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Booty Building Workout: Grow Your Butt, Not Legs Part 2

A fit woman doing lunges

As a health coach and huge advocate for a naturally grown booty, I get this question quite often: “How do I grow my glutes without growing the rest of my legs?” With the right booty building workout, you can grow the perfect toned butt without growing your legs.

I can relate heavily to this question because that used to be me: giant quads with a little bubble butt. And I hit a plateau haaaard with my rear—but then I learned how to fix it. I still have big quads but that’s because I specifically train to have them, but with that being said, my booty has grown exponentially based on glute-targeted exercises.

How to Grow Your Butt WITHOUT Growing Your Thighs – Abby Pollock

Booty Building Workout: You Need Intense Glute-Focuses Exercises

First I would like to say, your glute-focused workouts need to be intense; you’re not going to grow a big booty without some serious effort and dedication. Second, for the ladies that don’t want the big quad look, most leg exercises activate other leg muscles, so that gets rid of a lot of lower body exercises if we’re just trying to grow glutes alone.

The short answer to this question: You need to stop doing exercises that activate your quads and hamstrings and start doing exercises that heavily tax your glutes.

A fit woman on a leg press doing her booty building workout.
Stop doing exercises that activate your quads. Image Credit: Unsplash

So when I list these exercises to you, I am not saying this is all you should do. I still believe you should be doing lower body exercises to stay balanced. And to be honest, I would never, as a personal trainer, have a client do only these exercises if they want to grow their glutes. I give you this list so you can add them to your leg days; ease up on the quad and hami building exercises and then design a program to target your glutes twice a week.

What Exercises Help Build a Booty?

What you should ease up on if your quads are super dominant:

Squats, lunges, Bulgarian split squats, leg press, leg extension, Romanian deadlifts, back extensions, good-mornings, adductor exercises, etc.

What you should do to ONLY focus on glutes:

  • Activation work before every glute day: band work, donkey kick backs, etc.
  • Hip external rotation work: The mind-muscle connection is imperative here. Otherwise, don’t do it.
  • Barbell GLUTE BRIDGES: These are different from hip thrusts. Hip thrusts have some quad activation, so do these instead.
  • Pull throughs and KB swings with a booty squeeze

Remember, heavy lifts are king for growth, so make sure you are pushing the weight, and completing glute-targeted workouts twice a week for optimal growth.

It will also help if you activate your glutes before lifting with a glute band, which you can read more about here. Check out Part 1 Booty Builder as well.

Happy Booty Building!