 Here's what's interesting, right? When you look at studies on what men and women find attractive, even women say this about men that they like to have, that they like well-developed glutes. Now, why is that? It's a sign of health. It's a sign of power to power performance, functionality. So unlike other body parts that we, you know, we try to change with injections or whatever, although they do have glute implants now, which is interesting. It really is just a reflection of your fitness and your health. That's also why that's become a popular thing now to do the surgeries because, because it is, you know, we're drawn to that already. And so people have, you know, not everybody wants to do the work for it. So they artificially do it. Now, here's the thing. I've trained lots of people. I've been doing this for over 20 years. I've always succeeded at building a woman's glutes. If that was her goal, I've always succeeded with it. Now that didn't mean there weren't challenges and struggles, but it's not a hard. It's not. It's not a muscle. It's a big, it's not like calves. It's not like stubborn calves or like a tiny little muscle that's hard to get to fire. It's a big muscle. And if you feed it and train it correctly, it grows. All right. Here's the giveaway for today. Now in this episode, we talk about building your butt. So it only makes sense that we give away our best butt building bundle. It's called the build your butt bundle. This includes maps, anabolic and maps aesthetic. And they're tweaked for people who really want to focus on building their butt. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on your notifications, do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll pick you, we'll notify you and you'll get free access to the build your butt bundle. Also, we've made that bundle 50% off for everyone else. So if you're watching this episode, you want to focus on your glutes. You want, by the way, those are full body training programs, not just for butt. Um, and you want to follow those programs. You can get it for 50% off. This promotion will expire Sunday. So right when we dropped this episode, it's going to expire Sunday, uh, April 10th. So this isn't going on for long. It's 50% off. Here's what you do. If you want to sign up for it, go to but bundle.com and then use the code, but 50 B U T T five zero. No space for that discount. All right. Here comes the rest of the show. You want to know what's funny? Uh, we all saw this in our careers. The evolution of desirable body parts to build in, uh, in people and in women in particular, we went from, I literally remember starting as a trainer at in 1997. And female clients hiring me and saying, I want, I want to make my butt smaller. And then all of a sudden, and I think it was like 2000 shifted the arms, I think they don't like real sculpted tone arms. I think that was when Michelle Obama was real popular G.I. Jane even before that. Oh, right. Exactly. Do pull-ups or yet or Sarah Connor in a Terminator two, that did that a little bit. Okay. But it was like, no, I want to get my butt smaller. And then all of a sudden it was like, people were hiring me and they're like, JLo dude, I want to build my butt. Oh, cool. Jennifer Lopez completely changed that. Did they narrow it down to her? It was 100% 100%. It was our music video. Like after that, it became a thing that and, uh, Vita Guerrero, Vita Guerrero. There's a famous, that's a fit. That's all fitness. There is a there is a famous, uh, magazine picture of her getting out of the pool and her and it's her butt. And that thing went viral. I remember that. Yeah. And my buddies worked with her. And I remember she was like one of the her and then JLo were like two of the she was like a big, um, see that was back when the, the fitness magazine years moving it from what Sal was saying, because there was, I do remember, see, we've been doing this long enough that I do remember people like, I want a smaller butt. Yeah. Yeah. Like girls actually asked for that at one time, which sounds crazy right now. If you're, if you're under the age of 30, that sounds nobody says that sounds ridiculous to you. And now the truth is, obviously the butt is their glutes, their muscles, and they're super important muscles. They're part of a lumbel pelvic hip complex. They stabilize the body in terms of primates. One of the muscle groups that separates us from other primates is our ass, is our glutes. If you look at chimps and orangutans and gorillas as big and strong as they are, they don't have really small glutes because they don't walk up right. They don't run very quickly. So it's like these really, it's, it's these characteristic muscles that humans have. They give you stability and strength and in terms of athletics. And Justin, you're the, you're the, the hardcore athlete. I've got a funny story around that. You can tell me you can, you can almost always tell if an athlete's got explosive power. Oh, I've always said this. Yeah, I've always said this, especially like one of the guys on our team had like just enormous glutes and he was, he was the best player by far. Most explosive would honestly was, was the guy responsible for like all of the records broken in our school. And I attribute all to his glutes. Yeah. Well, this is so accurate that in, and I remember in my 20s as a trainer when I started to figure this all out and we used to play like pick up basketball games and like, I would intentionally not pick the, you know, you, when you're lining up, you're getting ready to play and you're like, okay, I got him. Yeah, I would never take the dude with like the biggest glutes because I didn't want to get dunked on. I didn't want to get lucky and it was always that guy. You know what I'm saying? It was always you got that just had the built, the built legs and glutes that would be just that much faster and more explosive than everybody. And it was always that dude. If there was someone that was going to make them turn around or every line up. No, you could always say it was always like, like you're saying there's always like somebody who has like, you know, abnormally large glutes, thighs and legs like that, that just stood out, especially this basketball, like everybody's pretty lean. You really see like a, like a lineman sized guy playing basketball. So you, the dude would be lean, but then he would be just built in his glutes and his legs. And you knew that dude was able to throw down or would be just so much faster. This is an important, it sounds like we're joking around whatever, but here's what's interesting, right? When you look at studies on what men and women find attractive, even women say this about men, that they like to have, that they like well-developed glutes. Now, why is that? It's a sign of health, it's a sign of power to power performance, functionality. So unlike other body parts that we, you know, we try to change with injections or whatever, although they do have glute implants now, which is interesting. Yeah, it really is just a reflection of your fitness and your health. So I encourage people to build this. That's also why that's become a popular thing now to do the surgeries because it is, you know, we're drawn to that already. And so people have, you know, not everybody wants to do the work for it. So they artificially do it. Yeah. Well, this is why I was behind the movement, because it's like actually a place of your body you can build and develop. Totally. It's not like, you know, when the boobs, boobs. Yeah, you could say it. Yeah. But how do I say it? Yeah. How do I say you can't grow boobs? Yeah. No, it's because it's not muscle. Yeah. Right. Now, now here's the thing. I've trained lots of people. I've been doing this for over 20 years. I've always succeeded at building a woman's glutes. If that was her goal, I've always succeeded with it. Now that didn't mean there weren't challenges and struggles, but it's not a hard. It's not. It's not a muscle. It's a big, it's not like calves, it's not like stubborn calves or like a tiny little muscle that's hard to get to fire. It's a big muscle. And if you feed it and train it correctly, it grows. It will. Almost every single, I mean, every time I've ever done it with someone, so I'm sure someone listening or watching right now is like, what do you mean? Like I've been doing this for so long. It's not working for me. And why isn't it working for me? This isn't happening. So what we did is we listed out the main, and these are very common. What we're about to go through are very common reasons as to why in particular women often will say, Hey, I can't build my butt. I'm trying, and it's just not happening. Um, the very first one that comes to mind for me, and I really think that this is, is getting better, um, today than it was back when we're talking about when we first started. I know what you're going to say. Oh, this was always the problem. Lifting heavy. I mean, it was also the secret. So by the way, it was also the secret just to just build a body on a female because they were, they were so apprehensive to, to lift heavy weight because still back, you know, 20 years ago, lifting heavy weight equal big, you know, get big and muscular body. And no girl came in and said, Hey, I want to get all big and muscular looking back then. Nobody was saying that. So they just assumed that to build their butt, they would do these other, all these, you know, high right, light weight type of exercises and get the butt to burn, you know, and get that feeling, but not lift like heavy to build it. No, one of the worst myths, uh, really damaging myths to women in fitness is this idea and the fitness industry partially to blame is this idea that if you work out like quote unquote, like a man, you're going to look like a man. In other words, if you lift heavy, you're going to build these huge muscular, uh, arms and shoulders and back. You're not going to look feminine. This is a terrible, terrible myth because that simply does not happen. Now I know someone listening is thinking, what would you mean? I've seen in Instagram and I've seen on magazines like women that like, they're bigger than you, Sal. Like what are you talking about? Okay, we have to be very clear here that there is a spectrum. There's a spectrum of genetic ability to build muscle on one end of the spectrum. You have physical disabilities, like people who have real medical issues in their bodies, just don't repair and build muscle and way on the other end. Those are rare, by the way. Those are extremely rare. Like, you know, think right now how many people you know or you've met in real life that have those types of genetic issues, right? Very rare. On the other end of the spectrum, as rare or possibly even more rare are people that just build muscle like, like so fast and so easy. Super, it's more rare than people who are naturally seven feet tall. The problem is we look at magazines and we look at social media and we're led to believe that that is so common, that, oh my gosh, if I just, you know, if Mrs. Johnson goes and does eight heavy reps of squats, she's going to wake up tomorrow and look like, you know, Miss Olympia, doesn't happen. It just does not happen. You can train like a bodybuilder. You could eat like a bodybuilder. You could do all that stuff for years and years and years and 99.9% of people watching this are just going to look the way that they've always wanted to look, which is good. Sculpted, have some shape. None of them are going to look like that Miss Olympia. I also think that part of the reason too is, I mean, just imagine for a second, you know, a female client of yours hires you or comes in and starts working out in the gym and her body fat percentage is higher than she wants and she also wants to build a butt, right? That's not, that's a very common. Yeah, yeah. I'm not as lean as I would like and I would like to build a butt and they listen to advice to go lift heavy and they go do that. And temporarily when they're in the gym, they air up the fluid. You got blood, the blood, they get this pump and their legs feel big and tight and they feel their pants out. So I do think some of this is psychological reinforces that fear. That's right. That you already have that fear going into it, then you're trying to, okay, I listen to those my pump guys, I'm going to go do it and then you'll get your first like real pump, your first leg ass pump you've ever had because you're training the right way. And also you go, oh, hell no, you know, your legs are all filled out, the pants are all tight and you're thinking, that's one workout I did. Not only that, but to add to that, women's pants and jeans are not designed for athletic female women that have some hamstring, some glue, a little bit of quad, forget like massive just some muscle. That's both sex. And so that's true for both. You're right. But especially for women. And so what happens when you lift, when you start working out and you do start to build the butt a little bit, the first thing it does is it lifts, you'll notice your butt gets a little higher. Now your jeans, which were designed for flat butt or no butt, start to feel tight. Oh my gosh, I'm getting too big. And I've had women come to me and say, okay, Sal, I know I lost four percent body fat. I know I'm leaner. My jeans aren't fitting. And I used to tell them I say what about the waist of your jeans? Oh yeah, that's way looser. Okay, don't worry about it. You're building and lifting your butt. Your pants are not designed to they're designed for people who don't have any muscle. The truth is building muscle is such a slow arduous, hard process simply because building muscle requires more energy to be consumed to survive your bodies. Our bodies evolved with scarcity. So they don't want to become, you know, calorie burning machines. They want to become more efficient. So it's a hard long, slow process. And so if your goal is to build your butt, what you want to do is you want to train in the most effective way possible, which will still make it happen slowly, but it'll happen faster than if you avoid those effective techniques. If you're fearful and say, I can't train heavy, I'm scared of getting big. Now it's not just going to take a long time. It's never going to happen. So you want to train in the most effective muscle building way possible, which is to lift heavy. You want to train with a high intensity. You want to keep your reps. You can go as low as two or three reps as high as 15 reps. But once you start to get much higher than especially when you get above 30 reps with lightweight, the muscle building is just slows way down. You're just not as effective. It does take a little bit of time to learn proper technique. And I think the some of the reservations is a reservation. Thank you. Reservations that a lot of women have had is that it's just barbell training in general, you know, it takes proper technique. It takes the educational process and like going through that. But it's so worth it. It once you establish good form and good technique, that's something that you know, will you can build this foundational muscle that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Dude, I'm going to tell you when we in tell me if I'm wrong, when we first became trainers, once you started to figure this out, it was easier to give women results that is way easier because all of them did that. None of them trained heavy. And all you had to do was have him trained. That's right. And that's part of the part of the reason that this is so important is because it speaks to the point that we always make on the show, which is the importance of novelty. Yeah. Right. So the reason why this works so well and why this is so important to listen to and then to go apply this if you if you're this person, right, is because most women were not lifting heavy. They weren't lifting heavy at all. And just simply doing that is going to get the body to respond. Not to mention that is going to be the best way for you to build the glutes and build muscle. But that's even even more so when you never do that. So now if someone's listening right now and they train really heavy on a regular basis and you're a woman and you try to build, you're going to get less from this advice because that simple reason. But that's not most that's not most female clients. Most female clients have avoided that, you know, three reps or five rep range. Just look at the programs that are out there. The majority are booty band driven or high reps or yeah, it all kind of stemmed I think from like sort of that jazzer size generation. Yeah, there was a lot of at home multiple reps type program. Well, that's the next point that is the wrong exercises or wrong movements. I mean, it's just you're doing these exercises that I think that you feel and they burn. And so that again, playing to the psychology of it, it's like they feel you're burning. You don't get a massive pump from it. You don't build a lot of muscle from it. So you don't feel the legs expanding. You don't feel that, but you feel this burning sensation. So you think, Oh, I must be building that muscle. And so you continue to do those type of exercise and burn fat, right? They sound the same. Yes. If I burn, if the muscle burns, I must be burning fat. And that's not what's happening at all. They're not connected whatsoever. Burning body fat comes from a calorie deficit. It doesn't come from doing lots of reps and feeling a burn in a particular muscle. If if lifting heavy, if telling women that lifting heavy would make them look like guys, so they need to stay away from lifting heavy. If that's the worst myth, the second worst myth is that there's exercises that men do and there's exercises that women do. That is so wrong. There are effective exercises and there's less effective exercises. That's it. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. If a barbell squat, which happens to be one of the most effective lower body exercises, that's effective for a man. It's effective for women as well. It's effective for both of them for their goals. There is no female barbell dumbbell machine exercise. Now they market them that way. So you'll have machines that are marketed to women like hip abduction, hip adduction, you know, a donkey kickback machines, like all these machines that you can tell. In fact, if you look at the machines themselves, here's what's funny. When I noticed this, you go to the gym and they didn't do this back in the day, but now a machine will have a little picture of either like, like an illustration of a person doing the exercise. You could see, oh, that's how you do it. Go to the abduction adduction machine. It's a female model. Go to the donkey kickback. It's a female model. Go to the bench press machine, dude. Go to the row machine, dude. So they know, and this is what they're marketing to, and it just feeds into this terrible myth. And so what happens is women for a long time have done the least effective exercises, which is silly. It's like, if I'm telling you to dig a 10 foot hole, and I say you can pick a shovel, a backhoe or a spoon, who the hell is going to pick a spoon? Definitely nobody. And most people are going to pick a shovel and go with the backhoe. I really think though it has a lot to do with what they feel, right? Like, okay, let's let's take two examples. And we both know or we all know exactly what is going to be way more beneficial for building the glutes. But take, take the same client and you do three sets and three like fast sets where they're 30 second rest periods and she does frog pumps. Yeah, just three to 20 reps, 20 reps of frog pumps for three sets, 30 second rest between there. What do you know is happening? Ass is on fire, right? Take that same person. Okay. And instead we're going to do three sets of five by, you know, five by five type of squats, right? Or see that'd be five sets, three sets of five reps of heavy 185 pound barbell back squats, which one is going to develop her ass way more and which one if you asked her not knowing like not telling her anything saying, where did you feel your butt more or what do you think worked your butt more? What do you think you're going to get told? Yeah, the opposite of what's most effective because you feel it more. And that to me, that's the real hurdle here is that you it's really tough when there's already this myth out there that you've heard for so long. So you already have a bias. That's right. You already have a bias going in. But oh, I'm open minded. I heard these guys on Mind Pump saying this. So I'm going to go do these these squats for three to five sets, you know, five reps. And after they do them, they're kind of like, I don't even know if I really felt it in my body. It's hard to convince because hell yes, especially because the difficulty of it, you know, there's a couple of hurdles involved. But what they don't realize is these compound lifts stimulate the body and create such a loud signal for you to recruit even more muscles to be to contribute to this. And so it tells the body, oh my god, there's much more demand. This is a much more taxing situation we need to build to be able to make our way through this crazy environment. There's no comparison. Look, you go back to my digging a whole analogy. Which one are you going to feel more digging a hole with a spoon or using a backhoe? Right? At the end of it? Hey, which one? Hey, which one made you work harder? The spoon? But I'm going to look at the hole and be like, dude, you went down a quarter of an inch. The guy over there with the backhoe who said he didn't feel anything. It was super easy. He did the 10 feet. So stop basing it so much on how you feel. And I'm not saying ignore your body, but look at the results. But the best exercise, the exercises by far that are the most effective in the context of building the butt barbell squats, hip thrusts, deadlifts and variations of those. So you can go split stance type squats, which are lunges or Bulgarian squats, right? All the variations of barbell squats, all the variations of deadlifts from stiff legged to single legged to sumo, right? Good morning. Good morning. Those exercises right there. Only those will build your butt to a great degree. You can do one million other exercises that promises you that and none of the inco and none of the combinations of the other exercise will even compare. I'll tell you what, you do barbell squats and hip thrusts by themselves. You can do 10 other exercises in your workout and you'll build more muscle in your butt and get better results and get it rounder and more shapely with those two that I just said. That's the difference between effective exercises that we're talking about. Well, there's another massive hurdle or elephant in the room here, I think is so go back to that original client I said that comes in because this has got to be like one of the most common things is come in and a female client tell me, Adam, I want to shrink my waist or I want to lose some fat, but I also want to build my butt. So this presents a challenge not only for the client, but even for the trainer. Okay, well, what do I do here? Because I know that in order to build a muscle, we need to be in a caloric surplus. You have to have extra fuel. That's right. Right. So and that's to build any muscle, whether it be the butt, the biceps, the shoulders, the cat. It doesn't matter if you are going to build okay, anabolic refitus. That's right. We need to feed it. It needs to be in a surplus in order to add tissue. So if that's what we're going to do, we have to be in a caloric surplus. But then I also know if my goal is to lose body fat and be catabolic, the opposite is true. I've got to be in a calorie reduction, right? Or and be in a calorie burn, right? So if you get a client that says that as a trainer, you have to make this decision. Okay, which way do I go first or how do I communicate this to my client on what we should be doing? There's two ways to do this. One is let me make the client happy. So I'm just going to have them burn calories and get them to lose an initial five pounds, because that's what people associate with success. The second way to do it is the experienced trainer, which says building muscle is going to get your body to burn more calories naturally. Let's do that. First, the fat loss is going to be easier if we start with the building. Okay. But besides all that, even women who just want to build, even women who are like, you know, I'd be okay with staying the same body fat, but I want to build my muscle oftentimes are afraid to eat enough to make that happen because they've been hammered by society and advertising and you know, just just culture in general, that they can't, they shouldn't gain any weight. They can't eat too much. It's scary. It's scary. Look, I understand this from the opposite perspective as a kid. I was skinny and I was afraid of being too skinny. So I was always trying to eat more, which actually prevented me from ever really getting super lean until I got much older because if I got, if I lost two pounds on the scale, mess on my head, oh, better start eating every, you know, every other hour. So on the opposite end, I understand that, but you have to eat enough to build muscle. It ain't going to happen. You could have the best workout. You could be on to all the steroids you want even. You don't feed your body enough. You're not going to build any muscle. So and this is a big one. And most women, when they start working out and you ask them, have you ever tried to purposely gain? Yeah. No, it's always on accident, right? No, no, I don't try to feel back. I mean, we had one episode just geared towards a shooting ball in bulk. Yes. And it was like mind blowing, and because nobody's talking about that. And it is so true. It's like, why would you go into a building type of programming and you're not feeding yourself adequate amount of nutrients? Like, how are you going to pull this off? You need to have the materials in order to build the desired outcome. I would never, by the way, okay, a client that comes in and in that situation, I don't care if she's 35, 40% body fat way, way high body fat percentage and says exactly what I said, I want to lose fat and I want to build a butt. I would never put her in a cut to start. No, never. No, which is no, because building helps by the way, though, that's a really hard thing for a young trainer to try and communicate. Right. You got someone walks in. There's the we know we need to lose body fat. They know they need to lose, but they admit it. They don't like where they're at. They don't like how they feel. And they're like, hey, I need to lose a significant amount of body fat. Please help me. But I also want to build a butt. We're good. We're going into calorie surplus. And I think that is just so hard to communicate that to somebody who thinks that, oh my God, I'm already overeating. Look at me. I need to drop down, but then also has this goal of building a butt. But you as as an experienced trainer, you know that like your point, Sal, if I if I get her to focus on increasing her caloric intake and building muscle, even if it's for a short period, just for a couple months that we focus in that direction, if I can add three to five or maybe get lucky and add seven pounds of muscle on her body in that period of time, the her metabolism is going to be so much faster that when we decide to cut and go the opposite direction and reduce calories, she's going to drop weight even faster than if I would have said, okay, let's first cut down and then we'll try and build the butt. Yeah. And it took me a little while to figure that out as a trainer because I just was failing. You know, you get the initial 10 pound weight loss. Well, you you lost your point you made earlier, you you fall prey to giving them what you they want. Yeah, rather than what they need. Yeah, exactly. You you fall prey to like, well, I do know if I if I restrict your calories and I make her butt burn, I can make her lose 10 pounds. That's right. She'll lose 10 pounds. She'll feel her butt burning so she'll associate. Oh, we must be training my butt like I asked. And so I think a lot of trainers fall into this trap of giving the client what they want versus giving them what they need or what they should do for their their ultimate goal. Think of it this way, right? The when you work out, you're sending the signal that says, let's build. So imagine it this way, right? You're trying to build. Imagine you're a project manager and you're trying to build a building. OK, so that represents your body. And so what you do is you send the plans over with no material. You send all the plans and you got the workers and everything's perfect. Here's the plans. You got the work and they're all ready to go. All right, we know what we need to do and then have no brick. Shit, who father who forgot the wood? No wood. They have no, you know, no, no concrete. They have nothing to work with half the supplies, right? Yeah, they just going to sit there. They're just going to sit there with the plans. Nothing's going to happen or make it even worse. You start to starve the workers. And now the workers are like, in order to survive, we got to go. We got to start taking. We got to start taking bricks off of other stuff. Start eating the bricks. Yeah. And so so you can't. It's building without eating or feeding in your body enough is impossible. So you got it. So oftentimes again, this is and this is third for a reason. This is the third reason when we would come to me. And sometimes it's this was pretty rare. Usually it was that we're not lifting heavy enough for doing the right exercises. But oftentimes I'd look at sometimes I get a client. I'd look at their work. I'd be like, OK, squatting and deadlifting. That looks good. OK, you're you're you're lifting heavy enough. This looks pretty good. Let's look at your diet. And I look at their diet. I'm like, OK, you're eating 100 colors. Yeah. This isn't going to happen. We got to and I would just have them eat more. And then voila, magically, they would end up, you know, building more of a butt. OK, so this next one is more common today than ever because and look, there's definitely been some progress in the fitness space. Women, nobody lifted heavy before. Nobody did barbell. Not just women. Men didn't even do barbell squats or deadlifts before, let alone women eating enough. That's still an issue, but less so today than it was before. You see some female fitness influencers now promoting eating more protein and bumping up calories. But here's the one now that I see it's a little bit more common, which is that they lack connection to their glutes in the sense that when they do those really effective exercises, rather than the barbell squat hitting the glutes, it hits more quads rather than, you know, a lunge doing what it's supposed to do with the butt. Again, it's building the quads more. This is where you're ready for this. We're going to go back a little bit on what we said earlier, but I'll explain why. This is where all those exercises that we made fun of earlier in this episode, the frogs, the purpose, that's what those are for. Those exercises teach your body to connect to your glutes. So that when you do your squats, your deadlifts, your hip thrusts, now you can target those the muscles that you're trying to work. So that's the value. And I want to be clear. There's definitely way more effective muscle building exercises than other. But all exercises have value if used properly. Those exercises that are sold to women are terrible muscle builders. But many of them are great at getting you to connect to your butt. So how does this work? You would do your frog pumpers at the beginning of your workout to feel the glutes, to feel a little bit of the muscle working to get a little bit of pump. Not fatiguing it. Not fatiguing the hell of it, but rather just to feel it. Then you go do your squats. Now you've got better technique. Now you're making them glute squats, not just quad squats. This is the hardest one, I think, for us to help people via podcasting, right? The other one, I think, is like we could communicate. Yeah. The other three is like very straightforward to eat, eat more calories, do the right exercises, lift heavy. Like if you weren't doing those things, you take that advice, you can definitely see the difference. This is the one that I get where I were having a coach or a trainer or somebody who is, you know, experienced to be able to help you with the mechanics, because this is the, and this is, I feel like the first half of my career, the front three things that we talked about were like all of the conversation. Now, it'd be like your point, Sal, like people are squatting and deadlifting now. They're doing the right movements. I mean, Brett Contreras is famous on social media. So you know to do these type of movements to build a butt. And so the communication is out there now, but that there still are people that are challenged with this. They're like, hey, I'm doing all these things you're saying, I'm eating in a surplus. I'm lifting heavy. I'm doing the right exercises, but I my quads are just getting big, you know, my legs are just getting big and it's not my butt building. And this is just the area where it's like, OK, and it's common in both men and women is we're not able to get the glutes to fire properly. And then to your points that's where you use an exercise like a frog pump. And instead of saying comparing the frog pumps to the barbell squats and saying, OK, which is better? Or I'm going to either take this path or that path that this is where you marry these or they were they both have values. OK, I'm going to take my client who has a really hard time getting their their glutes to fire. We're going to do a one set, you know, of those frog pumps for 15 to 20 reps just to get that burn going. And then we're going to move over to the barbell squats and then have them do the exercise. Yeah, that mind, muscle connection is so important to establish in the beginning. And again, this is where it's real helpful to have a coach to have those eyes to kind of, you know, see your your mechanics. So to a big point with the back loaded squat is depth and full range of motion. So if we're not really breaking parallel, you know, we're not asking quite enough out of the glutes to contribute. And so there's just things like that, that even though maybe you have a weight like you woke them up and you got the recruitment process started with these pumps or these, you know, lateral tube walking or whatever it was. And you bring that into the compound lift, you still have to have the proper mechanics and get enough depth to really gain the benefit. Well, that's part two of these exercises to help you connect, which is they improve your connection and mobility. They improve your functional flexibility. So like, you know, let's say you do have issues with going below 90 degrees on a barbell squat. And we know this for a fact that squats going all the way down, proper squats going all the way down will activate the glutes way more than a parallel squat or squat that squat that's above parallel. So what if and I'm going to use I'm going to illustrate an example. This isn't everybody, but some people they can't go all the way down because they lack ankle mobility. OK, so in this case, I'm going to do yeah, I'm going to do an ankle mobility exercise like a combat stretch before I do the squats, get to the point where my ankle mobility is now a little better. Now I can break parallel and activate my glutes a little bit more, right? What if I combine that? Oh, it's my ankle mobility. Plus I don't feel my glutes anyway. Let me do my combat stretch. Let me do my frog pumpers or let me do my lateral tube walking or let me do my body weight single leg hip thrust. Get those glutes to fire. Get my ankles out of the way. Boom. Now that barbell squat that's so effective. I'm I'm getting the real benefit of those barbell squats. I'm getting the maximum benefit. This is also an example, though, too, where you would use things like squat, squat shoes or elevated heels to to do a squat because someone has a specific goal like this. And you know that working on ankle mobility is going to take time and I can right away get to starting to get the glutes to fire. So there's a great example because we're all we're I mean, we're not we're not promoting tools like that that often. But herein is an example client who let's say that's their specific goals, like I said earlier about losing body fat building the glutes. And then let's say that the one of the first big hurdles we see is that oh, they can't break 90 degrees because they limit ankle mobility. So obviously we're doing combat stretch. We're working on that. But what I know is that one session of combat stretch is not going to get my client into the proper depth to get the glutes firing right away. So I'm going to do combat stretch, but then I'm also going to allow them to do like heels elevated with their squats or five pound plates. Yeah. And that's it. But with the ultimate goal of I'm going to get this ankle mobility there to where she no longer needs these squat shoes or no longer needs to elevate the heels. But temporarily why we're doing these barbell squats and we're not getting past 90 even with us priming in that session with their combat stretch. This is where I'm going to allow something like that or I'm going to use a tool like that. We gave examples earlier of the best most effective exercises. As Adam said earlier, that was a much more straightforward. I'm going to give some good priming examples. What we're talking about right now is priming. So when you do a movement before your most effective movement to help you do the effective movement basically you're priming your body. That's that's the terminology. So I'm going to give some some general good priming movements. Now the problem with what I'm about to do is that it's much more individualized than what we said earlier, you know, squats, deadlifts, hip thrust, like they build best butts in everybody. Okay. So long as they can do and they build the best butts in everybody. What I'm about to talk about are generally good priming movements before you train exercises for your butt. The only problem again is that it's very individual. Okay. So they this may or may not work for you. But I'm going to pick the most common ones. I already mentioned combat stretch. That typically helps a lot of people with better depth in a lot of these butt building exercises. 90 90 with external internal rotation that tends to help with hip connection and hip mobility which sometimes gets in the way or even core stability can help with some people. And then you have your body weight hip thrusts or your frog pumpers or your lateral two blocks to wake the glutes up. So I just gave you a bunch of exercises. You could pick two of them. Do them before you do your your your butt workout and see if you notice any real good. What would you guys say is the most common ones that you would use to prime or that you that you found most effective when you're when you're teaching somebody like this. I mean obviously those are the ones that I mean for me it was like those those would be the most effect usually. But man sometimes it's so it's so different from person to person. I've had clients that I had to to to prime their adductors which is not common. It's usually abductors. But I've had clients I've had to prime their adductors. That's really very squeeze like a basketball or something. Yeah. So it's like that's what I mean. It's so individual right. Yeah. You take that person if I took that person I do two blocks it would have made them worse. I mean in my yeah I think in my opinion two blocks are one of the one of the main ones are leg swings or anything to get them to promote opening up their hips as they drop in the hole. I think one of the most common things you say and this is men and women is that you just lateral stability. Yeah. Yeah. I mean we just we just locked that and because we lack that what ends up happening is is naturally as you drop down into a squat the knees collapse in for leverage. They collapse in and really you're you're shutting off the gloomy right. Your butt has three parts right. And that's one of the muscles that give you that kind of heart shape or allow you to see the butt from the front is that muscle. That's what keeps the knees from collapsing inward. So priming that muscle to be firing when you go into a squat. I would say is one of the most common that I think I use with almost every one of my clients before we get into. Yeah I would agree. I would agree. Now this last part this is where it gets a little complicated. And this is that there's a lot of bad workout programming. OK. So what does that mean. Workout programming is encompasses all the components of a workout which include how many sets of the exercises you do. How many reps you do the tempo. So like how fast you do the reps. The order of the exercises in the workout how each day communicates to each day during the week. I did this workout today. How does that affect tomorrow's workout that I'm supposed to do. Right. As well. Does it phase. Does it change. I do this for three weeks or four weeks. Then I change to something else. All these factors all work together to make a workout very effective or make it make a workout totally ineffective. I mean you could actually have everything be identical in two workouts and just have the exercise order be totally off or have the volume be totally different like one factor. It will make the whole workout not effective. Yeah. One thing I always see in a lot of these types of programming that's like glaring for me right away is the lack of recovery emphasis and you know strength focus and rest period. Jazz or size. Yeah. Everything is just go go go go go go go. You know as many reps as possible get the burn. Even if you are doing compound lifts it's just you know the tendency a lot of times is to just I need to be doing something right now instead of you know adequately applying that rest period so your body can get the right signal. I think that's the move with this point to be is to actually share what poor programming looks like opposed to trying to explain what good programming looks like. I think trying to explain good programming to the audience right now is a lot more complicated and individualized because of all the nuances but I think communicating what to look out for as bad programming is is an easier way to say and at your point I think the most common things I see are tons of super sets. A lot of these circuits. Yeah. No rest. A lot of these burn type of exercises. You know you you're missing movements like good mornings you're missing movements like deadlifts like you're missing movements like the barbell back squat like hip thrust you're missing a lot of those and you're instead you're doing a lot of these you know jump boxes or kickbacks or dog pee. If you see any type of jumping or explosive movement in your workout and it is not a specific sports plyometric workout in other words a workout that was written for basketball players football like really written by good coach garbage throw it away. Jump lunges you see a lot of that bullshit in these types of this is why I think that you see you don't see a lot of women going for lifting heavy because it's they're thinking too much about what's next you know what's and so to keep loading weight doesn't make any sense because they're not going to be adequately recovered they're just so taxed. Now you know what's funny about this is back in the day you know before I you know we had created programs and stuff like this when I would have a family member asked me like what do I do what do I follow. Do I follow the shape magazine workout or I don't say look all those workout programs are garbage. I said if you want to follow a program that's actually give you good results some of the best programmed workouts out there are like power lifting. Yeah. So I'll tell my female family members do you know you know West Side Barbell powerlifting program and they'd be like what do you mean I don't want to be a power if I say look it's way more effective than anything else you're going to find and mainly because strength focused competitive type focused programs have to be good because otherwise people don't do them they go and they go to a meat either they're stronger they're not they outperform what they did last time or they don't otherwise it's all this kind of subjective you know kind of mumbo jumbo garbage. I will say this which is I find interesting and I've communicated I communicate this as a trainer oftentimes people are so willing to spend so much money on ineffective things like supplements and diet pills and powders. I used to tell people this all the time potential clients that say look you you buy two workouts with me for two hundred bucks. No. I get you're going to get way more value out of two hours with me than the two hundred dollars worth of diet pills that you bought that will last you a couple months I guarantee it at the very least I can teach you proper biomechanics and I can write down a very basic workout. It's going to give you way better results. So I like to tell people this if you invest in anything invest in a good workout program because at the very least it was written well the programming is the most of all the stuff that we talked about this is the most complex because we could literally do we could do 50 episodes on exercise programming and what'll end up happening is we'll be speaking to other high level trainers because it can get quite complicated. In fact we had a question the other day about working out and the guys was out of remember who it was we were talking to and they were saying how they weren't feeling very good. And then they told us their exercise order and all of us were like oh yeah don't do your those exercises in that order. Yeah it's going to make your back hurt. He's like that's sure enough what happened my back hurt my hamstring. You know I got a Charlie horse or whatever. So the workout programming part is the most complex. If you are going to invest in anything. This is going to be where you're going to get by far the most bang for your buck is a good workout plan that you could just follow because all that complexity is is ironed out for you. Now the other thing you can do is we've laid out workouts and stuff on our YouTube channel on our podcast it's all free. So you can piece stuff together. But if you want to make it real easy. We did put together a bundle called the but builder bundle which comes with maps anabolic maps aesthetic and we design them in a way to target the glutes. So what you'll see in maps anabolic or trigger sessions those are going to be glute focused what you'll see in maps aesthetic or focus sessions those are going to be glute focused that bundle is 50% off and then what we also did is we threw in what we called the but mod but builder mod that you're going to use later. So what you're going to do is you're going to follow the but builder bundle programs afterwards to continue your workouts anytime you want to work out your butt and you follow any other program you can take the mod and just inject it replace your current butt exercises with what we put in the box. So basically what we're doing is we're setting you up long term for great but gains right for great results in your glutes. Now if you want to do the 50% off here's what you got to do you got to go to but bundle.com so but bundle.com and then the code for 50% off is but 50 B U T T 5 0 for the 50% off discount. Look if you like our information head over to mine pump free.com and check out our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any fitness goal. You can also find us all on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at mine pump Justin Adam is on Instagram at mine pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at mine pumps out.