train to failure (the point at which you can no longer keep the weight moving and have to end the set) or not is a contentious one.

Experts disagree left and right, legit-sounding scientific arguments can be made for a variety of positions, and many people report success with many different approaches.

Well, I break it all down but here’s the long story short:

We should be training to failure, but not so much that we risk injury or overtrain.

Exactly how much that amounts to will vary from person to person.

Personally, I never train to absolute failure for more than 2 to 3 sets per workout, and never on the squat, deadlift, bench press, or military press as this can be dangerous.

Furthermore, I don’t recommend you train to failure when you’re using very heavy loads (1 to 4 rep range).

Instead, the majority of your sets should be taken to the rep preceding failure (the last rep you can perform without assistance).

If you’re new to weightlifting, finding this point will be tricky, but as you get used to your body and your lifts, you’ll get a feel for it.

Once you hit the top of your rep range for one set, you move up in weight.

For instance, if you squat 6 reps on your first 4-to-6 rep set, you add 5 pounds to each side of the bar for your next set and work with that weight until you can squat it for 6 reps, and so forth.

What about abs and cardio?

If you want to add some ab/core work into the program, you can. This article will help.

You can also do cardio in addition to the weightlifting, but given the amount of lower body work you’re going to be doing, you need to take it easy so you don’t cut into your recovery.

Everyone’s body is different in terms of resilience, but I personally wouldn’t do any HIIT while doing this routine. I would stick with a couple hours of walking or light rowing or cycling per week.

How to to measure and track your progress?

I track changes in my progress with calipers, a scale, a measuring tape, and the mirror.

Here’s how I do it…

I TAKE WEEKLY CALIPER and tape MEASUREMENTS.

Generally speaking, you want to gain muscles and not fat when you want a bigger (toned) butt. That is why we keep track on our fat percentage using a caliper, and the tape for measurements of the butt size. This is why caliper readings can be very useful, despite not being inherently reliable for extrapolating body fat percentage. I’ve tried many calipers and skinfold testing methods, and here’s what I’ve found best:

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There are two reasons I like this caliper:

1. It’s a one-site testing method, which means there are less ways to screw it up.

2. It’s surprisingly accurate.

I’ve worked with hundreds of people using this caliper and rarely see flagrant misestimations (it seems to be accurate to within 1 to 2%).

Like said, the fat percentage is not everything you need to know, you also want to keep track of the progress of your muscle tissue. If you want even better results with improved accuracy I can personally recommend the following measurement tape:

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I TAKE WEEKLY WAIST MEASUREMENTS.

The size of your butt  is a reliable indicator of fat and muscle gain or loss.

An expanding waist indicates fat gain and a shrinking one fat loss, which is why it’s another good measurement to keep an eye on (and all you need is a simple measuring tape.)

I TAKE WEEKLY PICTURES.

If you’re like most of us gymgoers, the point of all of this is what you see in the mirror.

And when you look at yourself every day, you can get discouraged because you’re not seeing the gradual improvements.

Taking weekly front, side, and back pictures in good front-on lighting helps greatly with seeing your progress and staying motivated.

The Bottom Line on Getting a Bigger Butt

As you can see, building a bigger and better butt is pretty straightforward. You hit it with a lot of heavy lifting. You do the right exercises. You eat enough food, sleep enough, and, if you want an easy boost, take the right supplements. And your body takes care of the rest.

Happy training!

H/T M4L