Building up your glutes is always a good idea.
Stronger glutes will help alleviate your back pain, run better, help produce more force in all of your lifts, and make your pants fit better!
There’s literally no downside to having stronger glutes.
And the best exercise for building those butts? Step ups.
Well, kind of.
The figure below from a study conducted by the Journal of Sports and Science Medicine did a ton of research on ALL the different butt building exercises and found that step ups help “activate the glutes” better than other exercises.
However (really wanted to use “but” there), activation does not necessarily mean “muscle building.”
In order to truly BUILD muscle size and density and not just build muscular endurance, we need to be working with heavy weights at challenging rep ranges.
Doing 4 sets of 8-12 traditional deadlifts at 70% of your 3 rep max is going to help you build more muscle than 4 sets of 20 bodyweight step ups. Sure, there’s tons of benefits to the 4×20 bodyweight step ups, but if we’re actually looking to grow those glutes? We must move against challenging external load… more than just our bodyweight alone.
What can YOU do with this information? Weighted step ups would be a great place to start!
Grab some dumbbells that make you feel a bit uncomfortable, and perform 4 sets of 8-12 step ups per leg. If you get to rep 12 and think you could do 3-5 more reps, the weight was too light. If you can’t get to rep 8 without needing a rest, the weight was too heavy.
Scroll back up real quick. I want you to look at that figure again. I’ll wait.
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Welcome back! Want to know what I’m seeing when I look at this data? “Oh great, everything is going to work my glutes. Awesome!”
Sure, step ups might have the best average activation metric, but everything else is STILL activating your glutes, meaning you are still getting tons of benefit to your lower body when performing lower body exercises.
No need to overthink these things. These studies are awesome, but at the end of the day, we need to continue showing up, lifting challenging weights, and having fun while we do it. We like changing up our workouts because it keeps things fun, and like the data and science shows us, we’re still going to have very efficient (and high activating) workouts no matter what we do.
If we can have fun, we’ll stay consistent. If we can stay consistent, we’ll build up those butts in no time.
See you at the gym,
-Clark
PS – If you want to get REALLY into the weeds, you can read the full study in all of its glute glory here.
PPS – If you want to get on a call with me and figure out what’s going to be a good plan for you, send me an email. [email protected]
