Do you want a bigger butt? Are you looking to tone up your tushy? Do you want to grow your glutes?
Yes!
Me, too.
This booty pump is calling your hind end’s name – time to wake the F*ck up, you a$$.
Follow along to this booty pump and let us know what you think. We hope you are pumped. We sure are.
We often turn to compound exercises like the squat and hip thrust when we are looking to beef up our booty. While this approach is sound, we may be overlooking a simple concept that can help boost the effectiveness of compound exercises – muscle activation.
When our goal is to target and grow a specific muscle group, it is advantageous to ensure those muscles get turned on and ready to perform the exercises of the training session. This may seem obvious, but our bodies are masters of compensation and often stick with the law of least effort – it is easier to move the weight with the aid of momentum than it is through muscle contraction alone.
So, to counterbalance our lazy muscles, we must become more mindful of them if we are to spur growth. You may have heard of the mind-muscle connection – bringing your attention to the area responsible for the movement when performing it. This means mentally and physically squeezing that area.
A muscle that we turn on and that we are tuned in to is one that is more responsive to an exercise stimulus (e.g., resistance training). So how do we make sure our muscles get turned on? We can do this by incorporating activation or wake-up exercises before the main portion of our workouts. These are best to include as part of our warm-up or as a specific activation sequence or “pump” just before moving into our main lifts.
You may think that just warming up with lighter loads will be enough for your muscles to turn on, but we often move our warm-up reps too fast to stimulate our muscles. And sometimes, the muscles we hope to target do not activate optimally or with an ideal sequence due to other muscle groups firing.
So, what’s the answer? How do we ensure that we turn on the muscles we are looking to grow? Mind-to-muscle: slower, controlled, mindful movements and/or isometrics with lighter loads. These exercises should activate the muscle groups we are targeting in a similar pattern as the compound exercises planned for the session, just with less intensity and more burn. Think longer time under tension – more squeezing, more blood flow, more pump.
The video above is an example of how to turn on or wake up your glutes and hamstrings so that they are optimally stimulated for growth - to benefit from compound movements such as the barbell hip thrust. Use this 3-minute booty pump whenever you need a quick booty burn. It is also very effective at activating your glutes and hamstrings in preparation for heavier, compound lifts.
Perform 1 set:
1. Hip Bridges x 1 min
2. Hip Bridge Hold w/ Abductions x 1 min
3. Hip Bridge Abduction Hold x 1 min
No rest between exercises; rest 3-5 minutes before moving on to your compound lifts.