 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, we talk about building the butt. One of the most important muscles in the body is your glutes, and of course they look amazing. But did you know that there are eight exercises that you're probably not doing? We talk all about the best eight exercises most people don't do, but they should be doing to build their butt. By the way, we also included more free information. We have a free butt guide that talks about some more stuff that can help you develop your glutes, like how to trigger the butt muscles for growth, how to grow your butt and not your thighs. Some of you may be doing lots of butt building exercise and noticing that just your quads are growing. We also talk about how to isolate the glutes so that you can create that apple shape that people are looking for. You can find that free guide at freebuttguide.com. Also this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Legion. 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Use the code mind pump at checkout and you'll get 20% off your first order or if you're an existing customer, you'll get double rewards points. So this entire month, our high intensity interval training program, MAPS HIT is 50% off. This program is excellent for fat burning. It's a high calorie burning program. It's six weeks long. It can be very intense. It's done with dumbbells and barbells. So it is a resistance training based HIT routine. Again, it's half off. Here's how you get the 50% off. Go to mapshit.com, that's M-A-P-S-H-I-I-T.com and use the code HIT50, that's H-I-I-T-5-0 no space for the discount. I want to do an episode where Justin's basically going to talk the whole time. Yeah. So this is- I don't want to do that. Yeah, I do. You want to do that? Yeah, we're going to do that today. It sounds like a terrible idea. Sal and I will just throw jokes throughout the episode. We'll try to randomly interrupt the ages. Yeah. Dick. We'll try to be funny. Yeah. Sure. So looking back, we've been doing fitness for so long professionally that it's interesting to see how much trends come in and out of the space. Do you guys remember when it switched from people wanting to make their butts smaller to people wanting to make their butt bigger? Jennifer Lopez. Isn't that weird? Was it JLo? JLo, dude. JLo made big butts cool. She was definitely one of them. Yeah. Well, okay. Kim Kardashian took it to the later level. She came later though. That was after JLo, go back to when JLo got popular. That had to have been at least 10, 15 years ago at least. It was late 90s. Yeah. It was late 90s. And that was when like, at least I remember, right? Sir Mix-A-Lot. Sir Mix-A-Lot. Yeah. Wow. That's all around the same time, right? Sir Mix-A-Lot, then JLo, like that whole, that became, and then it became a thing where people would come and hire me and say that. Well, it used to be, their joke used to be that, you know, the wife would tell the husband, honey, do these pants make my butt look big? And the answer was, the guy was supposed to say, no, no, no, it doesn't make it look big. You're skinny, huh? All of a sudden, it's the opposite. Does his pants make my butt look big? And now, you know, it's like, oh yes, it makes it look big. Oh yeah, your fat, P-H-A-T. It totally changed and switched. And I'm glad it did because the butt, yes, there's, you know, you can store body fat on those. I'm glad it did. Me too. No, that's not why. But it's because the butt is, the glutes are muscles. Some of the biggest, if not the biggest, I don't know, there's a debate as to what the biggest muscles in the body are, the glutes or the lats, if you look at total surface area or total mass. They're the strongest. Well, we talked about this even, you know, from an athletic perspective. I was always, I was always impressed, like, the guy that had the big ass, you knew, he was like one of the best athletes out there. Yeah, you were looking. I was like, wow, bro, you got a real nice dunk-a-dunk. Yeah. No, well, so when you look at, I'm going to do a little science stuff here, when you look at primates, a few things really separate us from other primates, how narrow our hips are and how massive our glutes are. And it's because we walk upright. And so the glutes are constantly trying to keep us balanced. If you look at like an ape, which is a huge muscular animal, they've got really really small butt muscles in comparison to humans. So it's a very human trait. Big strong glutes signify that you're healthy, that you can move quickly, that you're strong. In athletes, Justin, you know, I know I joked around with you, but that's absolutely true. When you see an athlete who's got very powerful posture of your chain, especially the glutes, they typically can sprint really fast. Well, they're so balanced too. Yeah, they're very explosive. They're very like balanced centrally. Everything revolves around that in terms of like, if I get that like snap off the line, if I'm talking about football, like you see somebody that has big glutes like that, like be aware, like they're going to throw a bunch of power at your way. So we know this is a prize thing, right? It's no longer underground. Everybody wants this. And because of that, this is where marketing has now came in and found all kinds of ways to market to people. And so I think it would be cool actually to do an episode where we list the things that people are probably not doing that are some of the best exercises that they can be doing because everybody's seeing the kickback stuff. And we've talked at Nauseum how important squats are important. Like so we've seen a lot of stuff. I want to talk about the things that remind me of the movements that I was teaching clients in the gym that I knew a lot of people aren't doing because I still, when I go to the gym, I don't see these movements all the time. Yeah, because when I say, you know, we're at the point now, we talk about exercises that really develop and work the glutes. Most people now in fitness know that your squats and your hip thrusts are phenomenal butt-building exercises, and they are. Those are two of the best exercises you could do for the butt. But those aren't the only ones that are effective. There's a lot of other exercises that are very, very effective at developing the glutes that a lot of people just don't do on a regular basis. Some of the ones that will probably mention people probably might have never done before. And it's too bad because, again, there's a lot of compound movements that have a lot of power when it comes to developing the glutes. Now, when I was a trainer, aside from, you know, barbell squats and your hip thrusts, there was one exercise that I almost always did for clients when developing that part of the body. That's the sumo deadlift. And I don't see a whole lot of people sumo deadlifting for this purpose, and it's too bad. When you do a sumo deadlift and you really press the knees out, stand upright, it is, in my opinion, it's like one of the top three or four overall butt-building exercises you could possibly do. This is a favorite of mine for that reason. So first you have to understand that the glute is made up of three major muscles, right? And it's really common that people's, that feet collapse and pronate, which internally rotates the femur. The knees kind of cave in or turn in. Exactly. And what that does is it shuts the glute meat off, so the side butt. And so I referred to it as that because it's easier for people to understand, but that's what gives that look where you can actually see someone's butt from looking forward at them. And so because of this, when they do a lot of exercises like squats, they become very quad dominant and they don't get a lot of the glute meat activated, the sumo deadlift, because of the wide stance and opening the knees up like you're saying, Sal, it forces you to light that part of the butt up while you do it. And then we already know that hip hinge movements are one of the best things that we could possibly do for the butt. So you're combining one of the best mechanically movements that you could do for the butt, plus you're opening up the stance like that to light that part. Plus you can heavy load it. That's a, yeah. So that's one of the best benefits of these like compound lifts is just the amount of load that you can add to this lift, which your body has to respond to that, which sends a very loud signal for growth. And so that's why this is one of those like, you know, real powerful exercises. You know, it's funny in the olden days of bodybuilding, the early days of bodybuilding, exercises like the sumo deadlift were actually discouraged because in those days it was thought to have to, if you developed your glutes too much, they said that it took away from your aesthetics because their idea was the V taper and they thought the glutes would contribute to that. So in fact, old school bodybuilders, there were some of them, Vince Garanda being one of them that would say, don't do certain exercises. Cause he used to say builds the hips too much. What he was referring to was the glutes sumo deadlifts was one of the exercises I didn't know that he's also told people not to barbell squat deep because his idea of aesthetics was narrow all the way down, big legs, big upper body, and he's just all about chest day. He would write about, he would say, now Vince Garanda brilliant in many other aspects, but in this particular aspect I disagree with him because of course, like we said earlier, the glutes are an extremely important muscle and thankfully these days we appreciate well-developed glutes. He would actually tell bodybuilders and people in his gyms, don't do this exercise. It's going to thicken your hips and really again, he's referring to the glutes. It's a very effective buttbuilding exercise. Now when you do this, if you've never done it before, start light, press your knees out and push it almost like you're trying to spread your feet out against the floor. That's the force that you're generating. So yes, you're pushing down with the feet to do this deadlift, but also create this outward pressure with your feet as if you're spreading the floor apart and bringing your knees apart when you're doing this. And then Justin, you hit the nail on the head. One of the reasons why this is such an effective just overall butt mass builder, which look, if you're somebody who wants to develop your butt, you know how hard it could be to just add good quality lean muscle because you can load this so much, it's exceptional at building mass and muscle for the glutes. And I'll tell you something right now for women, in my experience, training women, the most weight that they'll ever lift free weights is with the sumo deadlift. They get good at sumo deadlifting. They'll be able to sumo deadlift more than they could squat or conventional deadlift. They can lift a lot. I've trained women who are 130 pounds who could sumo deadlift 300 pounds or almost 300 pounds. You can't tell me that's not going to develop. Well, our body responds like crazy, especially after all this nonsense marketing out there that has you doing donkey kickbacks for like 1,000 reps and thinking that that's going to keep, it's going to build this lean muscle out of nowhere where really building muscle is about building muscle. Yeah, that's a good point because remember, bigger muscle fibers contract harder. Muscle fibers that need lots of stamina and endurance tend to be smaller because they need to be efficient with energy. So if you do 100 reps of an exercise, especially a light exercise or the ones that tend to be advertised to women, you're not going to build significant muscle. You'll build lots of stamina. You'll build lots of endurance in that muscle, but you're just not going to build lots of muscle. The muscle comes from strength. That's the adaptation that comes from strength. So you want to do heavy loaded exercises. You can go as low as one or two reps and maybe as high as 20 reps, but above that, then you start to lose some of the muscle building benefit. The sweet range tends to be around 8 to 12, although if you stay in that range too long, it doesn't work. So make sure you kind of cycle in and out of them. Now, the next one I like quite a bit called the Cossack Squat, but you can also refer to it as a side lunge. I like this one because when you step into the movement, when you do a real Cossack Squat, especially if you're stepping in and out of it, when you're stepping into that sideways lunge, the side glutes, the muscle that Adam was talking about, the medial glute or whatever, the glute mede, has to slow you down because it's that lateral force. Then to push yourself out of it, again, not only are you pushing your body up, but you're also pushing your body laterally, which activates that medial, that glute mede, that side butt area, which is so underdeveloped and longer. And again, this target's kind of movement that we don't replicate enough throughout the day. And I think that's the main reason why I wanted to put this one up there is because it addresses something that is commonly neglected in somebody's training program, is they just don't account for anything moving side to side. It's always in front or in back of me. And so this is something where people might not even realize the potential in terms of building muscle by just moving in a different direction. And so this provides that specifically. Now, this is one that you have to, you really pay attention to the form because real quick it could turn into a more quad-dominant exercise if not done properly. So yeah, to get the real benefits of this, you wanna be able to keep your chest upright and you wanna be able to get really deep. I wanna be able to get to a, when I step out and do that side lunge or caustic squat, I wanna be able to get my butt all the way back down, almost back down on my ankle and then come out of it. That's where the glute is really gonna drive you out of it. I've seen people watch a video or try and emulate what they see someone else doing and they do this kind of side step lunge and they just kind of hinge back, they let the chest fall all the way over and they don't even break 90 degrees. So you gotta be careful and when you do this, if you want it to be more of your glute and not your quads, you wanna be able to break that 90 degrees and get nice and deep so the glute has to drive you out of there and you don't wanna have so much forward lean that your chest is hanging over your knees. So that chest needs to be high. You wanna get nice and deep for this to be a great glute exercise. Yeah, so add a little more depth. I know a lot of people and functional coaches out there will kind of teach a little bit different technique with the caustic squat too, to be able to kind of get a little more rotation out of the hip and externally rotate. So bringing the toe up off the ground and then like pivoting off of the heel will allow you to actually drop in a little more depth in that. Oh, you're talking about the, not the lead leg, but the lead that's left behind. Yes, the one you're stretching out. So when you're squatting down, your leg that's staying straight, it's actually on your heel with your toes up. I like that version. But it is important when you're in this, the bottom position of this, not just to come up, but to come up and push yourself as if you're stepping your feet together or actually step your feet back together. That lateral force is really helpful with the activating of the glute. And then what Adam said about going lower, whenever it comes to, with glute exercises in particular, most glute exercises, not all, but most glute exercises, deep reps are gonna activate the glutes more than shallow reps. This is true for squats. This is true for lunges or any other glute exercise. Lower is gonna activate the glutes more. The problem sometimes with this is people don't have the mobility. So you're gonna hear us say a lot in this episode, good full range of the motion. If you lack mobility, work on your mobility so that you can get deeper with these exercises. It'll help you activate the glutes a little bit better. Now the next movement, this one, for whatever reason, the first time I did this, I didn't think it would light my glutes up like it did. I was just thinking that I needed to balance out my deadlift. I love deadlifting. It's my favorite exercise. I tend to pull conventional. And I was noticing a little bit of a discrepancy between my right and left side. And so I thought, let me do some unilateral stuff. Let me do this one legged at a time, see if I can build that strength up and then see how it translates. And the first time I did it, I was blown away by how much glute activation I got from it. I'm talking about a single leg deadlift. I could not believe how I felt most everything from that exercise in the glute. I didn't feel my back activate as much as it normally did or neither even my hamstring. It was my butt that caught fire from that movement. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm balancing. When you're doing this hip-hinging single leg deadlift and you're on one leg, your glute has to stay activated just to perfect you. It's a prime stabilizer. Yeah, it's the main stabilizer in a movement like that. Not to mention, you also have to get down a little deeper to pull like a pair of dumbbells up off the floor. So you also get a little bit more of that glute activation to the point that you made just a second ago about, most of these exercises that we talk about, the deeper, fuller range of motion is gonna get more glute activation. So deadlift is already, we know is already a great movement for the glutes. But when you have to do a single leg deadlift, you have to get even deeper into that position. And then you throw in the fact that you're having to stabilize. I absolutely love this. And I know that we picked a couple of exercises in here. I think three exercises that we picked are all unilateral. So single leg type stuff, which I think is a must. Like I think that when you do a lot of leg pressing and even squatting and a lot of things with both feet all the time, when you're talking about the big muscles and the legs and the glute, there's a lot of cheating that can go on that you're not even aware of. So you can really easily favor one side. Now, how you know this is a glaring obvious thing with you is if you notice like low back pain on one side or the other, or you can see a visual difference in your leg or your glute on one side or the other, then this is an absolute must to spend more time on the unilateral work. But even if you don't notice those discrepancies, it's still there's a tremendous amount of value of doing single leg movements. You're gonna see a few single leg movements in this list. And mainly because of that fact, that stabilizing any rotation especially, which you'll find in a single leg deadlift, especially your hips are gonna wanna rotate towards the side that your leg is off. And that's just a counter balance issue thing. And so to be able to really focus in on keeping those hips square and everything operating the way it should and it requires a lot of extra stabilization in the glutes. Here's one way you know that you need to work on the single leg type of stuff or unilateral stuff in general, just for your whole body. Let's say I could deadlift 500 pounds. That's a weight that I can pull for one or maybe two reps, but I struggle doing a single leg deadlift with 100 pounds. I mean, that is, I should be able to single leg deadlift at least 150, 160 pounds. That's not even half of what I can do with both legs, but I can't even do 100 pounds, right? That's telling me that there's something going on I need to work on. And here's what happens. You do these single leg exercises or this unilateral exercise and get good at them. Your double leg or both side exercises, your strength goes through the roof. So single leg deadlift, one of my absolute favorites. Well, that's why these are a must and they have to be in this list is because we are trying to develop a muscle. Okay, no matter how you look at it, we're trying to build your butt just like someone who's trying to build their arms or build their chest or build any other muscle in their body and you getting really good at single leg movements, it's only going to contribute to you using both legs later on, which will then allow you to do more load and build even more. So that's why I think this belongs in everybody's routine, no matter if you have a discrepancy or not, but that's a great point, Sal. If you can't lift close to half of what you can do on both, which is most people, then there's a lot of room for growth in that area. Totally. And keep this in mind when you do the single leg deadlift, maintain your spine position. I think when people do a single leg deadlift, sometimes they round the back even more, try to hip hinge like you would with the traditional deadlift and then see how it feels. Now, the next movement, I love this one. I did this as part of how I would train people to get them to be able to do a squat. And then later on, I realized that I could load this and get people's glutes to really catch fire. This is single leg standup. This is a great movement just in general. And there's a lot of different ways to do it, but we're talking specifically about sitting on a bench, you put your feet out in front of you, like you're sitting, your legs are at 90 degrees, put one foot up, so now you're gonna do this with one leg and then try to stand up with just one leg. It's basically a box squat, but with just one leg being the driving force there. And this is one of those exercises that my clients used to hate me because it looks so simple and so basic to do, but it is very challenging. And especially if you put them in a position where it's a really low seat and they have to dig their way out, it requires all the amount of recruitment that you could provide for you to get up out of that position. And that's why it's so beneficial. So I love this as like a teaching exercise. I think this was, when we talk about all the movements that we're talking about today, when I think of probably the one that I use the most for all age ranges, all levels of fitness, I like this a lot. It's one of those exercises that you just can't cheat and I can regress it and progress it really easy. In other words, if I have like a eight-year-old client who is very deconditioned and I wanna teach them this, I might put like a foam pad underneath the bench so they're elevated a little higher or even allow them to use their hands on my hands so they can kind of assist themself to get up to start to teach that good hip hinge movement. And really easily, like you alluded to, Justin, is I could put them on a lower box that's really low or add 10 pounds in their hand or on their back and it becomes a really challenging exercise. So the ability for you to progress and regress this exercise based off the client or where you're currently in your fitness, I love this movement for all levels. Now a couple of things with this though in terms of like the form, what I tried to really reiterate is really trying to stand up tall without leaning forward. And now this takes that exercise to a whole new level because now you're eliminating a lot of the momentum of leaning forward and like using your body's way to throw forward to get you up. No, it's all about standing straight up and really like activating that glute. So cues that I remember queuing to make sure you do that. One of those is to keep your abs tight and don't let your abs like collapse when you sit down. It'd be really common for someone to stand up and then when they go and then they plop down their abs collapse and they kind of roll forward like you're saying Justin. So I would tell a client as they sit back is to sit down slowly, keep the chest high and the abs tight, don't let your abs collapse is what I would cue when they do this movement. I also used to have them like raise their foot off the ground from it and almost stomp their foot down. So it just emphasized the fact that they really needed to like recruit powerfully enough to get up. I used to say sit down and barely touch the bench and then sit down fully rather than, you know, sitting down super hard or whatever. Pay attention to this too. When you're doing these, the single leg exercise, watch your knee. Sometimes when people do the single leg stand up. Yeah, the knee will just go towards the midline of their body, keep the knee straight or even slightly push it out a little bit as you stand up to get more glute activation. Now the next movement, very different from a very popular glute exercise, although it sounds and looks similar, it's the single leg hip thrust. You know, you may be really, really good at a double leg hip thrust. Try this with one leg and try preventing your knee from caving in and you can load this just like you did with your double leg hip thrust. Put a dumbbell on your hip, right on the side of the leg that's doing this, watch what happens. By the way, if you notice one side stronger than the other, start with the weak side. Let the weak side dictate how many reps you need to do for the strong side so you can catch them up. Oftentimes, a person's body won't develop more muscle because there's too much of a difference between the two sides. Simply balancing them out allows the body to feel comfortable, because remember, your body has, just like when you drive a car and your car has a speed limiter, right? They put those on cars nowadays. The car could go 160 miles an hour. Governing. But it's got a speed limiter. It's got a governor that goes up to maybe 130. Now, when I was a kid and I drove like an asshole, I figured this out. I was on the freeway, seeing how fast things go and I hit 120 all of a sudden, you'd hear the engine go, and it wouldn't go any faster. It's like, what the hell's going on? Your body actually has these limiters. And most of these limiters exist to prevent you from hurting yourself. So if you're building muscle, building strength, or trying to move fast, or do anything that involves performance, if your body senses there's too much instability or there's too much of a high risk, it will actually, like the governor on your car, it'll prevent you from exerting more force. It'll prevent you from building more muscle. One of those things is an imbalance between the right and left side. And if you always, always, always do your hip thrusts, both legs on the floor with the barbell, try doing them with a dumbbell. You might be surprised just how much your knee moves, you'll watch your knee cave in, and you might be surprised how weak you are when you do it that way. But if you balance it out, you get rid, that governor actually moves up a little bit, now you can push a little harder. Well, I love this movement too, because the other thing that's great about all these single leg movements that we're talking about is, it doesn't take a lot of weight to really load one side. You know, a hip thrust takes, I mean, first of all, you have to have access to a barbell, and you need to have access to probably quite a bit of weight. Even most of my female clients could do, you know, 100, 200, 300 pounds in a hip thrust. So they're really, really strong with both feeling. So if you don't have access to all that, or have the means to get over to an area in the gym that you can let, you know, get on the ground and do this big old hip thrust with a barbell, you know, just taking it like you said, Sal, a single dumbbell on one side, it's extremely challenging, and you can load it really well because you're only doing one leg. And I like that for risk reasons too. Like, you know, as we, as great as squats are, hip thrust, all these movements that we are promoting for, you know, low, heavy weight, heavy weight, that also increases the risk. You know, with the greater reward in those, but there's also a higher risk as we sort of do that. So I love also using movements like this for teaching purposes. So I can challenge a client with a 20 pound dumbbell on a single leg hip thrust. The risk from that is very, very low in comparison to taking some client who maybe is only a month into training with me and loading a barbell with a hundred something pounds and they're gonna get equal amount of benefit if not more from the single leg with a lot less risk. This translates well into going back into that, you know, loaded position where I could do a hip thrust heavy still, but now I'm even more, like I have more stability. And so like, again, the risk factor goes down because now I put the work in to, you know, reinforce that stability in the hips. So it is a great valuable exercise. When I get DMs, because obviously, you know, gyms have been closed for a while. Some of them are reopening, but a lot of people don't wanna go back to the gym still. And so I've been recommending to people that they do single leg and unilateral type exercise. And now I'm getting feedback, right? Because we're talking about now two months ago, I've been telling people to do this. I'm getting feedback now and people love the results that they're getting from doing movements this way. So if you're at home and all you have are dumbbells that go up to 30 or 40 pounds or whatever, single leg hip thrust, that's a lot, that's good weight for a lot of people, especially if you're squeezing really hard at the top. All right, the next movement, I didn't really do these a lot until we started the podcast, Mind Pump. It really was Justin's influence that got me to look closer. I love these. I thought this movement really athletes. I thought this was valuable for athletes, really no other value for anybody else. I'm not gonna build lots of muscle and strength when I get a lot of carryover unless I'm a sprinter or a runner, not that big of a deal. We all got together early days of Mind Pump and we all did a workout together and it turned into a bit of a who's stronger than who type of thing, which tends to happen when you get a bunch of guys together. And I remember each of us picked an exercise and when it got to Justin's turn, he picked the sled drive. Now I never really did them as part of a routine. I messed with them a little bit, but really I was surprised at how effective they were at activating my muscles. And then the next day, the primary place I felt these was in my glutes. Sled drives are amazing for glute development, pushing forward, getting low, getting, taking big steps and driving for really getting that hip extension feeling the glutes catching on. You can get heavy load, you can get like maximal activation like you're talking about, but also the risk factor goes way down because all you have to do is let go. All I do is stop. And so I used to use these with any of my clients. Didn't matter if it was an 80 year old lady. I got, you know, we're doing sled pushes, we're doing sled drags. It's just one of those exercises that not a lot of people realize the potential it can provide in terms of muscle activation and development. So I went on a kick for a while of doing all kinds of stuff. And I had done probably a little bit more than you, Sal. Not quite as much as Justin though and hanging out with Justin just kind of reignited that for me to where I started using it more and more into my routine when I was competing. And one of the things that I loved messing with was because there's little things, there's little cues that you can do when you're doing drives or pulls with a sled to get activation more in specific areas. And what I mean by that, I'll give you an example. So if I'm trying to work my glutes more here and I'm doing a sled drive, I'm actually gonna, as I take steps forward and I drive, I'm gonna keep my heel flat. So the tendency to do a drive is to stay on the toes. Just like when you run. Like we run on the balls of our feet, right? So when you go to drive a sled, you're gonna be pushing off the toes normally. That's what you will naturally will gravitate towards. But if I wanna get more posterior chain and I wanna get those glutes more activated, I'll actually keep my heel flat. Like a big step forward. Yes, big step forward. Keep the heel flat and then drive and watch how much that lights up that backside. So there's cool things that you can do by manipulating just a little thing like that and really put the emphasis back on the butt by doing that. Keep the heel low, big steps. Keep the heel flat while you're driving. It's not about speed. It's about like grinding your way through that. That's why the load is something that you need to mess with to get that. So it actually takes you a while to push it across. Now, another thing I like about the sled drive is that it's all concentric movement. It's all positive reps. In other words, you're not doing the negative. So when you lift the weight, let's say I do a curl, curling the weight up is the positive portion of the rep. Lowering the weight is the negative. Now, why is this a good thing to have an exercise where it's mostly positive? Because it doesn't cause as much muscle damage. That means I can add the sled drive to my routine, add way more volume, not a ton of damage. This is a great volume builder. If your normal leg exercise or leg workout and glute workout has got lots of great exercises, but you want to throw one more thing in but you're not sure if it's gonna tip you over over training, whatever, do a sled drive. You don't get as much muscle damage, but you get that real good activation. Well, now when you bring up points like that, I love to share like we did on the other episode where we talked about how things pair really well together. So knowing that and keeping that in mind, I love to pair this exercise with like the sumo deadlift with emphasis on the negative. So I might go and I might sumo deadlift heavy load for just like three to five reps, but really put emphasis on slow on the way down and really putting the emphasis on the eccentric portion of the exercise. So I'm loading heavy, I'm focused on the eccentric on that exercise. And then I go over to a heavy load, a sled drive where it's all concentric and I'm loaded and heavy. Man, you pair those together in a workout, watch how much your backside is loaded. Now, if you don't have a sled and you're working out at home, push a car, no joke. Have somebody in the car, if you got a workout partner, put it in neutral, have them regulate with the brakes or whatever, open the windows, they can hear you and push that car down the street. You got yourself now a nice sled. Now, the next movement, a lot of fun. I love this one. And now I'm seeing more men do this exercise, which is great because it's a front loaded movement. The goblet squat. I love this exercise for the glutes, helps keep the body upright and people who tend to have issues with going deep with a traditional squat, tend to be able to go deeper with front loaded exercises like a goblet squat. This is great with, and you do this with dumbbells, right? So hold it in front of your body, sit nice and tall, squat down nice and low, come up. And at the top, I really want you to squeeze the glutes. When you get up to the top, fire the glutes real hard at the top for about three seconds, relax for a second, go back down. One of my favorite. This reminds me of like the old trainer tricks, right? So if I had a client that I'm teaching how to squat and I can't get them to break 90 degrees and we've done mobility work and they've just, they've trained themselves to be stop at that 90 degree mark and I can't get them to go any lower. Doing a goblet squat is one of the easiest ways to make that happen because it does. It forces them to keep their chest upright. It allows them to be able to get much deeper in the squat. And so I love to teach the goblet squat when I'm trying to get people and encourage people to go deeper into a squat because naturally you'll just do that with the weight loaded in the front. And so it's a great movement as a trainer to get someone to really activate and learn how to engage the glutes more in a squatted position period. If you have access to heavy kettlebells, I highly suggest this exercise specifically with a kettlebell just because of the way that it loads and the way that it forms in centric to your body. All that heavy load is in one place that I could kind of place there in my chest and go through that movement and keep everything nice and tight in centrics. Well, it's also easier to like front rack to 50 pound kettlebells than it is to hold 100 pound kettlebell. I mean, it forms better to this exercise. 100%. Now the next movement is a version of a lunge that places more emphasis on the glutes. It's a back step lunge. So we all know what a lunge looks like, right? You got a split stance, one leg in front, one leg in back, up and down. Most people know walking lunges, which believe it or not a walking lunge is actually like a back step lunge. It's actually quite similar even though they look very different. But why the back step lunge? Why are we doing that for the glutes? Because when I'm stepping back, going down and then pushing myself up and stepping forward, that gives me that hip extension. That forward propulsion from that front leg is what's getting the glute to fire. Opposed to a front step lunge. A front step lunge, when I'm stepping forward, going down and kicking myself out of that front position to go back into my feet together, that's knee extension. Now I'm working more quads. And if you look at a back step lunge and how you propel yourself out of it, that's exactly what a walking lunge does. But the back step lunge doesn't require to walk around anywhere. Yeah, like a decelerating, right? So like which part of my body, what muscle is responsible for slowing down this momentum? And so if I'm stepping behind myself, my glutes gonna make sure that I'm gonna slow my body in control and then explosively bring myself back out versus like stepping in front, my quads gonna be a little more dominant. Well, yeah, we're working with momentum to favor it working the glutes more versus the quads, right? So when you're doing a walking lunge, which can also be a good glute exercise, because you're walking forward, you have a propensity to wanna lean forward a little bit. And the opposite is true when you step backwards. When you step backwards, you have a propensity to wanna sit upright with your chest. Just that little bit of a difference forces more of the weight back into the glute versus over to the quad, like what you do when you walking lunge. You're gonna naturally lean forward. That's gonna make your weight distribute over the quads and the quads to activate a little bit more of the glutes. Just simply by stepping backwards, you're taking momentum the opposite direction, which forces the chest upright, puts more of the load back in the glutes. And then like your guys' point, the glute is what's gonna drive you out of that position. I love this exercise. And you never see people do back step lunges. I do these every single week. This is such a, it's one of those forgotten basic movements. And I never see people over in the squat racks loading the barbell up, because that's another thing too about this. You could load a back step lunge pretty good, man. So you could load that up on the squat rack, take a step back and then step forward, and load to where you're doing five to eight reps. You don't wanna be doing 15, 20, a ton of these, load it up and challenge that this is a great, great movement. Yeah, the other way would be with dumbbells. You could do this with dumbbells as well, but I love doing it with a barbell. In fact, this is an exercise that I do every single week now. I've been doing it now for months and it's had tremendous impact on my barbell squat and just the way my glutes and my legs develop and it's balanced me out. I had a little bit of a different, you know, discrepancy between the right and left. One of my favorite exercises, so definitely belongs on this. You can do this with dumbbells too, but I do encourage clients to do this with the barbell. Even if you can't load a lot of it at first with a barbell, as you get stronger and stronger with it, the limiting factor on you loading more will be your arms. Your hands. Yeah, at one point, you know, if I can, I've trained female clients of mine that could back step lunge 180 pounds, 200 pounds. They could do some serious weight on a back step lunge with a barbell on their back, but they sure as shit can't hold on to 100 pound dumbbells and do that. So the limiting factor will be your grip strength when you're using dumbbells. So starting off with a barbell on your back and even if you're just starting with the bar with 45 pounds at first, but working like that and then loading it each time, huge. Now, if you do only have access to dumbbells and you do find your hands start to fatigue faster than your legs, this is one of those few places where I could recommend wrist straps. You can actually use wrist straps quite effectively for leg exercises because you have to hold the dumbbells to work your legs. And wrist straps, you can find them anywhere all over Amazon. They're super, super cheap. This is one place that I would use those. Look, we record the podcast on video as well as audio. Check us out on YouTube. You can go to the Mind Pump podcast and you can watch and listen to the whole podcast. They're very easy to share as well. Also, look, we have a lot of guides that are free. We wrote guides on developing different parts of your body on working on your diet, burning body fat. We have a personal trainer guide. You can find all of those at mindpumpfree.com. Go there, check those out. Also, you can look at us on Instagram. You can talk to us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.