Bianca Boca - Trainer & Online Coaching

Bianca I need help to grow deez glutes, best exercises?
*recent question*
I decided to do a little series on this one starting with the key principles behind hypertrophy and how they apply specifically to the glutes. *All of these principles mean nothing unless you apply them consistently, day in and day out.

These principles are as follows:
1. Exercise selection
2. Progression (volume, intensity, etc)
3. Nutrition
4. Rest and recovery (manage stress, sleep etc)

I'm going to start with exercise selection a.k.a SPECIFICITY. Outcomes are input dependant - training must be specific to your goal in order to produce specific adaptations 👊🏼 One thing that helps to understand how to choose efficient exercises is to first understand the function of the muscle.
Your glutes...
Propel you forward
Extend the hip
Laterally rotate the hip
Abduct the hip
Posteriorly tilt the pelvis
There is no one exercise that combines all of these however there are exercises that provide more stimulus to certain areas of the glutes than others.

My next post will cover a list of all the glute exercises I find to be quite effective.

Great post by ;

We often use RPE (rate of perceived exertion) or RIR (reps in reserve) to describe how close to failure a set should be.

These are essentially the same thing. RPE of 9 (out of 10) and RIR of 1 both mean you should have one rep left in you at the end of a set.

This doesn't mean you won't grow or get stronger at all if you don't get close to failure, by the way.

But if you're like the guys in this study who got more than double the reps they normally use in training, you're definitely leaving gains on the table.

Second, it shows that learning how to use RPE or RIR takes practice.

These guys clearly didn't have a good understanding of how close to failure they were.

From my coaching experience, it can take several months of training to develop a good sense of this. It differs between exercises and rep ranges, so give yourself time to learn how to use it properly.

Occasionally going to failure will help hone this skill (eg on the last set of each exercise or in one week of a training phase).

Third, this has implications for how we examine research and how it relates to training programs.

In some research, it's possible that subjects were not providing a maximal stimulus for muscle growth because they might have been too far from failure.

On the other hand, many studies use qualified trainers and the subjects train together, which increases the motivation to push harder.

This might not reflect the conditions that we train under in real life. It's much easier to work harder and find failure with others there to push you.

Lastly, I want to reiterate that I'm not advocating going all the way to failure all the time.

You can get results without getting that close to failure. But I think you should be within a couple of reps of failure on average (RPE8/RIR2).

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✌🏼

MUSCLE NERDS NUTRIENT GUIDE

We put together a 24 page Nutrient Guide for you, which you can download (for free) here:

https://bxr6dtuf.pages.infusionsoft.net

It's an introduction to the importance of nutrients and the interplay, dependency, and contraindications they may have on each other.

It covers the nutrients:

Calcium
Iron
Magnesium
Omega 3
Potassium
Selenium
Sodium
Vitamin A (Retinol)
B-Vitamin Complex
Vitamin B1 (Thiamine)
Vitamin B2 (Ribflavin)
Vitamin B3 (Niacin)
Vitamin B5 (Pantothenic Acid)
Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine)
Vitamin B12 (Cobalamin)
Vitamin C
Vitamin D
Zinc

And while this guide is 24 pages, it is important to note that it is an introductory guide covering just a fraction of what can be discussed around each of the above nutrients.

Enjoy!

Proud of ya mum 💪🏼 😁😁 Lucky to have you in my life.

Progressive overload refers directly to increasing mechanical tension in a muscle over time. The body adapts rather quickly to a training stimulus, even more so as a beginner or intermediate trainee, so training should be made increasingly difficult - how often depends on individual adaptations or as soon as what was once challenging is no longer.
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PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD/ GETTING STRONGER CAN BE ACHIEVED IN A VARIETY OF WAYS— DOESN’T NECESSARILY NEED TO ALWAYS BE ADDING MORE WEIGHT
• Lifting the same load for the same number of reps for increased distance (range of motion)
• Lifting the same load for the same number of reps with better form, more control, and less effort (efficiency)
• Lifting the same load for more reps (volume)
• Doing the same number of reps with heavier weight (load)
• Lifting the same load for the same number of sets and reps with less rest time between sets (density)
• Lifting the same load with more speed and acceleration (effort)
• Doing more work in the same amount of time (density)
• Doing the same work in less time (density)
• Doing more sets with the same load and number of reps (volume)
• Lifting the same workout more often throughout the week (frequency)
• Doing the same workout and maintaining strength while losing body mass (relative volume)
• Lifting the same load for the same number of reps and then extending the set past technical failure with forced reps, negatives, dropsets, static holds, rest pauses, partial reps, or a superset (effort)
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Whether that’s by adding more weight, doing more reps, sets, shortening rest intervals while maintaining the aforementioned variables is both a more complex but also much less important question. The more important thing is that you DO overload, and HOW is very secondary for muscle growth.
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I like to overload by prioritising adding weight first then when that stalls I’ll use other interventions e.g. more reps and sets etc. Regardless, always use full ROM, play around with variations and what “feels” best and focus on strong muscle contractions.

Why choose a certain exercise over another?

Firstly, just want to address: what is more important than exercise selection is training hard, optimising volume and managing fatigue. It's not all about exercise selection - it's about executing exercises properly:
✔ Full range of motion - you feel a full stretch of the muscle followed by a strong contraction
✔ Making sure that you're using the muscles involved, not momentum
✔ Controlling the eccentric

If you do that right, it leaves you with very few exercises that won't work really well. If you don't do that - most exercises won't do anything.

Building muscle is a tension dependant process. Exercises come down to how they feel when you perform them/ where you feel it working the most. Some people get really good glute recruitment from heavy hip thrusts some do not, some with front squats and others with back squats.

This is where "SAID" comes in - 'Specific Adaption to Imposed Demands' - to train in a specific manner to produce a specific outcome. Someone training for absolute strength and less for maximum muscle gain could care less about isometric training than the body builder would, as this would have little carryover to maximal power output.

Heavy, multi-joint training will produce the bulk of your muscle density and shape and allow you to achieve more training volume than single joint exercises, are more challenging and require higher degrees of neuromuscular involvement, however adding in isolation exercises allows us to fine tune weakness and bring up any lagging body parts.

Individualisation only really starts to make a difference once you've got the compound free weight basic movements covered. When it comes to learning how to do bodybuilding properly, some basic techniques will apply to everyone; others must be tailored to the needs of the individual (unique anthropometry, biomechanical levers, muscle architecture, injuries, what "feels" good, etc) often on a trial-and-error basis.

Pt.2 🏋🏽‍♂️ Metabolic stress:

It’s not just muscle mechanical tension which is important for muscle growth. If this were the case, a box jump and 1RM deadlift which both instigate high levels of muscle activation would be enough to grow glutes. But this isn’t the case.

Metabolic stress is equally as important mechanical tension- one without the other won't work. This can be achieved with increased time under tension/ higher reps.

This relies heavily on anaerobic glycolysis for energy production which is dominant during exercise lasting 15-120s. To put this into context, this is why you’ll often hear that the most “hypertrophic reps” are between 8-15. Particular rep ranges translate to more time under tension, but remember rep ranges are context dependant and you can still build muscle outside of those ranges. The point of a rep range is to use an accomodating load that allows you to reach near failure (the point where your muscles can no longer produce sufficient force) by the time you’ve reached your rep target.

➡️ Similar levels of hypertrophy can be achieved regardless of your selected rep range as long as the muscle is brought to near failure. Our muscles don’t know the difference whether you’re counting to 8, 9, 11 or 12 all they know is rate of perceived exertion, so don’t get too hung up on numbers or if you miss a rep and focus on pushing yourself.

“Exercise selection for the glutes, like any other muscle, is influenced by their muscle composition. Generally the lower gluteus make up 60% of the muscle so at least 50-60% of glute training should be dedicated to some extension movement with the other 50-40% of training focusing on lateral movements for the upper gluteus.”
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There are multiple ways to categorise glute training exercises - including planes of motion, force vectors (the direction of the load in relation to the position of your body), dominant muscle group, action/ movement pattern etc depending on how broad or specific you want the categories to be. -
To keep it simple for bodybuilding purposes I’ve attached visuals from which categorises exercises based on which muscle group they target most. The other categories are usually referred to for the purpose of figuring out which exercises transfer best to specific sports.
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The last slides spills some examples of exercises and variations which perform each of the movement patterns of the glutes (hip extension, hinge, lateral/external rotation and abduction). It’s not an exhaustive list but hopefully it gives you an idea. Since many exercises often incorporate 2 or more of these movement patterns in one, it would have been a longer list to group them according to movement categories. -
How you perform these matters too. For example your position during abductions determines the degree of upper:lower glute activation -in straight leg/ neutral hip position the upper glutes are more active but in seated/hip flexed positions both the upper and lower glutes are active.
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Next post will go into a little more depth on why variation is important.