{"id":906,"date":"2017-04-10T06:41:18","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T06:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/formnutrition.com\/us\/?p=906"},"modified":"2019-07-04T13:45:02","modified_gmt":"2019-07-04T12:45:02","slug":"what-are-best-glute-exercises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formnutrition.com\/us\/inform\/what-are-best-glute-exercises\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Confirms the Best Exercise For Your Glutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glutes are the biggest muscle. Both literally and in terms of what seems to be on trend right now. You can\u2019t move in the gym for kickbacks and hip thrusts. But how did this happen and why? What is the best movement for glutes? What happened to the last king of exercises, the squat?<\/p>\n

Spend just a bit of time on the internet and you\u2019ll quickly see the controversy over what exercise\u00a0is best for peachy glutes\u00a0– squats or hip thrusts. Surprisingly for a much argued question there is little research to support an answer but certainly of late, hip thrusts seem to be winning out.<\/p>\n

You can most likely trace back the genesis for the rise of hip thrusts to\u00a0Bret Contreras who started championing them\u00a0about ten years ago, momentum built with various other trainers, mostly in the bikini world, to the point where now 7 out of 10 exercises performed in a gym are a hip thrust. Ok, that\u2019s not a verified statistic but you get the point.<\/p>\n

Bret, aka The Glute Guy is one of the few who has conducted research into the squat vs hip thrust question. His PhD thesis looked at EMG activity (a measure of muscle activation)\u00a0differences between the two, variations of the two and amongst other things rep maxes and force production difference between the two. Some of the research from this thesis has been published over the last couple of years.<\/p>\n

Bret himself is cautious about how much can be interpreted even from his own research, partly because EMG activity\u00a0is only part of the story in terms of hypertrophy (muscle growth) and also because real scientific\u00a0consensus is built up over 10\u2019s and 100\u2019s of studies not just one or two.<\/p>\n

What Bret\u2019s studies do tell us is that glute activation is greater with a hip thrust than a squat at\u00a0around the 10 rep range\/load1<\/sup> and that the\u00a0barbell hip thrust is superior in that respect to other variations.2<\/sup> Squats are superior in terms of quad activation though\u00a0hip thrusts actually\u00a0can\u00a0heavily activate the quads, if you find too much, elevate the heels.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

One possible reason for all of\u00a0this is\u00a0that the\u00a0data shows the glutes are barely activated at the bottom of the squat and far more activated in\u00a0the\u00a0full hip extension of the hip thrust. This activation duration through the range of motion of the hip thrust\u00a0might start to\u00a0interact with theories on time under tension (TUT).<\/p>\n

So what does all\u00a0this\u00a0mean?\u00a0Well, probably you\u00a0should both\u00a0squat and\u00a0hip thrust but if you don\u2019t, don\u2019t worry, the differences probably aren\u2019t all that large.\u00a0Even the evidence as mentioned above is not conclusive either way on the original question\u00a0and what is probably more important is that you are doing the exercise you just feel is\u00a0best for you.<\/p>\n

1<\/sup>\u00a0https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/26214739<\/a><\/p>\n

2<\/sup>\u00a0https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/26695353<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Glutes are the biggest muscle. Both literally and in terms of what seems to be on trend right now. 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