When it comes to building muscle, growing bigger glutes is often high on the agenda (especially for all the women out there!). And with that comes no choice but to ramp up the gym sessions and get on that squat rack daily, right?
While it's true that heavy compound lifts are a great way to boost the size of your glutes, we’ve got a secret to share: Did you know that you can successfully grow your glutes using glute exercises at home? We’re not talking about a couple of squats in your bedroom every morning (sorry to be the bearer of bad news, it does take a little more than that!), but a well-structured butt workout at home, that helps you develop strength, improve mobility and, of course, create a rounded rear that will be the envy of everyone.
If you’re a beginner, learning glute exercises at home without weights is an excellent foundation for strength training, allowing you to learn the movement patterns and perfect your form. If you’re a seasoned lifter, then bodyweight glute exercises still have their benefits – Add a resistance band to any of these glute exercises to increase the intensity, or use any of the movements as a warm up to activate your glutes on leg day.
So roll out of bed, pop on your scrunch bum leggings and get ready to build the ultimate perky peach – these are our best at home glute exercises (no equipment needed) – so don’t even think about making excuses!
Heading to the gym and looking to build your glutes with weights instead? Try our best glute exercises – with weights.
Contents:
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Benefits Of Bodyweight Glute Exercises At Home
Bodyweight glute workouts at home – that’s so 2020… We’ll stop you there: Bodyweight glute exercises are one of the best ways to build your glutes. Trust us, we’ve tried it, we’ve tested it – and even Kim K would be jealous (maybe).
Still unsure? Here are our top reasons why we love no equipment glute exercises (aside from building a big booty):
Increase Strength & Muscle Size
Yes, adding weights to your exercises is a proven way to develop strength. However, good progress can still be made with bodyweight glute exercises, especially as a beginner.
There's plenty of room to increase difficulty too. Increasing total reps, introducing isometric holds, following a slower tempo, and utilizing isolateral exercises are all great ways to make bodyweight exercises harder – challenging your glutes to build size and strength.
Convenience
Compound exercises such as hip thrusts and squats are great for building your glutes, but they aren’t always easy to perform and can take time (and confidence!) to get right. Bodyweight glute exercises don’t require any equipment, making them the ideal way to build your glutes at home or on the go, ensuring you don’t lose your gains whilst traveling. Doing glute exercises at home without equipment means you can make progress toward your goals in an environment that works for you.
Develop Movement Patterns
By learning the essential movement patterns of bodyweight glute exercises at home, you'll develop the ability to move through the full range of motion. This will give you a fantastic foundation to progress onto resistance based glute or leg exercises, should you want to.
Reduce The Chance Of Injury
Many people run before they can walk in the gym world, adding resistance to exercises before they’ve mastered the movement pattern. For example, loading a barbell for a Romanian deadlift but engaging their back more than their hamstrings and glutes. Not only will this not have the desired effect but comes with the risk of injury. Working on mastering movement patterns of glute exercises without weights will set you up for success in the long run.
What Muscles Shape The Butt?
So now you’re convinced of the benefits of bodyweight glute exercises at home, it’s best we cover exactly what muscles we’re targeting here.
The glutes are made up of three muscles [1]:
Gluteus Maximus: This is the biggest of the three, and most responsible for giving your butt shape. Exercises include: hip thrusts, deadlifts, squats, and donkey kicks.
Gluteus Medius: This muscle sits between the gluteus maximus and minimus, helping with rotation of the leg and stabilization of the pelvis. Exercises include: Sideways leg raises and the seated hip abduction machine
Gluteus Minimus: The smallest of the three glute muscles, the gluteus minimus helps with rotation of the legs. Exercises include: Balancing exercises such as the side bridge/plank
If you’re looking to grow your glutes, it’s your gluteus maximus you want to pay most attention to. As the largest and most powerful muscle in our body, this is the muscle that is mostly responsible for the shape and size of your glutes [2]. But for a well-rounded butt, you also need to work the gluteus medius and minimus too – and we’ve got just the right exercises to do so.
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The Best Bodyweight At Home Glute Exercises
If you’re ready to build your glutes at home then stay with us, as we share our best bodyweight glute exercises. Put them together to form your very own butt workout at home, or if you are heading to the gym to do some lifting, these exercises are great to add to your warm up to activate your glutes before lifting weights!
The Best Bodyweight Glute Exercises At Home:
1. Air Squats
Let’s start with the basics. Ideal for whatever stage you are in your fitness journey, the air squat (or bodyweight squat) is an effective leg and glute strengthening exercise that can be done anywhere and will help you build lower body muscle mass. Mastering your form on these and you’ll set a good foundation for all other squat variations.
How To Do Air Squats:
Stand with feet slightly wider than hips, toes pointing forward, or slightly out.
Clasp your hands in front of your chest, keeping your chest proud. Take a deep breath into your core.
Bend your knees, pushing your hips back, until your thighs are parallel with the floor, knees bent at 90 degrees, traveling in line with toes.
Drive up out of the squat, pushing through your heels to straighten your legs. Squeeze your glutes at the top.
Repeat for the prescribed rep range.
Tip: If you struggle to know how low to squat, try placing a box or med ball on the floor behind you. This will give you a target to aim for.
Looking for the best tips on squat form, stance, and proper breathing? Read our Top Tips To Master The Squat.
2. Crab Walks
Here's an exercise made famous on Instagram and TikTok – and when you try it you’ll see why! Called the crab walk (or lateral walk), this no-equipment glute exercise creates significant time under tension for the glute muscles. If you’re after that booty burn, you’re going to love this one!
How To Do Crab Walks:
Take your feet into a squat stance (just outside shoulders, toes pointing slightly out). Clasp your hands in front of your chest and squat down into a quarter squat.
Keeping your body facing forward and a straight back, move your right foot out to the side, then move your leg foot over to meet your right foot.
Shuffle laterally, moving the right foot out and then meeting it with the left one, for 8-10 reps. Then go back the other way, stepping the left leg out and bringing your right leg to meet it.
Repeat for 2 -3 lengths in each direction.
Tip: As you shuffle, think about driving your knees out. They should stay in line with your toes and not cave in.
It might be tempting to come out of the squat, but remember that we want to activate the glutes as much as possible! Try to maintain a quarter squat all the way through to the end of your set without standing up!
To make this exercise harder, come down into a full squat, or grab a resistance band and place it above your knees or around your ankles. If this exercise didn’t burn before, it will now!
3. Single Leg RDL
The single leg Romanian deadlift is a variation of the bilateral Romanian deadlift. This unilateral exercise is great for hamstring and glute development whilst challenging your core. It can take a while to get the hang of, but once you’ve mastered it it will improve your stability, balance, and reduce muscular imbalances, too!
How To Do The Single Leg RDL:
Stand tall with feet directly under shoulders. Lift one foot off the floor, keeping only the toes in contact with the floor. Keep the other foot firmly planted on the ground.
Push your hips back, tilting your torso forward whilst simultaneously lifting the resting foot off the ground, extending the leg out behind you. Keep a soft bend in the standing leg.
Tilt forward, aiming to get your belly button facing the floor. Keep your shoulders and hips square. Tilt until you feel a stretch in the hamstring of the standing leg, maintaining a neutral spine. Aim to bring your torso to a 45-degree angle with the floor so your body forms a T-shape, or as close to this as you can whilst maintaining a flat back.
Pause, then return to standing by driving through your heel and pushing your hips forward. Squeeze your glutes as hard as possible at the top.
Repeat for desired reps.
Tip: If you find balance difficult, you can perform the movement without extending the leg backward. To do this, keep the foot of the working leg firmly planted on the ground as above, and stabilize yourself by keeping the toe of the resting leg pointing into the ground. You can then perform the hinge the same way as above but will have added stability from the resting leg.
Looking to master the hip hinge motion? Read our Good Mornings’ Guide that breaks down how to do the hip hinge – a required movement pattern for all deadlifts!
4. Glute Bridge
A booty-builder classic, and for good reason: Glute bridges isolate the glutes, targeting all your hard work on building strength and size in your glutes. They make a great addition to your warm-ups, effectively firing up your glutes and making sure they’re activated throughout your workout. If you find these too easy, try doing single-leg glute bridges. Trust us; you will feel the burn.
How To Do Glute Bridges:
Lie on your back with your feet on the floor hip-width apart, knees bent up at 90 degrees. Keep your arms straight by your side.
Drive through your heels to lift your hips off the floor, resting on your shoulders. Squeeze your glutes until your body forms a straight line from chin to knees.
Pause, then lower your hips back down to the ground.
Pause, then repeat.
Tip: For ultimate glute activation, try adding a resistance band above your knees.
5. Split Squat
You may have seen the split squat performed using dumbbells, but don’t underestimate this bodyweight variation. An ideal no-equipment glute exercise that builds lower body mass whilst improving stability, it won't take many reps before you start to feel the burn in your glutes and quads! If that’s not enough, mastering the bodyweight split squat is a great way to learn the fundamentals of the movement pattern before progressing onto weighted split squats.
How To Do Split Squats:
Stand tall and take a step forward roughly three to five feet with one leg. Your feet should be shoulder-width apart, not in line with one another.
Focusing your gaze in front of you and keeping a proud chest, take a breath in and drive your back knee down towards the floor until it lightly touches it.
Push through the heel of your front leg to extend your legs and come back to standing in your split stance.
Pause at the top, then repeat.
Tip: Grab a plate and elevate your front foot to increase the range of motion. Try leaning forward with your torso as you squat down to really target the glutes.
6. Curtsy Lunge
This lunge alternative stands out from the rest by focusing on different muscles to the regular lunge by specifically targeting the gluteus medius, which is often neglected in lower-body workout programs. Curtsy lunges also help to strengthen your abductors and adductors, making them an even better bodyweight leg builder.
How To Do The Curtsy Lunge:
Stand with your feet directly under you, hands by your side.
Step one leg behind and across your other leg, bending your knees so your back knee drives down close to the floor, clasping your hands in front of your chest as you do so. Keep your chest proud and your gaze focused straight ahead.
Pause, then return to standing by driving through the front heel to straighten the legs, bringing the back leg back in line with the standing leg as you do so.
Switch legs, repeating the same steps on the opposite side.
Tip: Focus on keeping your hips square. If you twist them as you lunge, you’ll lose the activation in the glutes and hips.
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How To Program Your Glute Workout At Home
We’ve covered the very best bodyweight glute exercises, but how do you go about putting those into your workout? We’re now going to cover how you can use these exercises to create your butt workout at home.
Did you know you can access hundreds of pre-made bodyweight workouts via The Gymshark Training App? Or, add the suggested at home glute exercises below into the app, to track your reps, sets, and rest periods.
Bodyweight Glute Workout Warm-up
Even though we aren’t using weights in our butt workouts at home, we still need to warm up. As the largest muscle group in our body, it’s important to make sure our glutes are properly primed before we train them!
First, you’ll want to focus on raising your heart rate a little. If you’re planning on doing your glute exercises at home and don’t have access to cardio machines or equipment, then try a couple of rounds of plyometric exercises such as squat jumps, jumping lunges and mountain climbers.
Next, you’ll want to do some dynamic stretching. Focus on stretches that target the lower body, specifically the hips. Glute exercises require a lot of movement from the hips (hinging and extension), so it’s important to take time to mobilize the hip joint to prevent injury and aid range of motion. Give these three hip stretches a go.
At Home Glute Workout
There are a number of ways you can use the exercises above to build your own bodyweight glute workout. Here are some options:
Option 1: Glute Circuit
Perform all 6 exercises, for 15-20 reps each. Rest for 2 minutes once all exercises are complete, then repeat for 5 rounds.
Option 2: Tabata-Style
Using Tabata-style training, you’ll work for 20 seconds and rest for 10 seconds. Do this for each of the six exercises, for 20 minutes.
Option 3: Supersets
Instead of completing all six exercises at once, you could break them into supersets, for example:
1a. 15 Air Squats
1b. 6 Lengths Crab Walk
2a. 15 (each side) Single Leg RDL
2b. 15 Glute Bridges
3a. 15 (each side) Split Squats
3b. 15 (each side) Curtsy Lunges
Complete three rounds of the superset, resting for 30-60 seconds between sets. Once three rounds are complete, move on to the next superset.
For all of these glute workouts, we have intentionally kept the rep range high and and the rest period low. As we’re only using our body weight we want to keep the glutes under as much tension as possible to maximize gains.
Cool Down
Those bodyweight glute exercises at home have really targeted the butt, so it’s important to cool down and stretch out after.
Give these stretches a go, holding for 20-30 seconds each:
Lying hamstring stretch: Lie flat on the ground, legs stretched out straight. Bend on leg up, taking hold of it by clasping both hands around the hamstring. Straighten the leg, pulling it towards your chest until you feel a stretch in your hamstring.
Piriformis stretch (supine twist): Lie on your back with legs stretched out. Bend one knee up, reaching across with the opposite hand to take hold of the knee, gently pulling it across your body toward your opposite shoulder. Keep the other arm stretched out to the side, keeping your gaze toward that arm as your stretch. You should feel the stretch through your glutes and hips.
Pigeon pose: From standing, step one leg forward into a lunge position. From there, come down to sit on the ground, bringing your front shin parallel to the front of the mat, other leg stretched out behind you, flat on the floor. Square you hips towards the front of the mat and sit into the stretch, bringing your torso down to bend forward over your front leg if possible, resting on your forearms for stability. You should feel your hips open up and lower back stretch out.
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FAQs
There are several ways you can make your bodyweight butt workout easier, including:
Use a shallower range of motion.
Increasing the rest time.
Decreasing the reps/rounds.
There are several you can make your bodyweight butt workout more difficult, including:
Move slower, focusing on squeezing your glutes.
Reduce rest periods or make rests an active recovery by adding in squat jumps, burpees, or mountain climbers.
Add a resistance band or grab a dumbbell or kettlebell – You can add these to all of the exercises listed above to add load.
Whilst weight training is held in high regard when it comes to building your butt, bodyweight exercises can get you there too. As long as you can adequately challenge your muscles, you can effectively grow your glutes using low-load, high-repetition exercises with no equipment [3].
One thing to remember is that just because you aren’t using any weights, doesn’t mean you can forget about a very important thing~~,~~ called progressive overload. This refers to the need to continually challenge your muscles to avoid reaching a plateau.
With strength training, this is reasonably straightforward, as you can just increase the weight each session. When it comes to doing bodyweight glute exercises at home, you need to think slightly more outside the box. Increasing repetitions is the most common way to increase difficulty in bodyweight workouts, but you could also implement other variables such as reducing rest time or adding isometric holds to the movements. With a well-structured butt workout at home that takes into account progressive overload, you will be able to grow your glutes without weights.
This is a difficult one to answer, as it’s going to depend on your training frequency, training history, protein intake, genetics, age – the list could go on. One thing we do know is that glutes don’t grow overnight, and building your butt is no easy challenge. True beginners might see glute growth within six weeks, whereas if you’ve been training for a while it may take longer to see progress. If you want to build your glutes faster, then make sure you’re training them twice a week [4]. Oh, and a nod towards nutrition can help too: Try our article on How To Increase Protein Intake For Muscle Growth.
It may sound like a fitness fad, but squeezing your glutes (referred to as gluteal squeezes) has been found to be just as effective as glute bridges [5]. Strange right? Even Bret Contreras, the Glute Guy himself, backs this, finding that squeezing the glutes in a standing position was enough to elicit EMG activity in the glutes [6]. It’s a win-win for those chasing a bigger butt (although we would still highly recommend doing the workout above, twice a week, and using your glutes squeeze as the cherry on top to maximize your gains).
Bodyweight exercises put less strain on your muscles and require less recovery compared to resistance training. If you did these bodyweight glute exercises every day, you’d probably be ok, and the fact that hypertrophy follows a dose-response relationship (in other words, the more you train, the greater the gains), then you’d probably be increasing your booty gains by doing so [7].
That being said, giving your body time to rest and recover is very important. Exercise creates tiny microscopic tears in your muscle tissues. During rest, cells called fibroblasts repair the damaged tissue which makes your muscles stronger. It also gives your body time to replenish glycogen stores which are depleted during exercise. Because of this, we don’t recommend training your glutes every day. If you want to train on consecutive days, try alternating your at home glute workout with an upper body-focused session. If you have a resistance band at home, why not try our Best Resistance Band Arm Exercises.
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Ready To Kick Your Rear Into Gear?
If you thought you needed a gym membership and heavy weights to build your butt, then think again. Doing this bodyweight glute workout will give you a well-rounded rear, without even needing to step out of the house. Combine this with some lift contour shorts (and a BBL jacket while you’re at it), and you’ll have some pretty good booty gains to be proud of.
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WRITTEN BY: Alex Kirkup-Lee
Alex is an inhouse Content Writer for Gymshark’s Health & Conditioning categories. A qualified Personal Trainer, CrossFit Level 1 and Functional Fitness Coach, Alex is experienced in training clients from a range of sporting backgrounds. With a passion for functional training, her favorite workout is anything that includes deadlifts, rowing, or wallballs.
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References:
Elzanie, A. and Borger, J. (2021). Anatomy, Bony Pelvis and Lower Limb, Gluteus Maximus Muscle. [online] PubMed. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538193/.
Buckthorpe, M., Stride, M. and Villa, F.D. (2019). ASSESSING AND TREATING GLUTEUS MAXIMUS WEAKNESS - A CLINICAL COMMENTARY. International journal of sports physical therapy, [online] 14(4), pp.655–669. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6670060/.
Iversen, V.M., Norum, M., Schoenfeld, B.J. and Fimland, M.S. (2021). No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy: A Narrative Review. Sports Medicine, 51(10), pp.2079–2095.
Schoenfeld, B.J., Ogborn, D. and Krieger, J.W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, [online] 46(11), pp.1689–1697. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0543-8.
Lehecka, B.J., Turley, J., Stapleton, A., Waits, K. and Zirkle, J. (2019). The effects of gluteal squeezes compared to bilateral bridges on gluteal strength, power, endurance, and girth. PeerJ, 7, p.e7287. doi:https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7287.
Contreras, B., Vigotsky, A.D., Schoenfeld, B.J., Beardsley, C. and Cronin, J. (2015). A comparison of two gluteus maximus EMG maximum voluntary isometric contraction positions. PeerJ, [online] 3, p.e1261. doi:https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1261.
Schoenfeld, B.J., Contreras, B., Krieger, J., Grgic, J., Delcastillo, K., Belliard, R. and Alto, A. (2018). Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, [online] 51(1), p.1. doi:https://doi.org/10.1249/mss.0000000000001764.
