 Our next caller is Roxy from North Dakota. What's up, Roxy? How can we help you? Hi. I just had a question about hip dips. Okay. I recently started getting back into fitness in May, and as I started to lean out, I noticed some pretty big indents in the sides of my glutes. When I started looking up how to get rid of them, a lot of the research said that they were either genetic or bone structure or not really possible to get rid of. So I was just wondering if there were any exercises I could do to reduce the appearance of them or if they are genetic or what I can do. Okay. Butt dimples. That's what I call them. Yeah. Sal's got cute ones. I got a really nice one. So, Roxy, great. I love this question because it's going to allow us to highlight a few things. First off, I've seen the question that you sent us, that you're doing all the best butt-building exercises. You're doing hip thrusts, squats, deadlifts. So you're doing the right kind of butt-building exercises. You started working out in May, so it hasn't been that long that you've been super consistent. Yeah. Do you know what your body fat percentage is sitting at? Or can you give us a rough estimate, do you think? I honestly have no idea. You look pretty lean from the video. I would say, without looking at the rest of you, you're probably in a pretty lean athletic category, especially if you could see. So when you're talking about hip dip for people watching this, literally it's the sides. It's under the hip bone, and it's kind of where, as you get leaner, you'll see it kind of come in a little bit. Now, I think you might be a little too critical of yourself if I'm being quite honest with you. That definitely is an area that, I mean, are there muscles you could develop there? Kinda. Is it going to change it much? Not really. You're doing the best exercise. I'd say be a little bit patient. You can gain a little body fat, and sometimes that'll fill in. But you also want to be careful that you don't analyze yourself in the mirror and start to pick yourself apart and notice little things that, maybe to other people, don't look like a problem at all. You might look very fit and healthy, but to you, if you kind of go down this path, it'll be almost impossible to get out of. Well, I have a couple. I mean, there's some things for sure. I saw that you are doing a lot of exercise, but one, I would ask, what does your rep ranges look like? How long have you been training in that rep range? And then also, are you tracking calories and have you gone on a bulk in any time in the last, you know, three months since we've been trying to do this? Okay. Yeah. No, I haven't gone on a bulk. I don't really track my calories. And rep range, I usually do about eight to 10 and three, or yeah, eight to 10, three times. Okay. And are you pretty consistent with that? Yeah. Okay. So here we go. I would love to see you lift in the five rep range. And I would love to put you on a bulk because you got to remember you're trying. So, and the side butt is kind of what we're alluding to to get that kind of heart-shaped ass, right? So that gives you that look on the side and you're doing some of the best exercises. But if you're always in that rep range and you're in a calorie maintenance or a calorie deficit a lot of the time, you're not going to build. You're just not, you're going to, you're going to continue to kind of burn and stay tight and stay firm and stay in the shape that you currently are. But if we want to build some muscle, build some shape, then we need a calorie surplus. And if you've also been training in that same eight to 12 rep range for a really long time, your body's probably pretty adapted to that. So dropping you down to the five rep range and loading, loading the bar more and then bumping your calories and then focusing on the exercise you're doing. I think you're doing great exercises, but I think it's important that you're phasing your rep ranges. And are you following any of our maps programs? I am not. Okay. So I mean, we have a butt builder bundle. So I would love to hook you up with that and have you follow that to a T because in the program, we actually phase you in and out of rep ranges. And the first phase is the low rep range that I'd want to transition you into right now. So I would transition you into that. I would ask you to bump your calories a little bit and then see what happens from there. Now, Roxy, if I were to talk to somebody that knows you very well and that cares about you and if I ask them, do you think Roxy's a little bit too critical of her appearance? How would they answer me? For sure. Yeah, I give that a lot for my boyfriend. Yeah. Now, sometimes we need to listen to the people that care about us the most. Especially when it comes to how we judge ourselves and especially when it comes to appearance, especially when you're somebody that's into fitness because look, I've experienced this. You literally do not see accurately with your own eyes when you judge yourself. At least not the way you look at other people. I'm sure you look at other people and say, well, that person looks great or whatever. And then you look in the mirror and you start to really hyper criticize how you look. Don't go down this path. There's no way out and you'll never get to the point where you look perfect if this is the mental state that you're in. Adam has great advice. In fact, if you do what he's saying, focus on the strength. Don't focus on the mirror. That'll guide you in the right direction for sure. Have you ever worked out just focusing on getting stronger and watching the amount of weight that you can lift increase? Has that ever been a focus of yours? Has it always been aesthetic? No, I like seeing the numbers go up on the bar and everything like that too. I just, yeah, recently lost the weight so it's kind of been hard to not focus on the mirror so much. Yeah. Yeah. Time to bulk. Time to bulk. Definitely focus on that. And just allow yourself that kind of freedom to just go in there and just really just keep it just specifically on how much weight you're moving around and how much stronger you're gonna get. You're doing great exercises. I mean, you obviously have done your homework and research on the movements that are going to give you this look that you're chasing. But it's just, I mean, if you don't give the body the right amount of calories to grow and build a butt, the butt's a muscle, just like your biceps is or shoulders. It's no different if a guy called me up and said, Adam, I have small shoulders. I want bigger shoulders. I assess his diet and his diet is at maintenance or in a deficit. The easiest thing I'd tell him is let's just increase your calories. But the challenge, especially for my female clients is when I tell them this, they also wanna stay as lean as they possibly are. And you just gotta be okay with, hey, we're gonna increase your calories. So we're gonna put a few pounds on, just trust the process. We can always reverse and go lean out again, but if the goal is to build a fuller, rounder butt. Yeah, feed your body. That's right. We gotta feed the calories it needs to build that muscle. And then if we inevitably put a couple pounds of body fat on along the way, which is inevitable and not a big deal and we reverse and go the other way, we're gonna lean out. Not to mention, in this process, you're gonna speed your metabolism up. Yeah, and the strength gains are objective, right? Your visual criticisms of how you look can be not objective, right? So that's why it's such a great place to be when you're seeing just strength go up and that's what you're focused on because you either get stronger or you don't. And I will say this, if you get stronger and you do it in a healthy way, the, what shows in the mirror is gonna change for the better, for sure. That'll happen automatically. Okay. All right, Roxy. Thanks for calling. Yeah, thank you. No problem. Man, that's a tough one. You know what? I feel like she was a little disappointed in our answer. Can you tell, Doug, did she have like a disappointed look on the answer? Yeah, maybe I think she wanted... Secret, secret exercise. Yeah, we're giving out the secret exercise. I mean, I could add some things. Like I would love, my ass is on fire today, the whole thing because I did, I hadn't done a single leg dumbbell deadlifts in so long and just you hit all the stabilizer muscles around the hip, which you're trying to, she's trying to develop. So there's some exercises that we can include, but I think she's already, I guess we should tell the audience because the audience didn't hear it. I mean, she's doing sumo deadlifts, she's doing barbell hip thrust, she's squatting, you know, so she's doing a lot of good movements, you know, lunging, Bulgarian split squats. These are all movements that are gonna build and develop the butt. But this is an area that a lot of my female clients would struggle with and that is they wanna build their butt and they also wanna lean out. And those are conflicting goals. To lose body fat is catabolic and to build a butt is anabolic. So one of them needs a surplus of calories. And so you just gotta, if you really care about building that butt more, you gotta be okay with, hey, we're gonna try and put some weight on right now. That's inevitably what's going on. Well, and then this is kind of like, I don't know, I guess it highlights a little bit of the trap of Instagram and you know, really just like the comparison trap. It's the thief of joy, right? So you're always comparing yourself to what you see and you're not happy with what you have. And so like I think it's important that you know, Sal was kind of stressing that to her because you know, and to be able to really, you know, get to the place you want, a lot of times you have to remove yourself from it. Totally. No, that's great balance for us to do. Cause I mean, there's two sizes. 100% Sal is right and that we've got to be careful because that's the never ending goal. You'll always just like the guy who is our girl who's chasing a certain amount of wealth and they realize that they just keep stretching, they just keep the, and you see this in bodybuilding a lot too. I'm not big enough, not big enough, not big enough. You know, one of my favorite things about training clients for as long as I did, I would have clients that would be with me for 10 years, 15 years. And one thing I used to love doing is we would take pictures sometimes, right? So I'd have these old pictures from 12 years ago and I would love to do this cause I get clients, this is something we all struggle with. And my client would say something like, you know, oh man, I don't look good. I don't like the way it, whatever. And I'd say, man, I remember when you used to say that to me 12 years ago and I pull out a picture and they look at it and go, wow, I really thought I looked terrible. I looked great. And it's like, you could be objective cause it was so long ago. So you get caught in this trap and fitness does not improve your life. It becomes a detriment to you. So sometimes you have to remove yourself. One of the best ways to do that is just focus on getting stronger. Now that being said, you know, cause that's the, there is also some things that could potentially be the main reason why she's not building her butt. Low calorie, same rep range. If she's been doing that for months or years and she, and these same exercises, same rep range and living in a calorie maintenance or deficit. I mean, you simply give her a few more calories, change up a couple of exercises for the glutes, drop her rep range. Drop her rep range and change the tempo. Yeah, she'll absolutely see some of that, some of that butt grow.