 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's favorite fitness health and entertainment podcast, we talk about building the butt. In particular, we talk about the four reasons why your butt is not responding or is not building. So we talk about everything from exercise selection, poor muscle recruitment patterns and inability to connect to the butt muscles, program design or poor program design, I should say. And we talk about the wrong kind of nutrition for building the butt. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Legion. Legion makes some of the best performance enhancing muscle building fat burning supplements on the market. These are supplements for dedicated people who work out hard and want to see great results. All of Legion's products are not sweetened with artificial sweetener. They have natural sweeteners. All of the products are backed by third party testing. 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It's a fitness workout designed to make you look amazing and move amazing. Now, if you have a full home gym set up, follow the program as it's laid out. If you only have dumbbells, that's all you got. There's a mod in the program that allows you to follow the full program with just dumbbells. Here's how you get the 50% off. Go to mapsgreen.com. That's M-A-P-S-G-R-E-N.com and use the code Green50. That's Green50 with no space for the discount. I want to talk about a subject that I think Justin is an expert in. Let's talk about some mass. Of course. It's my specialty. You know what's funny is that for, I remember this too in the fitness space. I've been doing this for a long time, right? There was a shift where people wanted to get smaller butts. JLo, dude. And then all of a sudden it became, I want to grow my butt. JLo, right? Was she the main catalyst for this? Yes, dude. Really? She was the big first one. I think she was the first one. Yeah. Even when people came to me and hired me early on and said that they wanted a smaller butt, what they meant was they wanted one that was more shapely, firm, sculpted, toned, whatever word you want to use, but essentially what those things mean. They didn't mean smaller, like they wanted it to look the same, but be smaller, but rather they wanted to be leaner and have good shape to it. And so I'd have these conversations and say, well, the butt's a muscle. We can build it. And then of course we'll follow a nutrition plan that allows you to get leaner. And that's going to give you the goal. And it's the same thing when people come to me and say, later on, I want my butt to be like JLo's or I want a bigger butt and it's like, well, we're going to build it. We're going to build the same thing. No. I want to do this a little bit different because I think that finding information regarding building a butt is all over the internet. So it's not hard to find or Google search this topic. Yeah, these days it is. Yeah. It's one of the number one search topics that's related to fitness or building muscle is how to build a butt. I think we should talk about the four reasons why people struggle to build a butt and lead into that. In fact, our number one most downloaded free guide is on building the butt. And you can find that at, what's the URL for that? Is that mindpumpfree.com? Yeah. So we have a bunch of free guides on there. It's just free information. They're like short books on different topics. And the building the butt one is by far our most popular one. But yeah, I think what we should do is talk about the most common mistakes because it's one thing to not work out, not do anything and then be frustrated over your butt. That's frustrating. But what's way more frustrating is when you're spending time and energy trying to develop a butt, trying to sculpt it, trying to shape it and nothing is happening. And there's no shortage of misinformation out there kind of steering you in all kinds of different directions of how to achieve this, you know, desired celebrity big butt. And so to be able to navigate through all that is the most important thing, like things to look out for. Yeah, because again, it's the most frustrating thing in the world is when you're genuinely trying, you're genuinely working hard, you're following advice that you've seen, you're consistent, you're doing it and nothing, nothing is happening. You do it for months, you look in the mirror. Why isn't this working? I'm doing, I'm putting all this effort, all this time into, you know, trying to develop my butt. Nothing is happening. That is by far one of the most frustrating feelings of all time. Well, there's so much misinformation regarding this. And it's, I think it's led by a lot of females that have the great genetics to start with, that are promoting some of these exercises and routines to build their butt that are terrible. And they were already, but everyone's, everyone has got a friend or girlfriend that has got that butt that had a butt before she even started to exercise. And so there's, there is a genetic role in this also, right? There's, if somebody has a really long origin insertion, you're going to have what you start with is going to have this kind of longer, flatter butt. Okay, so if you're just like a guy who has a long origin insertion for a bicep and he's always trying to reach that peak or that bubbly look for his bicep, he's at, he's at a starting point, he's at a disadvantage of attaining that, but it doesn't mean that he can't build his biceps just like the girl who starts off with a flatter butt does not mean that she can't create this bubblier looking butt. You just have to understand that she's, her starting point may be different than that girl that has that great bubble butt before she even lifted anything. And here's the beauty of resistance training. We're dealing with a muscle, right? We're not dealing with body fat. So like if you were trying to get more body fat on your butt, that's largely determined by your genetics. Where do you store body fat is largely determined by genetics. Of course, your health can change fat storage patterns a little bit, hormones can change a little bit, but you know, your butt is a muscle. Here's the beauty of resistance training. You can target muscles and you can shape them, you can build them, you can sculpt them, resistance training them properly is like, it's like a, it's like a sculptor. You take a piece of clay and you can literally build some areas to make them look the way you want. And so that's the beauty of what we're talking about right now. Although genetics play a role, you can get around genetics because we're dealing with a muscle. Much more easy with, with the glutes because, you know, before this, it was the chest and how big your boobs could be and all that. And so of course that's largely determined to genetics at that point or getting surgery or things, you know, to enhance that, that area. But like the butt, like you said, is we could build and develop this to its full potential because it is one of the major muscles of your body. Oh, the glutes are one of the biggest muscles in the body, the prime movers and many, many movements that you do. In fact, it's one of the muscles that separates us from other primates. We have really big glute muscles. It's because we stand upright, it balances us out. We're designed, our bodies are designed or evolved to be able to develop good glutes. So if you're struggling and you're putting in a lot of work and you're not developing glutes and you're getting zero results, it's probably because you're doing one of the next four things wrong. There's a problem with these four common areas that we have all seen time and time again with people who have trouble developing the glutes. Number one for sure has to be exercise selection. This one has to be the top one. I see the wrong exercise is being done all the time. Again, I think this is perpetuated by things like Instagram models that get super famous that have millions of followers because they've got their blessed with these incredible genetics they have an awesome butt or they paid for it. Some of the most famous ones have got a fake butt and then they're promoting programs to build their butt and they have no real science to support the exercises that they're telling people to do. Remember, just because you feel it in your butt from exercise, you could sit down and you could do kick backs and dog piece all day and make your butt burn. It is not necessarily going to build the butt that you want just because you feel the exercise either. It's a very tiny signal and I think that's the one that's perpetuated out the most is the booty bands and those very simple exercises because it is misleading because you feel the effect of it. So you do feel that bit of a sensation of a burn. You feel connected to it, but it's just not achieving that large signal to grow a larger muscle there. No, there's a lot of exercises, a lot of exercises that qualify as resistance training, but they're not all equal. Some are just far more effective at building muscle. And by the way, that's what you want to do here. If you want to shape, sculpt, tone, whatever the word you want to use, it's all building. You want to build your butt. The more you build it, the rounder it is, the more sculpted it is, the harder and more firm it is, right? Not all exercises are created equal. Some are exceptional at building muscle. Others are terrible at building muscle. That doesn't mean they don't have other value. They're just not really good at building muscle. If I were to give an exercise like let's say a barbell squat, let's start with that one for example, if I were to give a barbell squat a number between one and 10, one being terrible, 10 being awesome, the best for building the butt, it's going to be close to a 10. If I were to talk about, let's say dog peas, like Adam said, or donkey kickbacks, okay, those are all exercises that target the glutes. But if I were to give those a number for building the butt, it would be closer to a two or a three. That's literally the difference that you see between some exercise. Unfortunately, first of all, the market that we're likely talking to, although there are guys that want to build their butt as well, we're largely talking about the female market, okay? The female market, largely women, are really interested in building the butt. Now, here's the problem with the fitness space. It's been a problem for a long time. It still is a problem. They advertise to women and show them programs and exercises that are just not effective. They treat them totally different, as if our bodies were so different that these exercises work for women, these exercises work for men. Not true. The exercises that build the most muscle are the same ones that build the most muscle for men as they are for women. And the way that they market for women oftentimes is, of course, as a female model, presenting the exercise, nothing wrong with that. But it's always, it's never heavy weight. It's never strength. It's never barbell exercises and dumbbell exercises, usually bands. It's usually small dumbbells or body weight stuff on lots and lots and lots of high reps. Tons of reps. And in all of those things, they have their place. But when it comes to building muscle, there's no comparison. I don't want to lose our guys on this conversation either, though. I've never met a guy one who says he wants a flat butt, okay? So there's no guys out there that are trying to achieve. They may not be as obsessed about building a butt as some of your female clients, but they certainly don't want to have a flat butt. And then there's another thing that's important too, if you're a guy who doesn't care so much about that is the performance aspect. The glutes are the most powerful muscle that you have in your body. So learning how to activate them and work them can do tons of work for your deadlift and for your squat if you want to improve in performance. So think of it like that too. Yeah, we used to joke about that all the time because the most, I guess the athletes that stood out the most were always the ones that had the biggest butt. And really it was like in baseball, it was in football. You just notice that a lot of the power that they could derive really was centered around the hips in general. And so you'd see just from doing these compound lifts and training and everything else in terms of fast twitch movement really resided around how much power they could drive through their hips and their glutes. Oh, the butt is, believe it or not, Adam, you talked about men. It's always top three or top four of the areas that a woman will judge a man. If she looks at them just physically, glutes are at the top. And a lot of guys don't know that. But why? Because what you guys are talking about, there's a primal aspect of it. Well-developed glutes means you can run well. You can support yourself. You're stable. You're strong. Your testosterone levels are probably healthy. So yeah, building your butt is important for men too. But let's go back to the exercise selection. Okay, let's list the best butt building exercises you could do. And if you're not doing these, you're not maximizing your potential. And in fact, after we list these exercises, they should be in regular rotation in your workouts. And you should aim towards getting stronger at these exercises. Now number one, I already mentioned it, barbell squats. Barbell squats done properly are excellent posture to your chain developing exercise. It's excellent for building the butt. It was always my number one go-to exercise for anybody who wanted to build a good butt. It's extremely functional. And it still is my number one exercise for building the butt. Yeah, well, especially to take it through its full range of motion, I think is important to add just in terms of people that will barbell squat and then maybe not go down quite low enough, might not feel the activation from their glutes. And so that's just something to consider if you've been doing barbell squats and you're still not seeing change in the size of your glutes. That may be something to address. I would definitely agree that the barbell squat is especially if you are able to take it through its full range of motion because then I think nothing does that as well as the barbell squat. There is a case in an argument to be made for hip thrust as the number one. So because the weight is directly opposing the glutes, it's easier for more people to activate their glutes in a movement like that. You could load it substantially. You could load it quite a bit. So there is a case to be made on is barbell squatting or hip thrusting number one. They both belong in your routine. If you're trying to build your butt and you're missing either one of those, you're missing out on a ton of gains that you could be making. Yeah. Barbell hip thrusts have got to be up there. It's one of the top exercises for building the butt. So are deadlifts, deadlifts and deadlift variations. So traditional conventional deadlifts, sumo deadlifts, both excellent building exercises. You have to have strong glutes. Trap bar deadlifts. Yeah. Trap bar deadlifts are good. Any kind of a deadlift, but in particular the straight bar ones, conventional sumo are really going to get the butt to develop really well. I'm going to make the case for the sumo being one of the best. And the reason why I'm going to make the case for that is because there's other things that the butt is responsible for besides just hip hinging. There's also external rotation of the femur, which is where you turn your feet outward. So if somebody is deadlifting and they only do conventional and they never really do sumo and you also want to build your butt, that's one of the best things that I've ever done as far as teaching clients a movement and getting them to develop their butt. I did a video a while back. It's actually one of the more viral YouTube videos that we've ever done and it's on building the side butt. Right? So yeah. So your glute meat, right? The butt is broken up in three different parts and the meat gives you that kind of like look where you can see the side of their butt where you can see some people have this develop these develop glutes. So develop that you could see their glutes looking at them from the front. And a lot of times that's a great glute meat has been developed and doing something like a sumo deadlift. I think you get the same benefits that you're getting from the conventional, plus you get that external rotation. So you get more of the glute meat involved. And it's just an area that we just tend to lack, especially as we age. Well, and to add to the deadlifts and the importance of it, it's there's really not a lot of exercises that, you know, better target your entire post to your chain. So they get everything to respond behind you, you know, just create such a loud signal for your back, your glutes, your hamstrings, everything to benefit from. Yeah, I also like Romanian deadlifts. I like good mornings. Good mornings are great. It's a sleeper one than a lot of people do. Now you got to do them right, right? You got to have good posture, tight core, you got to be able to hinge at the hips. Great. And then squeeze at the top. That's where sometimes people mess up, they just stand up from the exercise and don't actually squeeze the glutes. But if you do them properly, they are exceptional butt building exercises. And then you have your split stance exercises, your lunges and lunges variations. Those are also great butt building exercises. And that kind of, I mean, that kind of rounds it out. I can't think of any others. No, those are the, those are the great ones. But I do want to, there's, there's ways to do some of those exercises. For example, like talking about the deadlift, sumo versus conventional to get more glute activation in an area that someone may not be working that often. Same thing goes for like a lunge. Like you can do a lunge where you step out close, you know, you take a small step forward, or you're in a stationary position and your feet aren't that far apart from each other and do a lunge and it's, it's more quad than it is glute. If you take a longer stride or you take a big step or you do a split stance, you know, lunge where you're in stationary position and you do a big long stride, you'll get more glute activation. The same thing goes for like a Bulgarian split squat. So if you're doing movements like that for the glutes, by putting your feet further out away from you, you'll get more glute activation than you would if the feet are closer to you where you'll get more quad activation. Right. So if you're trying to build your butt and you're not practicing those exercises on a consistent regular basis, in other words, you're not trying to consistently get stronger at the exercises that we just listed or one of them, one of the fundamental ones is missing out of your routine. That may be one of the main reasons why your butt is not building. Now the next one, this one's a tough one because it's hard for people to identify. This one is really frustrating because people will do all the right exercises but it's still not working and to make it matters worse, they don't even feel their butt working that well. That has to do with poor recruitment patterns. You know, let's talk about the barbell squat for a second. There are different ways to do a barbell squat. There's ways to squat where the glutes are very active and then the squat, ways to squat where the quads are more active. And to the untrained eye, they might not even be able to tell the difference. Now I could see it right away. If I watch someone squat, I can tell that's all quad, that's more glute. But for a lot of people, they don't see that. Now here's the big frustration with it. If you've been doing it in a way for a long time that really isn't activating the glutes well, then it's going to be really hard to go back and change the way you squat because now that's your pattern. That's the way you squat, that's the way you move. It's almost like you have to relearn the exercise. Now we talked just now about the best exercises and we talked about how some exercises just don't build great muscle like donkey kickbacks and dog peas and that kind of stuff. Well those exercises now have value when we're talking about poor recruitment patterns. One way to learn how to activate the glutes with those great exercises we just listed was to do a few sets of those isolation exercises that aren't great at building muscle but they can't help you connect. Well they're great at priming the glutes. So we talk a lot about priming. You mentioned the free butt guide that we did. I also shot a YouTube video that is related to the free guide that is the number one viral video that we have and it's addressing exactly this. And this is one of the most common things that I would get with a client that they would hire me for their butt. They would say oh Adam, I do the squats. I do the deadlifts. I do all these things that you're saying but it just still won't build. I have a hard time feeling it there and that's so common because we're so sedentary as humans. We sit down, we drive, we sit at computers and what you got to understand when you're in that seated position like that your hip flexors are shortened and they're contracted and they're tight. And so then when you go to stand up it's hard for you to open it all the way up. And I give the analogy I would I was actually just talking about this this last week into my sister is like when you are if I were to ask somebody to flex their bicep as hard as they possibly can for like two minutes straight without letting up and then I ask you to open up your arm you would feel it like oh it's like hard for you to extend your elbow all the way out. That's what's going on with your hips when you're in a seated position all day long. When you ask yourself to fully stand all the way up it's hard to fully come all the way up because your hip flexors are shortened and tight. So what does that do? That ends up carrying your weight over the anterior in the front on your quads and then your quads take over a lot of the movement that you'd be wanting your glutes to activate and then you go over and you load your backup for you know a barbell squat or you pick up a heavy barbell to do deadlifts because your trainer tells you that's what you want to do for glutes and what ends up happening is you're so quad dominant because of the shortened hip flexors your quads take over the movement and the glutes do very little bit. Yes so do priming if you're this is you if this is you if you do some of those other exercises barbell squats and deadlifts and split stance exercises and you're like man I feel a lot of my quads I even feel some of my hamstrings I don't really get anything in my butt I don't get a pump in my glutes start your workouts with isolation priming exercises go ahead do one or two rounds or you know three sets of one or two exercises that are isolating that help you feel connect to the glutes get a glute burn then go and do those big exercises that we talked about earlier and then while you're doing them try to continue to feel the glutes fire throughout the whole movement and if that means you need to change your form that's not a bad thing that's probably a good thing so be it change your form and now that you've connected to the glutes it's easier for you to feel the glutes throughout that whole movement and then you'll find those exercises be truly effective yeah and I also feel like people get so hung up on reps and like whatever is on their chart and sheet to accomplish for these workouts to where you know it might just be beneficial for you to really hold an isometric pose with you know a hip bridge and really like squeeze and do it for you know a longer period of time even until you really get connected even further to that to that specific muscle group I think that people don't allow for their their body really the time to get to that point where they do feel connected to those glutes and to kind of come back to the to the barbell squat there's there's a couple things too that I would look at in terms of like subtleties of things you could you could adjust and so if you if you notice that you're you're very much more you know prone to feeling it in your quads and being front loaded I would look at the bar position on your back to to bring it maybe a little bit lower kind of obviously is going to take a little more shoulder mobility to accomplish this so that's something to consider but you know the lower the position of the bar on your back it it tends to help then to fold your body a little bit more and help to provide a little more depth in the posterior change well back to your point you just made Justin with the like the isometric hold in that video the YouTube video I'm referring to right now I teach floor bridges and the idea when it's really slow controlled and at the top of the bridge the idea is that you squeeze hold and concentrate on the glutes you're not trying to do 15 20 reps you're not doing five six sets you're not trying to fatigue the muscle you're just trying to really squeeze activate and I love isometric holds like from a floor bridge position to get people to really connect to the butt and you just want to do enough that you're like okay I feel this and so typically I'm only asking a client to do five to ten reps really slow and controlled with like isometric holds in it and then we go right into the barbell squat or deadlift and there's nothing wrong with you doing that between every one of the big lifts so let's say you're gonna do you know you're gonna do squats today and hip thrust and maybe like a lunge those are gonna be your three like major you know lower body movers that you're doing today nothing wrong with you doing one to two little isometric floor bridge holds right before you go into each one of those exercises to get reconnected and to practice that to practice the neurological connection from your brain telling your glutes to fire that's one of those things that you can practice this all the time before you go into these big lifts that'll help promote you firing the glutes yes and in another thing is you can do those those priming movements on days you don't even work out just to practice connecting to the glutes just throughout the day so you can start to feel what they feel like to squeeze and contract then when you go to your exercises it's it's gonna target the glutes much more the next one has a lot to do with just how your workout is programmed out and designed you know one of the biggest mistakes i see in butt building exercises is they don't have a heavy phase everything is super high reps 20 reps 25 reps the most common yeah 30 40 repetitions now there's nothing necessarily wrong with high reps but if that's all you ever do you're not going to build much muscle and most of these programs focus on just that it would be great to go through a phase where you're doing four or five reps with heavy weight where you're grinding through the set you're feeling the squeeze you're going and it's heavy and you're not getting this crazy burn but you are building a tremendous amount of strength that's all about program design in fact what you should do with your program is you should do anywhere between two to four weeks within a particular rep range so i like to pick something like three to five reps for one phase another one might be eight to twelve reps and then another one might be something like 15 to 20 stay in that rep range for two to four weeks get good at that rep range get understand how it feels the the the benefits of that particular rep range then move to a new rep range and then now get used to that rep range those changing of rep ranges does help the body avoid plateaus that's the big thing here your body plateaus much faster when everything is kept the same all the time well one of the reasons why the the 15 to 20 rep range and a lot of these exercise programs online don't work for someone trying to build their butt it's because most might feel female clients already gravitated towards that way of training as it is it was very rare i mean i could probably count on one hand how many times i had a female client who was you know constantly training in the strength phase and i needed to move them out of that because that's all the gravitate towards unless they were like a power lifter other than that most all the marketing has been geared around high reps for women because we want to tone the muscle we don't want to get big and bulky and so because they've been marketed to like that for so long most of them are already doing 15 to 20 reps super set jump lunges things like that that are high intensity and lots of repetition so doing that could be one of the most crippling things for you to try and build your butt your body is already so adapted to that rep range one of the best things you could do to design a program is to build it around a strength phase a majority of your time should be actually spitting that and you're only intermittently coming out of that phase to go back into the 15 to 20 rep range because your body is probably so used to that signal yeah i love that too because then you have the opportunity to load a bit more weight which then will help to promote that louder signal for you know the glutes to respond to and also you know you could really kind of mess with your tempo with that a bit too and maybe not necessarily add a lot of the low but now we're going to mess with the tempo where we're going to you know hold for a bit longer in the most challenging part of the squat which is at the bottom and so to do less reps but really concentrate on now having the recruitment process to be able to get yourself out of the hole is another strategy so when i think about program design like the obvious thing is like what we would sell it to already which is you know you stay in a rep range you know a set in rep range for you know you know three to six weeks and then you move out of it for three to six weeks then you move into another one three six weeks and you cycle through just like how every one of our our programs are designed now the other thing that i think it's important too is understanding too how bad cardio could be hurting you when you're trying to do this so a lot again one of the things that i used to get a lot is the you know adam i want to lose five or ten pounds and i also want to build my butt and so they're doing all this cardio and then they're asking me for the best butt exercises well if you are running on a treadmill or hitting away at the stair master like crazy you are sending a signal to the body that it is not advantageous for you to have a bunch of muscle much less build a bunch more muscle and that's exactly what we're trying to accomplish when we're trying to build a butt i want to take any extra calories that your body consumes and i want to prioritize that straight to the glutes and build the butt but if you are getting on the stair master every single day and burning away calories all the time you're sending a conflicting signal to the body and it makes it very difficult to get the butt to grow from you you're not going to build an amazing butt with cardio it's it's just not going to happen now sprints might build some muscle still not nearly as effective as resistance training but regular traditional cardio doesn't build muscle it just doesn't do that it's not the signal that you're sending your body adapts to get better at cardio which means you lose muscle uh your body pairs muscle down to slow down its calorie burn if you're trying to build your butt and you're picking cardio machines to do that huge huge huge mistake waste your time i see this all time right yeah where people will get on a stair master or they'll use the elliptical any particular way and i can see what they're doing they're like oh if i step kick max if i do it this way it's gonna it's gonna work and they feel the burn in the butt not going to build the muscle in fact doing that may actually make the butt muscle shrink yeah because it's becoming more efficient uh at that particular thing now program design is also about exercise selection exercise order um tempo justin mentioned tempo you should definitely go through phases where you're slower with your repetition uh you should go through phases where you're a little faster with your repetition now here's a deal program of all the things that we're talking about program design is the most complicated this is where a really really good trainer or coach can put all the pieces together think about it like you're programming a video game there's lots of ones and zeros and a lot of stuff and a programmer knows how to put it all together so the game works a good trainer knows how to take all these variables exercises tempo reps sets how they look in the day how they look during the week how the phases all work together uh base and then of course what the person's goals are they know how to piece that together to design a good program if you want that all take it all the guesswork taken out for you you can hire a trainer that's the best thing you could possibly do a good trainer is worth a weight in gold or you can enroll in like one of our maps workout programs um and they're all programmed well because of course uh we wrote them all um maps performance is actually a really good butt building exercise because it is a athletically minded program and like we mentioned earlier athletes always have well-developed butts because we have we have mods and programs specific for building the butt i mean maps aesthetic is geared around picking one or two muscle groups that you want to develop you can pick glutes it comes with a butt mod want it butt mod with it we also did strong strong was one of the surprising ones that wasn't we didn't write that with the intention of oh let's build butts but that was one of the number one that's what happens things that ended up happening because it was so posterior chain focused because a strongman athlete needs and that's and and there are athletes that are our ladies that took went through that program ended up developing glutes from that so any of those three programs are great for that but they are the the main takeaway from that is they're following all the principles that we're talking about right so that paired with everything else we're talking about in this episode is what really is going to make the glutes develop right now here's the last one and this one is tough for people who want to build and shape their butt but also want to stay lean or get lean and it's nutrition I worked with many many people who've come to me we've put together a good workout good routine form looks good on their exercises everything's looking good but I look at their calories and that's just it's not enough their protein intake just not optimal here's the deal if you don't feed your body enough to build it just won't it won't have the building blocks to do so it's like it's like giving a bunch of workers blueprints to put up a house and giving them no lumber no nails and no concrete figured out that they can't build anything because they don't have those building blocks your nutrition needs to be on point and if you want to build muscle you need to eat at a at a surplus meaning you need to eat a little bit more calories and you're burning because those extra calories then will go to developing your butt now if you're trying to figure that out you don't know what that number is for you you can go to maps macro.com input your information it'll give you a pretty damn good estimate in terms of how many calories you should eat but if you're not eating enough it's just not going to happen and if your protein intake is an optimal it's going to be very difficult it's conclusive beyond the shadow of a doubt higher protein diets just build more muscle than lower protein diets and yes some people can get away with eating less protein but even they would build more more muscle with a little bit more protein you need the right materials for the job right and so you got to consider that when you're consuming you have to be just in a surplus enough to provide those nutrients that the body needs to be able to produce this muscle tissue so what would the conversation look like to this client since this is i think one of the most common things i at least i remember getting which is the i want to lose five or ten pounds or i want to flat tummy but i also want to build my butt how do you guys start that conversation with that client oh easy we're going to start with the building first here's why okay if if we start with the building first first of all we're going to build muscle we're going to build and shape the butt but simultaneously we'll speed up your metabolism now the second part is easier right you want to lose another five or ten pounds of body fat now we're dealing with a faster metabolism which means you can eat more food and burn body fat now let's reverse that let's say the person comes and says the same exact thing i want to build my butt but i want to lose ten pounds we start with weight loss first through the weight loss process we're probably going to lose a little bit of muscle because the body is trying to adapt by slowing its metabolism down now that you've lost weight now we're dealing with the slower metabolism now we're going to try and work in the opposite direction that makes it more difficult it's more beneficial to start with the building by the way i do this way if someone wants to lose ten pounds or if they want to lose 30 pounds i start with the building first it makes the second part much easier it's a much easier process to work through so i would say start with the building first and then move to focusing on fat loss if you have a lot of body fat to lose then start with a very small surplus it's literally literally look at your maintenance see how many calories you're burning you can use the website maps macro.com figure that out and you can add like 100 150 calories above that that's all just enough to give you a little bit of extra building blocks to build your to build muscle and here's what it might actually end up happening by doing that through the muscle building process you might actually simultaneously get a little bit leaner at the same time the other piece of advice i'm giving this client because i'm thinking of the mental hurdles that that i would had to overcome with someone like this it's really hard to tell male or female client that comes in and says i want to lose 30 pounds of body fat and then in addition to that i want to build a certain body part whether it be a male asking me to build his arms simultaneously or female asking me to build a butt simultaneously it's really hard to convince that person who feels quote unquote fat okay to get them to add calories and so the first point is one you don't have to add that much we start with a little bit and then the second thing is let's take it away from your weight and let's just focus on building strength let's let's concentrate on where you're at right now how much basing and and we're really going to look at the big lifts that we talked about when you looked at the very first point we made about the right exercise exercise selection we're going to look at all those exercises we're going to look at their base where they're starting at right now strength wise and then our goal is to add a little bit of calories and add strength to all of those movements you get strong at those exercises you add 10 15 20 30 pounds to your squat your deadlift your hip thrust your split stance exercises your good mornings your romanian deadlifts you're going to build more muscle that's just the bottom line it has to overcome those stressors that's a great point adam it's like that was the number one thing that i'll focus on for someone who want to build their butt i'd say no problem we're gonna get strong at these exercises yeah when you're stronger you have more energy you know a lot of times it's just it's just a healthier mentally to approach it that way and it's more sustainable as well because you know in early on as a trainer i've tried both approaches and you know it is much much more difficult to go from a cut than to come back to a building phase just because of those the fact that strength wasn't the the foundation of what we were starting from right so if you're somebody who's been training and just frustrated with the results or the lack of results are getting for your butt development it's probably one of the four things that we just mentioned find the ones that are the biggest offenders tackle them and then watch what happens to your gains and if you want more detailed information if you want more information on building a butt that's going to complement this particular podcast to really help you out go to the the website mind pump free dot com find the build your butt guide it's a guide all about developing better glutes or bigger glutes or rounder glutes and get it it's free read the whole thing apply it to your training apply it to your lifestyle and your butt will grow look mind pump is recorded on video as well as audio come find us on youtube mind pump podcast you can also find all of us on instagram that's where we're at the most on social media you can find dug at mind pump dug he's our producer you can find justin at mind pump justin you can find me at mind pump sal and adam at mind pump adam my go-to stuff dude i don't have my chili pad i'll have the pluto pillow i don't have any of this oh did you not get the pluto pillow dude this guy he's just sounds like of all the things you grab all the things your house is going to burn on it forgot your pluto pillow your chili pad no i don't have any of that stuff right now and i feel it dude like it's it's um i swear i want i want i want chili