So we all want a bigger booty right? Well, we reached out to the glute queen! Meg Tovey and here is what she had to say about how to grow your glutes:
You’ve seen it all over Instagram..
High-rep/body-weight booty band circuits
Unqualified ‘fitness influencers’ doing air kick-backs on the stair machine
‘The BEST exercise for toning your butt’
DON’T BE FOOLED!
Hypertrophy (building muscle) is made up of 3 mechanisms: mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress. In order to achieve this you need to:
- Get good at the basics, and train them HARD! The glutes are the largest muscle group in your body so don’t be afraid to lift heavy.
- Incorporate progressive overload. Don’t get caught up trying to “confuse” the muscles by switching it up every session, or chasing muscle soreness. Follow a structured program and track your stats during training. If you’re not tracking your progression how can you be sure that you’re CONSISTENTLY creating muscle damage?
- Incorporate a thrust/bridge variation, a lunge variation, a deadlift/hinge variation and an abduction variation in each training session. There’s no ‘best’ exercise is for building your glutes - In order to target all 3 muscles that make up our glutes to achieve that full peachy shape (and prevent injury) they need to be worked across ALL 4 planes of motion!
- Train them every 2-3 days. When you train, muscle protein synthesis spikes up for around 24 hours but then goes back down to baseline around 48-72 hours later (even less time on more advanced trainees).
BUT, it’s not just about training! On top of this you also need to:
- Eat in a caloric surplus. That’s right ladies, if you want to grow your booty, you need to be CONSISTENTLY consuming more calories than your body expends.
- Consume adequate protein at regular intervals. It’s recommended to consume 1.6-2.2g of protein per kilo of body weight if you are resistance training, and to optimise muscle protein synthesis you should be aiming to distribute this evenly throughout the day.
- Optimise your recovery. When you hear recovery, you probably think ‘stretching, foam rolling, massage’ etc but the number 1 tool for recovery is SLEEP. Sleep is extremely underrated in today’s society.
Alongside this, is rest days from training! Training more doesn’t always = more muscle - When we create muscle damage (required for growth) they need time to repair/adapt. The length of time you need to rest between sessions will depend on the volume you accrued on the particular muscle. This is where finding a coach who can tailor your training split to suit your lifestyle is so important!
Yours in strength & nutrition,
Meg xx
Massive thank you to Meg for her amazing info about how to grow your glutes.
You can find Meg on instagram @megantovey
