At the end of 2021 I got it into my head to do some glute specific training.  I had never really trained my glutes specifically before.  I had always gotten some glute stimulation from doing squats, deadlifts, and back raises.  I had a client ask a bit about glute training and I realized I had never gone down that particular rabbit hole myself.  This led me to start researching and write up a glute program.  What resulted was a glute program that can be run alongside your typical conjugate lower body days.  

When I set out to do this, I looked up a lot of what Bret Contreras had to say about glute training.  Everyone says he is the expert on glute training, so I decided to just run with his recommendations on things.  This was a good starting point. 

These are key takeaways I got from watching a whole bunch of his videos.

• Simple answer on frequency is 3 times a week.
  • Bikini competitors with best glutes on average do glutes 3 times a week.
• Can train glutes 2-6 times a week.
• Glutes biggest muscles in the body. (I knew this, but its good to be reminded.)
• Eccentric phases of hip thrusts not as rough on body as eccentric from squats/deads/lunges.
• 36 sets per week.
• He had a fair bit of single leg work going on.
• His Rule of thirds – do a third of each type of movement.
  • Vertical hip extension
    • Squats, deadlifts, step ups, lunges
  • Horizontal
    • Cable pull throughs, hip thrust, back raises, etc.
  • Lateral rotary
    • Seated hip abduction, lateral band walks, etc.
• His rule of thirds for intensity. 
  • 1 third low reps and heavy.
  • 1 third moderate. 
  • 1 third higher reps.

Those were the high points of what I found from him on glute training.  He had a lot of other useful information and recommendations, but those recommendations were the most relevant to me trying to build a glute program. 

I wanted to make this fit into what I was already doing.  I settled on doing 2 days of glute training per week.  I was already doing 2 days per week of lower body training.  I decided to swap out my accessories for things that would drive the glute development.  Since I was already doing a good amount of squats and deadlifts

 I decided that following the rule of thirds for movements would be easy to some degree.  I did make sure to put some from each category into the program.  I ended up doing more work with the vertical hip extension movements since I was doing a lot of squatting and deadlifting.  The horizontal movements ended up being the easiest to do.  Hip thrusts,  pull throughs and back raises were the exercises I chose for this experiment.  I was just worried about good movement and not pushing hard loads.  I did apply load as it felt good on those movements, the weight was adjusted depending on fatigue levels.

When it came to following the rule of thirds for intensity, I didn’t worry about that too much.  I did do low reps as part of the system since I was doing heavy deadlifts and squats in the program.  I figured that covered the low reps.  Most of the rest of the work was moderate reps, some things got pushed up into the 20 rep range.  This is mostly because I’m lazy and I would rather do 10 reps than 20.  Since this was all new to me I knew I would get good mileage out of whatever rep range I did.  In the future I would be inclined to do some more high rep stuff since I am more adapted to the glute training and would benefit by being more well rounded with my programming. 

The following is the glute program I did.  It is spread across both dynamic and max effort lower body days.  I ran the program for 4 weeks.  I think it is a good program for people that want an introduction to glute training.  There is nothing too crazy in the program and it scales up and down nicely.

Dynamic Day:

Speed squats and speed deadlifts were performed before the following work.  In general I would do around 24 squat lifts, and around 10 speed pulls on these days.  I autoregulate these, so what actually happens on a given day is a chaotic mess.

Glute Specific:

1. Reverse Lunges 2 sets
   1. Increase reps every workout
   1. Add weight if reps get super high
2. Back raises 3 sets weighted.  Add weight each workout.
3. Hip Thrusts 3 sets (weighted or unweighted, your choice)
4. Hip Abduction 3 sets

ME Day

On these days I performed a max effort lift of a variation of deadlift, squat or good morning.  If you’re doing this good mornings should be done for sets of 3 or 5, and everything else should be a single rep.

Supplemental Lift:

• Romanian Deadlift 3 x 5-10 increase weight and/or reps each week.
• Switch up when and if burning out. (I never got to the point where I burnt out)

Glute Specific:

1. Step ups 2 sets just increase reps
2. Back Raises Higher Reps, 3 sets unweighted.
3. Cable Pull throughs 3 sets
   1. Increase weight each week if you can, but make sure you are feeling the movement.
4. Hip Abduction 3 sets

Both Days:

Finish with light sets of:

1. Leg curls
2. Calves
3. Leg extensions or Leg press if quads needing more stimulus or feeling energetic.
4. Abs

*Part way through the program the gym where I workout bought a reverse hyper machine so I started doing those after the above work too.  That introduced a bit of a chaotic element to things, as those gave me more glute stimulus.  I think the reverse hypers pushed me to a bad place with the fatigue and were overkill.  Overall I still think the glute work did work and got me some benefits.

The Results

• My hips feel better in general now than when I started the program.  Before I ran the program my hips felt slightly beat up.  They feel 100% good now. 
• My hips feel slightly better while squatting.  This is marginal, but still a slight benefit.
• Strength levels were maintained or slightly improved.  My lifts did not go down. (4 weeks isn’t a long enough time to see huge strength gains)
• My glutes definitely grew.  I have never prioritized any glute training so my body was ready to respond to this stimulus.
• It was fun to do.  It was all easy stuff to be honest, and I saw stuff grow.  Easy growth is kind of fun. 
• I did get a bit of fatigue while running this program.  I would start lighter next time and grow into it.  I also think some of that was jumping into the reverse hyper in the middle of all this.  I think adding the reverse hypers was just adding one too many things.

Concluding Thoughts

This is a program I would definitely run again.  I think for me it would be best to run it in a 3-6 week block.  Anything more than that and I start to get bored with exercises.  With 25 years under my belt of training I adapt pretty fast to things, you might be able to run things longer.  I think doing this kind of program would definitely help with deadlift and squatting strength over time.  Overall, this was a fun experiment and gave me the chance to train something I had not done before.  It is fun to do new things after all. 

You can read up my full recommendations and glute program I did on its workout routine page https://nehemiah.co/workout-routines/intro-to-glute-training-program/