How to Get a Bigger Booty (Build Your Glutes the Right Way)

Everyone wants to know how to get a bigger booty. However, it can feel like rocket science with all the workout and nutrition nonsense out there. The gym gurus would have you believe doing a handful of squats will do the trick, while others will try to convince you to take a magic pill.

Don't fall for it.

Here's the science-backed way to get a bigger booty (without years in the gym or expensive supplements).

How to Get a Bigger Booty

1. Eat Enough Food

The first thing is that you need to eat enough food. When you are growing your butt, AKA your glutes, you need enough fuel to actually build muscle in your butt. If you're a female, and you're looking to get a bigger booty, you have to make sure that you're eating enough food in general—this is an issue that a lot of females fall into.

I did this myself, too. We tend to want to just restrict, restrict, restrict—and we feel like we need to be eating the smallest amount. If your main goal is to get a big butt and build your glutes, you have to eat enough food to support that muscle growth.

2. Do the Right Exercises

The second thing would be just making sure that you are doing exercises that are going to stimulate muscle growth in your glutes. Do different types of exercises that you are able to recover from as well. That's another thing—going off a tangent—but recovery is super important. If you're not recovering from whatever you're doing, you're not going to be building enough muscle.

Especially with training your glutes, if you're going into the gym, and you're doing glute exercises every single day, stop. Please stop. Your muscle tissues need to come back to baseline before you can actually grow more muscle tissue. And what I mean by that is there is something called the stimulus to fatigue ratio.

Stimulus to Fatigue Ratio

When you're in the gym, and you're working out and you're stimulating your muscles, that is the stimulus part of it. The fatigue part of it is that if you don't allow yourself to come back to baseline, you won't be able to actually grow new muscle tissue.

Once you break your muscle tissue down, you need to give it time to actually rebuild and repair before you go and try to break it down. If you break that muscle tissue down, and it's still repairing, you're just basically doing work and not getting any reward out of it.

Glute Exercises

Going back to the exercises, with a glute, specifically, make sure that you're incorporating movements that are going to stimulate your glutes. Think about training your muscle in different positions. We have like lengthen positions and shorten positions.

Think of Romanian deadlifts where you're bending over and you're getting a stretch in that glute. And you're that's where it's hardest, right? Where you feel that stretch, that's going to be a lengthened exercise. A shortened exercise is going to be something where it's hardest in the shortened position or in the most contracted position—and that's going to be barbell glute bridges or hip thrusts. Those are in a short position or 45-degree hyperextension—that's your glute in the shortened position.

You want to make sure you have a range of exercises, where you're trained in different positions and kind of going between those because if you're only doing, you know, glute bridges, you're going to miss out on that lengthed position If you're only doing RDLs, you're going to miss out on the shortened position.

Choose the Right Exercises for You

Make sure that you're picking exercises that work well with you. Because that's another thing—if you're doing a movement that you're not benefiting from or something that either you don't enjoy then that's going to hinder things as well. 

Pick exercises that work for your personal biomechanics. Try different things out, but choosing exercises that work for you is going to be important.

There's a difference between tension and sensation. When we're building muscle, we know that tension in the muscle is most important—mechanical tension is what drives muscle growth. And sometimes we can confuse that with stimulation.

3. Focus on Tension

And when I mean that is specifically with glute exercises. There are a lot of glute exercises with like bands that people feel a lot of sensation when they're using the bands. But that sensation might not actually translate into having enough tension within the muscle to stimulate growth. There's a little bit of a confusing line between figuring out what exercises are actually going to stimulate muscle growth versus which ones are more so since sensation-based.

With all that being said, just make sure that you're focusing on movements that work for your biomechanics, and that you're actually kind of educating yourself on is this actually a good movement? Or is this something that I'm just doing because I saw it on Instagram—or I heard about it somewhere else.

In terms of glute exercises, my favorites would probably be if we're talking about more of that lengthened position, and I mean that is where it's hardest. That's going to be RDLs and glute leg presses. When you're doing a glute focus leg press, you want to think about having your feet high and narrow on the machine. And that's going to allow you to get more hip flexion than knee flexion.

When you're thinking about hip flexion, you're thinking about movement in your hip as you're coming down—and that's going to stimulate your glutes more. There are ways that you can manipulate different exercises and actually just change the position of your feet to stimulate different areas of your body.

Critically Analyze Glute Exercises

A few of the ones that I used to think were good exercises are abduction machine in the gym—where you're pushing your glutes out. That's one of the machines where you might feel a lot of sensation, especially in your glute medius, but you're actually feeling a muscle that's underneath the glutes.

There's a lot of complexity to it, but finding ones that you enjoy doing, but also realizing that there are some that you may see other people doing that might not be the best choice.

Another good exercise for like the glute medius itself would be a cable kickback, but you want to make sure that you're doing it properly.

This one's a little bit confusing—because a lot of people just tend to kick back or kick out to the side. But when you're really focusing on your glute medius, you want to make sure that you're doing it in the plane of motion that the fibers of your glute medius are moving.

4. Lift Heavy Weights

If you want to grow your glutes, you have to lift heavy weights. Sometimes, a lot of band work is not going to do that—that goes back to the sensation part of it. But typically the most growth that you're going to get is from doing exercises that have a good amount of resistance on them.

Want to learn more about how to get a bigger booty? We have plenty more exercise and nutrition advice across the blog and podcast—check it all out!