Dr. Bret Contreras: How to Build Bigger Glutes & Legs
03:28:58 Share

the science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today's guest is Dr. Brett Contreras. Brett has a PhD in sports science, a master's degree in exercise science, and is a certified strength and conditioning coach. Brett is known popularly

as the glute guy. And that's because he spent the last 30 years of his career focusing on the science and application of maximizing muscle growth and strength development in the lower body, and specifically the glute or butt muscles. We'll talk about that a lot today. You'll learn a tremendous amount about how to optimize training for the glutes, but we'll talk about much more than that. You're gonna learn a lot about anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and other things as they apply to practical recommendations.

Brett does a phenomenal job and has over his career of weaving these things into conversations, not so that you learn unneeded or unnecessary mathematic principles, but so that you can really maximize your understanding of why certain exercises do certain things and others do not.

This is going to allow you to leave this conversation, whether you're coaching people or just here for your own personal needs, having a much better understanding of how to choose the exact right exercise based upon what you're trying to get and what you're not trying to get. So Brett has spent a lot of career on people who are training that want specific development in a particular part of their lower body and not in others. You'll learn a lot about how to do that. You'll also learn about how to make sure that that exercise is

is doing the right thing for you personally that you're wanting it to do. So you're going to have a lot of fun. You'll take a lot away from this. I hope you can extend these learnings again from just females to men as well, from just the lower body to the upper body as well. And so overall, you can enhance the precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your training and fitness routines, specifically regarding developing strength and muscle size and the lower body. That all said...

Please enjoy my conversation today with Dr. Brett Contreras. Dr. Brett Contreras, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. The world knows you for the most part as the glute guy, and we will certainly talk about the glutes today, but I know you...

as the guy who used to write extensive articles on the science of strength training, mechanics. I don't know how many of those things you wrote and I read many years ago before social media existed, but it's very funny for me to hear people talk about you and then my perception of you is like, this is the science guy. This is not the glute guy. This is the deep, passionate love for science guy. So

I don't know where our conversation is going to go today, but I certainly know we will definitely talk about the glutes and how to train and why and all those things like that. But I'm personally a little bit more interested in kind of the other science stuff. So that is a little bit of my lead in. I don't know how you view all that stuff, but that's my perception of Dr. Brett Contreras. Appreciate that. To get us started, we're going to play the hits, right? We'll talk about the glutes and all that. But what I was really hoping to go into very first is

You made a post fairly recently that I thought was really insightful. And actually, I've changed how I do stuff now permanently because of a single post that you made. And that was referring to the difference in how to train women versus men. Now, my answer, which I've changed my tune on typically is because I've trained a lot of female athletes.

is there's not that many things that are different, but you actually gave some incredible insights into things that are different and how you do differently. And someone who's trained, I don't know, 80% of your clients over your career have been female? More? I don't know what's a fair number there. Probably 90. 90 plus percent. What are off the top of your head, some of the major differences in coaching females? And I'll give you context for you. We're talking about

Strength training or strength training, like rated activities, not endurance running and like all things like that. So kind of within this wheelhouse, how do you think about this? It's just mainly their goals. And so men can't seem to wrap their head around it. Like it's funny you say, cause this was literally me. Yeah. It's most men because we want hypertrophy everywhere.

If you were like, hey, Andy, you mind if I slap a little muscle on your traps? You'd be like, I'll take it. I'd be stoned. Sure. Buys, tries? Sure. Pecs? Upper, lower? Yep. You can't name a muscle right now that I'm not going to say yes to. You can say yes to everything. We want to grow everything. And so therefore, when we do our leg days with squats and deadlifts and lunges, that tends to grow a lot of quad and adductor and glutes.

But here's the deal. A lot of women, if they lean out, if they get lean, they like the way they look. They might want a little bit more quad and not too much, but they want a lot more glute. That's the goal is to have large glutes. In fact, now surgeries are becoming very common because of that, because it's hard to get glutes through training. Even through proper training, some don't get the glute mass they desire. So women want glutes, okay?

Say a man wanted arms as bad as women want glutes. We said, look, we want you to get, you know, I say I'm a man. I want the biggest arms possible. You wouldn't say that, like, you wouldn't go, Andy, quit doing isolation lifts.

Free weights only. Do the big complex movements. You know you're going to get big triceps if you develop a strong bench and weighted dips and close grip bench. And you know you're going to get big biceps if you do weighted chin-ups and pull-downs, supinated pull-downs.

Right. Every guy knows that if I said I will give you a million bucks if you put two inches on your arms in the next six months, what would every guy do? They'd start training at least three days a week.

You throw what you know out. You wouldn't go, oh, train a muscle one day a week. You'd say, no, I'm going to train it at least... I don't care what the studies say. You might even venture into training it every day. You might be like, I think I can do some curls every day. And you'd use variety. But you'd be going, I'm going to get as strong as possible at close grip bench and weighted dips. I'm going to get my weighted chin up. But that's going to make up, you know, maybe a third of your volume. Two thirds are going to be curls and tricep extensions. Now...

Now, use that exact same strategy for women with the glutes. Yes, they're going to do the squats. They're going to do their lunges. They're going to do the Romanian deadlifts, Bulgarian step-ups, etc., and they're going to try to get strong at those. But if that's all you did, you're leaving a lot on the table. Your maximum recoverable volume for glutes is probably 36 to 45 sets a week, and

If you split it up properly and, but here's the deal. Cause if you said, Andy, you're only allowed to do like breathing squats, one set to feel like, you know, like where you're, you know, you grind it out. You can do squat squats to failure, deadlifts to failure and like walking barbell lunges to complete failure. How many sets could we squeeze in a week and recover from it still? Yeah.

you know, maybe 10 sets a week tops, like where you're two failures. Especially when you're not 22 years old and on, you know, potentially recovery aids. Yeah. It's going to be tough. No peds. Yeah. And you're not 18 years old anymore. Okay. So you're going to do that still. You're going to still do

your your compound list but then you think hip thrust if all you did was barbell hip thrust you could easily do them every other day you they don't beat you up much they would work at short muscle lengths and people will say well they don't grow they work you at short muscle lengths they're not as effective hold on now we got three studies now we have the plotkin 2023 we have

Casiano, 2023. And now we have Bartolomeu, 2024, all indicating that they're just as effective as stretch position movements. Okay? So we don't, the jury's out on glutes. For glute growth. Yeah. So the jury's still out. We need more specific research, but it seems like they're just as effective. So if they don't beat you up as much and you can do more volume, why not add those in? The other thing is, it's like delts.

How much delt volume could you handle per week? It's a different thing when there's different subdivisions. Like, yes, so every set of bench-inclined military dips that you do is front delt. And if you're in the frontal plane, it's side delt too. People think military press, especially behind the neck press, activates the lateral delts very well. But

And, you know, technically every pull down and row you do works the rear delts. But I know personally, I grow my rear delts way better when I perform specific movements for them. And it's like noticeable. So anyway, yes, you got all your compound lifts, but you could throw in, if all you were trying to do was grow your delts, you could probably do some isolation work for all three heads every other day. Now with the glutes, yeah.

like women want the shelf. They want their upper glutes too. Well, so there's the glute medius. That's a separate, glute medius and minimus is a separate muscle. So that volume doesn't, that's separate volume. But also there's some evidence about, you know, with regards to the upper and lower gluteus maximus, we need more research because the only training study was Plotkin and it showed the same upper and lower glute growth versus between vertical and horizontal. But we have some EMG evidence that,

like when you put bands around your knees and do hip thrusts. It tends to activate the upper glute max, not the glute medius, by the way. Women will do it for the glute medius, and it doesn't activate the glute medius more. It activates the glute medius less, but it activates the upper glute max more, but not the lower glute max more. We're lacking a lot of research, but my point is you can do a lot of volume if your main goal is glutes. So quit thinking about bro splits.

Quit thinking about, you know, a man decided one day, look at the human body. Look at it. Imagine on an anatomy chart. Okay. I'm going to split this upper half into five, five different days. I'm going to split this lower half into just one day for everything. Yeah. Now you see some bodybuilders over the years who did do break their lower body into a quad focus in a hamstring focus, but yeah,

Bodybuilding is not about – male bodybuilding is not about glute development now. And so most of the male bodybuilders, they don't – they just – if you do steroids and train your legs, you end up with fine glute development. And it's about getting shredded glutes. That's diet and conditioning. So –

They don't train for maximum glute hypertrophy. If they did, they would have separate glute days. And so they don't care about that. The women care about that. And then male, some men care about maximizing glute size, like me, a guy who never had any glutes. That's why I became the glute guy. I had to study my butt off to grow them because I'm like, I'm doing these exercises. I don't feel I'm working my glutes as well as I should.

So that's the main difference with women. They want glute development is their number one goal. So they're going to train glutes three days a week, most of them. Okay. You threw out so much gold right there. We're going to take a very long time unwinding and packing a lot of the things. There's a lot of terminology in there that...

I followed along with it, probably missed some people though. I want to make sure everything you just said, people can grasp how helpful and important that was. So we're probably going to spend a large chunk of the next few minutes here going back through some of those things. But to summarize the initial question,

Again, the context I laid out for you was women. This is the strength training side of the equation. This isn't mobility. This isn't necessarily body composition or fat loss or endurance. This is simply if women want to lift weights and men want to lift weights, what are some of the things we should think about that differentiates them? And the case you made pretty eloquently there is women.

Oftentimes, certainly not every woman. I want to stop you real quick. This is important. I want to give some shout out, some credit. You said this is about hypertrophy mainly. Like this isn't about athleticism, but I would have never came up with these methods that I've popularized if it weren't for my strength coaching background.

We're going to get into that right now. Submerge into that world. Yeah. But they were doing three lower body workouts a week and recovering from them. I'm going, bodybuilders tell you to train legs one day a week. And I'm like, they're doing a knee dominant movement and a hinging movement every training session. And then they're doing glute activation work. And I'm like, why do you have to do glute activation work? Well, you have to wake up the glutes in all three planes. Why can't we turn those into strengthening movements? Why are we using little bands?

and doing 10 glute bridges, let's load those suckers up. That's what gave me the idea. So anyway, it's interesting that I came up with my ideas of hypertrophy because of the strength coaching world, but keep going. Yes, okay. So the summary for training men versus women, in this case, what you're honing in on is the fact that we don't necessarily, on aggregate, as a general statement, not every woman, not every man, right? Just you're saying you've trained...

Probably tens of thousands of women at this point have been through your programs and things like that. What you're just saying is on average, most people that have come through your systems want more glute development, want to have bigger glute muscles where men also maybe want big glutes, but also want bigger arms and things like that.

The other thing that you would want to think about here is there's often a case when women don't want hypertrophy in certain areas. So they oftentimes will want bigger glutes but not want bigger thighs. Right? So part of what you're talking about here and all the exercises and the methodologies you just laid out are ways that can help you potentially grow the glutes without also then growing the thighs and other parts. Did I have that? And by the way, that was a blog post I wrote in 2010 where

And I realized this is a thing. And say you don't have big glutes and you're a woman. And then from the side view, I go and get your quads and hamstrings bigger. Yeah. And then your glutes don't grow. They look even smaller now. It's proportion. Right. And that's something...

That men can't seem to fathom because why would you not want big quads and hammies? But if you have a certain aesthetic, you know, a lot of Asian women that I've trained who have muscular quads but then flat glutes, they don't want to do more squats. And I'm trying to get them to – I'm going, squats are good for your glutes. And they go, no, they grow my quads, Brett. Yeah.

You have me front squatting 155 and my quads are huge. I don't want to do squats anymore. I've learned this over many, many decades of training women. So you actually make their glutes proportionally look smaller when you do that. So it depends on the – if you train the thin person that needs muscle everywhere versus the person who has big legs and flat – and we all have the right to –

I mean, every man does it. Every bro has problem areas and strong points. And so you look at everyone who, you know,

people's training splits and we all have a preference that we throw in that makes our training unique compared to everyone else's right so you're not necessarily saying there's a difference in physiology or anything like that goals it's the goals and the physiology i think doesn't you don't even really need to take that yes you you you know all of it all the differences in hormones and everything and the recovery differences and stuff but i don't think that the

That has to change much at all. It's just a matter of preference. And then some women who are listening to this will be like, why would you not want to grow the quads and hammies? Or I don't care about glutes. I just want to be strong. And that's fine, but we're talking about the masses. And most women, they look at the human body and they go, I want to split it up this way. They look at the lower body and say, I want to do that three times a week. And upper body, they typically do

Some do none. Yeah. Some do twice a week, two upper body sessions. Some just do full body training and work it into their – I would say with my programs that I – for like Booty by Brat, it's three full body days. Yeah.

And, but here's the deal. You do one press, one compound press could be vertical, could be horizontal. You do one pole compound, whether it's a chin up, a pull down or a row, and you do that three times a week, that beats what most of them are doing for body part split training. And, and, and I don't want to go off on a big tangent here, but

with like booty by breath. I will tell them I want to get in 10 chin-ups eventually. And they're like, what? I can't even do one. Well, keep doing negatives. But having that goal will do more for your upper body development than having your one back day a week where you do these wimpy pull downs and put it on 70 pounds. Cause that's what all my girls will want to just put on 60 and 70. They don't go to 80, 90. I'm like, what do you weigh? I weigh one

130. Then you need to be doing 130. You want to be able to do chin-ups, you better be doing 130 for reps. And anyway, but that tends to develop their upper bodies really, really well. And then a lot of women, especially in bikini, they want the side delts, so throw in your lateral raises. But it depends on the woman, but they tend to want to do upper body twice a week. And some of them will have a back day and a shoulder day.

And I don't think that's as wise as having two upper body days because of frequency. But anyway, they always have at least two lower body workouts a week. Always two, sometimes three. And some girls go crazy and want like...

to train glutes every day. I got creative in how to make that work because they're obsessed. And I get it. We've all been there, but they're like, I want to train glutes every day. How could you do that? Well, it's doable. It's just, you got to do more shortened, short muscle position stuff, more band work. And then people will say, bands suck. Okay. How come during COVID people's upper glutes grew like crazy? Cause they got a glute loop around doing tons of abduction cause they're bored as hell. So they work. Yeah.

Today's episode is sponsored by Momentous. Momentous makes the highest quality supplements on the market, period.

Many of you know me, and you know that I do not trust the vast majority of supplement companies, and for good reason. Many studies have shown that anywhere between 10% to up to 40% of supplements have accidental contaminants, intentional alterations, mislabeling, or other serious issues. But Momentus is different. I literally spent years vetting the company, their products, and leadership team before personally officially partnering with them in 2023. Every single one of Momentus' products is

is third-party tested to ensure quality, and many are even NSF certified for sport. Now, while I love all of their products, the ones I use the most, both personally and with my clients, are what I call the big three. And these are the Omega-3 fish oil, creatine, and newly improved whey protein formula. These three supplements have fantastic data supporting their benefits.

whey protein for lean muscle mass, omega-3s for brain health, and creatine for both muscle and brain support. And they have been shown to be very safe across basically all populations of people, young, old, men, women, etc. Now, nobody has to use supplements, and I hope you never feel pressured to do so. But if you're interested in supplements, it's important that you get them from the highest quality providers.

You don't want mercury in your fish oil or lead in your whey protein or anything like that. So that's why I stick exclusively to Momentus. If you'd like to give Momentus a try, go to livemomentus.com slash perform to get 20% off your order. Again, that's livemomentus.com slash perform to get 20% off.

I'm very familiar with the Booty by Brett program. My wife does it. She loves it. It's three days a week of total body every day. And then you have to listen to my voice. See if you hear it in the background. I don't know. If anything, it helps me. It's three days a week, total body. And then there's two additional bonus days just for the glutes that you do. So that's what you're referring to when your program is such that if you only want to do three days a week, fine.

If you also want to do four or five, you can sort of add those things on. And the way that you've gotten around that, as you just mentioned, is those additional days, you just call it a pump. But it's non-damaging, non-fatiguing, things that will stimulate a little bit of growth, but it's not going to crush you for your next workout. Because those three workouts are when you're getting your true maximal mechanical tension and stimuli back.

And things like that. So I want to walk through that whole program. But before we go. Side note on mechanical tension. I just called Brad up. I'm like, Brad, why do we say mechanical tension? What else could it be? Psychological tension? Let's drop the word mechanical. It's just tension. Muscular tension. Tension on the muscle. Why do we have to say mechanical anyway? Keep going. Okay. All the way back though.

You started off your career. You mentioned a little bit of your backstory I've heard, you know, before you didn't have large glutes as a kid, you wanted to develop them. So you kind of got focused in this area. I said initially where I had first saw your stuff was again, I don't even know, probably before 2010. I don't know. When did you start writing for things? 2009, for Teenation. Right. Teenation stuff all the time over there. There's like

It's very funny. The strength conditioning nerds are going to understand this. The rest of you probably won't. But these things like T Nation were like the only thing we had. T Nation was the greatest. Back in the day, right? The early 2000s. Some of the articles were wild on there. And then there'd be people like you. And I'm like, my God, this is a dissertation. This is references. All the top strength coaches. You wanted to be a top strength coach. That's how you earned your stripes. Yeah. Actually, like a little bit of a side note. You're the example I also give.

of people think that wow you got a million followers because you did it no no no like you were famous in this whole field way before instagram existed from things like putting your chops in on those articles speaking of scientific conferences before you had a phd i don't even know if before you had a master's degree but you were using science as best you could in application so you spent

I don't know, what was it? At least 10 years just purely coaching and writing. For the most part, you have probably 25 years of lifting yourself. 33 years of lifting, 28 years of coaching. 28 years of coaching. And this is a lot of high volume personal coaching. You have to be in the top half a percentile of people with a PhD in the field in terms of coaching hours. Yeah. Like not that many people there, right? So at what point,

In that journey, did you get super focused on the glutes? You mentioned why the personal side. And then I'm going to ask this inflammatory on purpose. When did you, Brett Contreras, invent the hip thrust? Okay, so... And I'm a little bit smiling when I say that. I know some of the backstory, but I actually don't know the whole answer here. Yeah, I think you'll be pleased to hear it. Okay, so when I was 16 years old, so I'm 48 now.

So when I was 16, it was 1992. I wanted to lift weights for two reasons. And maybe every guy does this in the beginning, to stand up to bullies and to get laid. I would look at my body in the mirror. My friends were like athletes and they were developing. And I'm like, I'm this scrawny. What girl would ever want to see me naked? I don't.

I wish I had the confidence that other people do that don't care, that just have the gift of gab and women love them. But I was like, I was insecure. I was like, why would anyone want to ever hook up with me? I don't, I'm so scrawny.

And I hated being bullied more than anyone. I remember getting my, like back when, when, when we grew up, it was kind of worse. Now I was a teacher for six years. I taught high school math for six years. It's not as bad. Yeah. There are anti-bullying policies. Thank God. But back then I'd have some kid come up and slam my head into the locker or something. And,

I, I, one, I took one time I was out in an event and then some guys like, I don't want to hear you talk. If I hear you talk, I'm going to hit you in the face. And he was the toughest guy in the school. I didn't speak the whole night. And all of a sudden he, I, someone's like, Brett, Brett. And I'm like, I can't talk. And then I said, I answered them and he happened to be coming up and he just hit me in the jaw. Um, and I'm, I was like, Oh, I wish I was bigger than him. I wish I could bully him. And that's what I really fueled me to start lifting weights because

But I heard two specific instances. I heard these girls saying, I can't wait to go to football practice and watch the guys training. I love staring at their butts. And I'm like, oh, great. I'm going to be a 40-year-old virgin. Women want glutes. I don't even – I look so bad from behind my butt. And then the next story is I'm playing golf with my sister's boyfriend. Bending over to swing, we're on the ninth hole, and he's like –

And it's so funny because he became so descriptive. He was like, you know, Brett, your back goes right into your legs. It's like, you're missing the gluteal musculature. Most people have like a prominence that juts out and you're just, your back goes right in your legs. And I'm like,

Why do you feel so comfortable talking about my biggest insecurity? I remember just going, I am not okay with this. I'm going to do something about this. So I started reading everything I could. And in the bodybuilding mags, you had just read their leg day. They didn't talk about glutes. It was, what does Ronnie Coleman do for his quads and hammies? Because they will not mention glutes. It's like,

He who is the muscle whose name shall not be mentioned. It's bizarre. They still to this day have this homophobic association with glutes and with hip thrusts. It's weird. I cover a lot of it on my Instagram, like my idols say.

You know, Tom, Tom Platts, the first thing he ever posted on his Facebook page was drop the useless hip thruster. I'm like, he didn't want to make a post about it. He's my Tom Platts' legs. And like Lee Priest just made a, I just responded to an interview and he's like bashing hip thrust so bad. And if, if you're a, if you're a man doing hip thrust, take your tampon out. And it was, it's, it's funny. So I had to learn about glutes through hip,

um, other, you know, basically through bodybuilders, but what they did for the leg days, but also through other resources. And when I was 19 years old, my cousin bought me this book, the complete guide to, to button leg development. And, and that was 1995. I still have the book. It's on my coffee table in Vegas. I still flip through it. It's still in mint condition, but I, I read it, you know, on Christmas, I just left the party and went into my room and read it for like two hours, came back to the party. I'm like, this is my favorite present. Um,

How did you know? And he goes, dude, I've never met someone so obsessed with the glutes. And, you know, it was 1995. And since then, my enthusiasm for glutes has never diminished.

I'm still just as excited, but it was because I had no glutes and no one becomes the glute guy if they just born with good glute genetics. Cause if you have good glute genetics, guess what? You never need to do an isolation movement. You just squat. And then you're the guy going, LOL, just squat. Quit doing that stupid kickback. Quit doing that stupid exercise. Just squat. You know? Yeah. I'm going to be real honest. Like that was definitely me for a good decade or more. That's a part of my physique that it,

you know, grows very easy and very well. And so I definitely dismissed much of these things. In fact, more than that, I was pretty aggressive earlier in my career. It's like, you don't need any of these things. Just squat, just squat. It took me age. Like it does everybody else to go, Oh, you know what? Not everyone's like me. Right. So I don't need to emphasize. And as you age, you get injuries. Injuries are what taught me a lot.

Half of what I know is by working around, you get an injury and you work around. So if you're like, Oh my God, I like this or, Oh my God, I came back stronger. I was missing something. So you asked about the hip thrust. So it's October 10th, 2006. There's a date, exact date. I'm watching UFC, UFC fights with my girlfriend at the time. Her name was Jeannie and you know, UFC fights in Phoenix, Arizona or Scottsdale. Come on it. Like,

9, 10 o'clock. So we're watching the fights. And I didn't care who won. It was Ken Shamrock versus Tito Ortiz, their third fight. I don't care who wins. I just want it to be a good fight because I like both of them. I was in Phoenix on that fight, by the way. Really? That's crazy. We were within a few miles of each other. Yeah, I was at Athlete's Performance. Really? Yeah. Okay. So I know exactly where that was back before it was XO's or whatever. XO's, yeah. And so...

I'm watching the fights and I'm like, man, Tito mounts him. And I'm like, Ken, do something. Don't just lay there. Because I had a twin brother growing up and we would always...

you know, grapple and you'd straddle the person. You'd be bucking like a Bronco. Eventually you'd buck the person off. I had done a couple of years of jujitsu training. I know the jujitsu guys can say, Oh, if you have your hooks in, but the, in MMA, they don't have their hooks in. You can, if you're really freakishly strong, a hip, a good hip bump or whatever they call it now, but a good, a powerful glute bridge can help get you out of that.

And glutes help in a lot of ways in MMA. But anyway, I started thinking at the time, I'm like, that should be an exercise. Now, at that time, I'm reading articles on T Nation from Eric Cressy and these guys saying, do these glute bridges. And I would do them. And I'm like, I love these. I love the way it feels, but I could do 100. So I was going, how could you load that? Also, you're limited by the ground. How could you sink deeper?

i went out to my garage i had an idea and i thought i'm gonna move my glute ham developer

a few feet away from my reverse hyper. I called Jeannie, Jeannie, come out here, help me. She gets out there. She's like, why can't we do this tomorrow? And I'm like, fine, I'll do it myself. Yeah, I'll do it myself. And I'm trying to move this GHD across the floor, but I did it. And then I'm like, a male weighs, an average male weighs about 180 pounds. That's four 45 pound plates. I didn't think of the idea to use the barbell for a long time. I took four plates. I put a dip belt in

It was so hard because I stood in the dip belt, tried to get up to my legs, and then I had to lay back on the glute ham developer, shimmy the weight belt up to my lap, and put my feet on the reverse hyper. Oh, this is super safe. They could split apart and you'd fall. Yeah, immediately. I sunk all the way down, thrust it up. One. I remember I got to like 15, and I felt my left glute start to – I felt like I was going to pull it. I was like, God, I'm worried I'm going to tear this thing if I keep going. Yeah.

So I set the weight down and I'm like, oh my God, I have a pump from one set. I had never felt that feeling before in 2006. And I went out to my front yard, looked up in the sky. I'm not religious. I'm not even very spiritual. And I looked up in the sky. I go, I'm going to spend the rest of my life making this exercise as popular as humanly possible. From this point on, my whole life changes. And I knew it.

And it was just this random where your life is going this way and now it's going this way. And so people will say, so this is crazy. So I start giving it to all my clients. I'm giving it with body weight. And then I'm like figuring out different ways to load it. And then my aunt says, you should –

I said, I want to write an article for Teenation. I think I'm ready now. This is going to be my first article, which it was, Dispelling the Glute Myth. That was my first article. That was your first one. That was the article heard around the world. Yeah. Because I come out of the gate strong and I said this. I didn't know that was your first one. And so I'm like, this is the way you build your glutes. I have me hip thrusting 405.

People around the world started doing it right away. That's the time when people would have said, this is awkward, Brett. We're doing that. That was heard around the world. T Nation back then, they had that forum. Of course. I was meeting guys down the road. Like when I went and got my PhD, this guy from New Zealand, this guy, Sam, he's like, do you remember the day you posted that article? I went and did them. I did 405. And because he's a power lifter, he's like, it was awesome. Do you remember? That was me. So the very next day, guys in New Zealand, guys all over the world were doing it.

If someone was doing them, that would have been the time. People were like, Brett, this is awkward. We're doing this here. No one was doing hip thrusts. They never existed. But now the weirdest thing happened in the world. At that time, it took me a while to think of using a barbell. I told my aunt about it. She goes, sounds like you need to invent something. And I go, I don't know how to invent anything. And she goes, sure you do. You were always good at drawing.

Draw some up right now. I did. I applied for a patent. I still have the patent. I don't enforce my patent. I could probably make an extra $2 million a year if I enforced it. I feel guilty because I want there to be as many hip thrust machines as possible. And so, but yeah, they're all infringing. So you have the actual patent on the hip thrust? I have the patent since I think I was awarded in maybe 2009.

and you can pull it up. You can Google Brett Contreras patent. It comes up on Google. You can see my original patent, all my drawings. But it took me a while to think of the barbell hip thrust. So my first invention was a scorcher. And it was like that idea, the rounded back pad. I had an angled foot plate, but it was this monstrosity. So I opened up lifts, my first gym in Scottsdale. That's all we did.

for hip thrust was always off the scorcher, never anything else. And we did three types of hip thrust. We did a band hip thrust. Cause I said, you need bands, uh,

And it needs to be anchored low. So there's tension at the start and tension at the top. So the thing was elevated and then there was band tension from way down low, but you'd get to the top and it was like insane. So we did band hip thrust. We did single leg hip thrust. And I gave a unit to Gunnar Peterson. He trained J-Lo back then. He's like, Brett, this is J-Lo's favorite exercise, but you need handles on this. I wonder if he remembers this. You need handles on this so they don't wobble around. So I put handles on the unit. It was great. Yeah.

Single leg hip thrusts off the scorcher are amazing because it actually changes the strength curve. It's hardest at the bottom. And you can do that off two benches. If you get two benches and you actually go all the way down to where your butt touches the ground and then comes up, it is hard off the bottom. So we would do single leg sinking really deep coming up. And then we'd do barbell, but the barbell were hilarious. This is what we did in my first gym. Trainer on this side, trainer on this side.

So we'd have to have to, every time you did, someone did barbell hip thrust, they'd be like, coach, I'm ready. And we'd have to run over. We'd be training like 10 people at a time. We'd run over two trainers, pick the barbell up. The person slides underneath, gets in position, drop it in their lap. They do their set of hip thrusts. Then we pick the barbell, you get out of it. And we did that for two years. And by the way, I remember when I said, why can't you use the barbell? The thing is it would hurt.

You need padding. And I Googled thick bar padding. I Googled this in like, you know, 2008 and Hampton was the only one making this thick barbell pad for squats. And that became, so I made Hampton a lot of money until people started making their own squat sponge. The squat sponge came out and then like we started making ours and

And, but people also use the Eric's balance pads. So we'd use those too. Those were the game changer for the hip thrust. So, all right. So now I decided to write an ebook because when I blogging was popular back in the day, you blogged, but you needed a moneymaker. So I made an ebook. I'm like, I can't be doing, telling people do these hip thrusts off the scorcher and

They don't have a scorcher. How can I make this mainstream? Well, they could do it off a bench. When you've only done the scorcher and then you do it off the bench, you're like, I don't feel it on my hammies. Yeah. I don't feel like I'm sinking deep enough. It just doesn't feel right. But then you get used to it. So whatever you do the most, you like, and then everything else kind of feels weird. Right. But anyway, we started doing off the bench because I'm like, I need to teach everyone how to do it using regular equipment. No one did a barbell hip throws off a bench for a couple of years. Right.

Now, I didn't just think of the barbell hip thrust. I also thought of the barbell glute bridge and the single leg hip thrust. And you're sitting here going, Brett, you're looking me in the face saying no one ever did a single leg hip thrust. No, no one ever sat on a bench and did a single leg hip thrust. At least there's no evidence of it. Now, okay, so prove me wrong. So when I wrote my glute ebook, I did my research. You know I'm a researcher. I'm not lazy. I searched for a whole week of my life.

like eight hours a day. I thought of every term you could come up with for the first term could be pelvic floor, supine, glute, hip, whatever. And then the second term could be raised, lift, thrust, bridge, um, push up. Like, and I, and I did every combination of those and I searched 30 pages deep. I'd go to forums and search. I did see like someone glute bridging a keg. Um, I, uh,

I found later on, I found some evidence. So here's, if you're a Brett Contreras hater, I'm going to give you four pieces of evidence you can use against me. The first piece is the evolution of the bench press. So I have this book from 1924, Super Strength by Alan Calvert. And it's 101 years old.

And so anyway, real quick, I'm going to, I'm going to fast forward to modern day. If I made a post right now, like if you post this clip, if you were to, if we were to collaborate on a post, there'd be at least 10 people that write, LOL, I was doing those in the nineties. I was doing those in the two thousands and they remember it that way. I'm not doubting that they think that.

I'm not saying they're lying. They don't have good memory. They were doing that after 2009. Or they'll be like, my dad was doing that. And I go, I always say, okay, I'm a historian. I would love to talk to the people. How'd you do it? What padding did you use? What set and rep schemes? How frequently? How strong were the people?

But there's no evidence. And what they will always say, this is crazy to me because we've reached a period of time where people are so insanely stupid that they think that we don't have history of anything before camera phones. Yeah. So I'll say, prove it. Like, give me evidence. I'm happy to send out a newsletter. Hey, turns out I didn't invent the hip thrust. This person did. I will give credit. And they'll go, LOL, like we had camera phones back then.

And I'm like, oh, my God. I have a book that's 101 years old with 200 pictures in the back of it in black and white. A hundred years ago, we had cameras. We brought cameras to the gym. We have a whole history before camera phones exist. And these people are so inexplicable. It's like inexplicable how insanely stupid they are. They are the dumbest. So anyway. It's not that you necessarily care.

Maybe didn't invent the hip thrust, but you have yet to find any evidence. Beyonce's trainer invented the hip thrust in 2003. That's the only evidence I have. She used a stability. Okay, so I'll go for the four pieces. Number one is Beyonce in 2003. She's on a VHS. Is that the VM, VH1? VH1. There you go. MTV's, yeah, the MTV channel, like the counterpart. VH1 had a series called Rockin' Bodies.

And someone sent me this and I'm like, this was not, this was after 2006. No, it was not. And she's on a stability ball and she's got a little barbell and she's doing hip thrusts. That's the only time I've ever seen a barbell hip thrust being performed, but it is with like a 30 pound barbell. Yeah. And she doesn't have the best form, but I'd never seen it until I, I didn't see that until a few years ago. So you could say Beyonce's trainer, it shows her in the video. Yeah. There's a little extra. So whoever this is,

She could be given credit for inventing the hip thrust. You could find her name, right. And then if you look at the book, okay, that book I told you about in 1995, it has pelvic raises. It shows glute bridges and cingulate glute bridges, but it doesn't show them with weight. But if you go to the back of the program, the back of the book has programs and it says in one part, weighted pelvic raises.

Okay. But it doesn't show how to weight it. Gotcha. Now, that would be off the ground, but that would be a weighted glute bridge or whatever, but it doesn't say how. No, you look at the book Super Training by Mel Siff. Yep. This is a classic. Classic. There is some pictures from 1977 credited to Yuri Verkoshansky, this Russian sports scientist. Rest in peace. And these are all hip thrusts. It looks like Kama Sutra drawings, but they're all hip thrusts.

And you can see these are single leg hip thrusts. There's one, the person against a bench and they're pushing against their hips. That's an isometric hip thrust. And then there's single leg where you've got your foot on a kettlebell on your foot and you're doing single leg hip thrusts. And there's special exercise to develop sprinting

Who would have known that 50 years later, we'd now have evidence that hip thrusts are actually better for sprinting than the vertical hip extension exercises. So that was ahead of its time. But these are hip thrust variations. And then another piece was from the late 1800s, early 1900s, the invention of the bench press. So they didn't always have benches. So what they first started in the strongmen back then is,

they'd have to kind of do a pullover and press. You just were laying on the ground. You just had to get the bar over your head. Then they started making bigger discs and you could roll it over, which is what I ended up doing with BC Strength with hip thruster plates, even bigger. But back then they had to get it over their head and then they do a press. And then people started realizing if I...

So it was like, you know, Arthur Saxon had the record and then like George Hackenschmidt and then this Joe Nord quest. And he did it from a, he would elevate his, cause you could bend, you could, if you turn it into a glute bridge and turn it a decline, you were even stronger. Yep. And then some guys started realizing, hell, I'm just going to, they call it a belly toss. Yeah. Yeah. So they would put it on their belly and toss it up and lock it out. So then that was the belly toss method.

And then some guy named George Lou Rich came

He was so flexible, he could just go and bridge it all the way up to lock out, put his hips down. Oh, nice. And then at that point, they're like, this isn't even using pressing muscles. This is silly. So the powers that be, Hoffman, what is Hoffman's name? Bob Hoffman. Bob Hoffman decided, this is stupid. Let's get away with all this. Let's just do this strict exercise.

strict floor press. And that's when benches started coming along. So they were doing like belly tosses, but for one rep, not for reps. And it wasn't with the goal of building glutes. It was to have a stronger bench, which is what you'll see high school kids doing now in gyms, doing anything they can to get a stronger bench press. And interestingly, back then, bench presses, some of the same criticisms are what you see of hip thrusts today.

Quit being late. They were a lazy man's exercise. Right. Standing exercise are functional. Overhead. This is how you build the real functional muscle. Who wants to artificially expand the pecs? These aren't, you know, functional muscles. The real muscles are your shoulders and your biceps. And you should, you should be doing curls and overhead presses. Who lays down to do an exercise? And then bodybuilders, you know, started doing the bench, the

and then it took off. But it was criticized in the beginning, and it's going to be bad for your posture. It's going to be non-functional. It's going to lead to injury, and then people ignore them, and then it now is the most popular exercise today. And the same thing is happening with hip thrusts. Now with the...

invention of these plate-loaded devices and these selectorized devices, those are the best-selling pieces of equipment right now. It's like, you're a modern gym, the ladies want the hip thrust machines. I would be hard-pressed to believe nobody in the history of the world ever did a loaded hip thrust before Brett Contreras. Of course. That's not what you're really saying. Well, that's why I tell people, then...

Because I had a coach tell me he was doing it. I go, how come you never posted about it? Why didn't you, you didn't realize it was going to be popular? Yeah, yeah. It's just like, that's the way history works. Yeah. It just wasn't very popular at all before you. So at minimum, we could say you were the one that brought it to the lexicon. Sure. You were not doing it in every gym. It was not, certainly in studios. Now you can't go to a gym that doesn't have a hip thrust machine of some kind. Yeah. So yeah, no one will argue that Brett Contreras popularized it. I just don't.

I just don't like being like basically being called a fraud as if I take credit for something I never did. In fact, back in the day, people were like calling it the Contreras hip thrust or two bloggers calling it the CHT. And I'm like, don't make it about me. This, I want this to be popper on its own. Everyone knows I invented it. And then now no, no one knows I invented it because the world changed. Social media kind of became a copycat game back in our day. We gave credit.

We always gave credit. If you didn't give credit, you were, you know, dead in your tracks. Today's episode is brought to you by Parker University. Parker is the only university in the world dedicated exclusively to human performance. It's also my new academic home. I first heard of Parker after attending their NeuroCon seminar and was stunned.

I've been to countless clinics and conferences, and nobody is even close to Parker Seminars. The speakers, the setup, and the total experience are frankly jaw-dropping. All their seminars are great, but the upcoming Las Vegas show, which is going down March 20th through 22nd, is going to be extra special.

It's featuring speakers like Drs. Andrew Huberman, Tommy Wood, Gabrielle Lyon, and more. But on top of that, I'm personally hosting a co-seminar at the same time. So imagine going to a phenomenal lecture on how the nervous system works, then popping over and lifting some weights with me personally, grabbing lunch,

and then settling in for a talk on how NASA scientist Cody Burkhart is preparing human bodies for life on Mars. Tickets for this incredible event are on sale now at a special rate of only $599. But this price will increase as the dates get closer, so do not wait.

And yes, you heard that right. $599 gets you full access to the entire Parker Seminar, Expo Hall, nightlife and social events, plus two full days of learning and lifting weights with me in the gym and my friend Dan Garner. To see the exact schedule, list of speakers and get signed up, visit parkerseminars.com. One more time, that's parkerseminars.com. I can't wait to see you there. Okay, so really fast, before we go into some more details about how to train and some of the things,

Walk me through the difference between a hip thrust and a glute bridge. You mentioned single leg glute bridges. You mentioned different loading strategies for people that are thinking like, I don't know the difference here. What is that difference again between a glute bridge, a hip thrust? Why does it matter? If you're on the ground, it's a glute bridge.

You can do that one leg, two legs. Best way to do it is off the Smith machine, though, because you're on a bench. It's plate loaded. You just load the plates up, and you can go all the way down to the ground. You can sit on the bench. Sometimes the plates...

If you're a smaller person, you don't even get to touch down before the plates touch down. Yep. Okay. So your back is on the ground, your feet are on the ground and you're elevating your, your hips up in the air and with some load on your hips. That's a glute bridge. That's a glute bridge. One leg, two leg. And if you elevate your feet from that position, it's a foot elevated glute bridge. So you put your feet up on a bench. Yep. Yep. Which allows you to get your hips up higher and. Yep. Increase the range of motion, but doesn't increase the quad activity. Right. Um,

if now you elevate your shoulders, that's a hip thrust. So now you're putting your back up on a bench or something like that, right? You put your back up on a bench. And now if you elevate both your shoulders and feet, that's a dual elevated or foot elevated hip thrust. Yep. So yeah, basically hip thrusts are going to build your quads a little bit more, probably. If you want all glute growth and no quad, no hamstring, no adductor,

then the glute bridge is probably your lift. Because the thing is, you could say do kickbacks, do these exercises, but these are not exercises easy to progressively overload over the years. Glute bridges you can and hip thrusts. That's why they're so effective. They're very conducive to progressive overload. Same with squats, deadlifts, and bench press. The most effective exercises you can

Keep loading them. You have a standardized range of motion, a way to perform it. You do it this way every time. When you get stronger, you're utilizing progressive overload. You should be growing muscle over time. Yes, there are neural effects and coordination effects, but you should grow muscle over time. And that's why I say,

Make it a goal to hip thrust 315 for 20. That's your best bet to getting glutes. 315 pounds for 20 reps for a 250-pound man? So it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's kind of crazy because you think every other lift, you're like, well, size matters. What do they weigh? But I've found that when you're bigger, like hip thrust, it's easier to hip thrust when you're smaller. Yeah.

it's just more comfortable. When you're bigger, your belly gets in the way. You're just cramped in there. And body weight adds to it. So I would like to say, you know, maybe 2.5 times body weight for 20 reps, but really 315 for 20 is very simple. Probably the best metric if there had to be one, but obviously with genetics. Yeah, yeah. I want to linger on that really, really fast. Again, what you're saying is

You personally, having trained, again, thousands, if not tens of thousands of individuals, not NFL players, 90% female, probably most of them sub 200 pounds.

Um, what one or two of them have ever been able to hip thrust three 15 for 20. Like how many? Every client I have can. Every client you have. And, and not just, all right, you go to an Olympic weightlifting gym. What are you going to see? Snatches and cleaning jerks. Well, what the equipment? Oh yeah. You're going to see barbells. Well, you're going to see plates, squat stands. Yeah. Platforms. That's it. Yeah. What, what are you going to see if you go to glute lab? Yeah.

hip thrust stations. In San Diego, we've got like 12 against the wall, just against the one wall on the AstroTurf.

That's what we do here. And the other thing is, yeah, if you trained at Westside back in the day, do you think you would have been stronger? Yeah. Well, if you train at Glute Lab, you think you're 315 for five is impressive. And then you look at these girls and they're freaks. Yeah. Freaks. They're doing 495. They're doing 585. Didn't you have a girl just do 800?

or something like that? - So there's, I have not, I've seen one legit 800 pound hip thrust from a woman. Her name was Daria. Now, the problem is people don't lock it out. A full legit lockout. I've been watching hip thrusts, millions and millions of reps. I'm very skilled at seeing, did you reach full hip extension?

They have these Guinness Book of World Records and like contests now you see, and I get tagged in them. I'm like, they didn't even come close to locking it out. You got to reach full hip extension. This girl, Daria, she did 810 or 800. I think it was 800 legit in training. She did one of my strong lifting competitions. The thing is hip thrusts are last.

So you've already done squats and deads. She didn't get seven, I think it was like 735 or something. Well, nonetheless, call me still impressed at 700 pound hip extension. But my client Carly, she hit 765, legit, full lockout. One of the coolest experiences of my life. And I think she could have done 800. There's another girl, Katie Soniero, I think could get to an 800 pound hip thrust, legit. She's doing the rotisserie one now.

That's using the rotating pad. Oh, that slides with... Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's on my Thruster 3.0. The girls like it more. That also changes the torque angle curve to where it's hardest off the ground.

the lockout becomes easy. Oh, cause you can roll back. Yeah. It just changes it to where I did it the other day. Cause I did it for the first time. It was always hard at the bottom. It feels I'm too, I got a belly, you know, it's too, I'm too wedged in. So I did like, I did it with bands and I did, I'm, I think I did four, four or five for 12. And my client Dre is like, LOL coach, I'm stronger than you. I'm like, Dre, it's my first time I did them. I'm still stronger than you. I hope I'm stronger. I'm literally twice your size. Um,

So I did it again and it was, it's, it's, it's really hard at the bottom and then it gets easier as you come up. It's really different. In fact, at the top, I'm like, I feel like I'm going to tip over. It's kind of, you're kind of scared that you're going to flip over, but that's an interesting debate because now you're changing. So with that rotating pad, you, the, a lot of the men who criticize the hip thrust say, well, it's easy at the bottom, hardest at the top.

Well, you can make it with this design. You can change that around. Yep. But anyway, now there's that Katie's doing like 900 pounds for four reps or something. It's crazy. Or yeah, maybe it's 800 for four, but she's crazy. It's a lot. Anyway, there's women can get stronger than men at this. I would love to.

Relatively, relatively stronger. I have never seen a man legit lock out a thousand. Well, maybe this guy, I posted it. There's one guy who looked like he had a legit lockout, but you see the strongest power lifters in the world. They never lock it out and they're doing like, you know, they can get to seven, 800 pounds, but it's really interesting. And I think it has to do with that. Women have

possibly better leverage at lockout, especially with their adductors, some of their muscles, but maybe their glutes can get... Their glutes can probably get relatively, maybe a little bit bigger, or at least they're training glutes three times a week. It's going to get bigger. But I think they're... Maybe because they're not training their hamstrings and everything too. So their lockout strength tends to be amazing. And I always think it's funny what...

10 years ago, I'd have all these girls that are like, I saw this bodybuilder in the gym. And of course, that bodybuilder has a crush on one of my girls. So they're flirting. And then they see him doing hip thrust or glute bridge. And they're like, oh, let me see if I can do it. And they can't do it. And that's because they have strong glutes down deep in a hips flexed position. They can do half reps for days. But then you have them come up all the way and lock it out. They lack that lockout strength, which is something you will hear, um,

What's his face? Nautilus inventor. Arthur Jones talked about how when people would start to use the machines, they're so strong in the stretch position. They're so weak here. It takes them a while to, you know, they're so weak here. There's this massive imbalance throughout the range of motion. So I do think that there are some anatomical differences that make women stronger at hip thrust, but also just comes down to

For women, the hip thrust is their bench press. Yeah, yeah, of course. Guys ask you how much you bench, women how much you thrust, you know? Right, yeah. So you've mentioned now a handful of anatomical terms and you've peppered in a little bit about how to train them differently, but I want to complete that picture if we can. So just give me the really basic overview of the glute anatomy, right? The couple of different muscles there. And then what I really want to get to on that is how do I train them differently if I need to? So if I want my glutes...

To get bigger, do I need to be having bands? Should I not use them? Like give me that whole picture of saying, okay, Brett, I want my butt bigger. Do all I have to do is hip thrust? Do I need to add anything else? What are adductors? Complete that whole picture about what am I looking at anatomy-wise and then what implications do I have for training? Okay. So anatomically, you have attachments at the ilium, the sacrum, and the coccyx.

Mostly the sacrum. So the Glutmax will... Tailbone. Yeah, attaches a little bit to the pelvis, and then the sacrum, and a little bit to the coccyx. And then it inserts onto the gluteal tuberosity of the femur, but also onto the IT band.

So your glutes attach to the back of your thigh, like the back of your thigh muscle. Kind of the lateral edge of it, though. Right. There aren't many muscles like the glutes. It's like a...

Quadrilateral? Why don't I remember this? I used to teach geometry. Sounds good. It's almost rectangular shaped in a way. Right. If we contrast this to the quadriceps muscle groups, those all come into the patella, have one insertion point on that front of your knee. That's that knob down there. So what you're talking about is the glutes are different because they don't have that single point of landing. It's a broadly... Big fan of attachment. Because they attach...

Okay, so because they attach to the femur and pelvis and sacrum, that alone is a big deal. But now you look at their fascial attachments. So first of all, there's some fascial attachments to the pelvic floor, giving us some implications with that kind of like urinary incontinence, like the pelvic floor function. Right.

Then you have the attachment onto the IT band, which then attaches down to the tibia. So now it's almost like that can be considered a tendon. Yep. So it makes it – that would make it a biarticular muscle, you know? Yeah, meaning it's going to both extend your hip and rotate it out, right? Because it is attached to the outside there. Well, if it attaches to the tibia –

Not just... All right. Okay, so you're talking about when it contracts. I'll get to that in a second. But it also attaches to the thoracolumbar fascia, to the glute medius fascia. A lot of stuff kind of blends in together. So if you consider the thoracolumbar fascia into the lat and the lat to the arm, you've got...

Kind of the glute max possibly affecting things up and down the chain from the arm to the lower leg. So your back shoulder, right? Yeah. So for that reason, these people tend to over-exaggerate and act like, you know, these like anatomy trains and stuff and the fascia is everything and these myofascial meridians and everything. But...

I do think it's, if you looked at, if you took a step back and looked at the human muscular anatomy chart or like picture, you'd be like, the glutes are the keystone. They are the keystone muscle. That's why I'm okay being the glute guy. I would not want to be the pet guy. The glutes are the keystone. They're the- Plantaris guy. Yeah. So they affect a lot of things and it's like that centerpiece. So then you look at the subdivisions, okay? So the glute medius-

That's been separated into interim posture divisions, subdivisions. It probably has interim middle and posterior divisions.

Glute medius isn't talked about that much, but people act like you can target them one or the other. The glute medius overlaps the glute minimus. How do you target? They'll be like, kick out at this angle for glute med and this angle for glute min. Right. So you've got glute max is the big one we think of as your glutes, right? So the glute med and min are up or outer. Up and outside, right below your hip bone there. Yeah.

And then the glute max is a diagonal shaped and the fiber directions are, you know, around 40 degrees ish.

They all – they change between – I can't remember. There's a couple of papers looking at the exact fiber directions. But it's like – and then when it contracts, you can see bodybuilders squeezing their glutes, posing. They become pretty horizontal when you – so people will say – I've heard people say, oh, glute max is just a hip extensor. It's just – if it was just a hip extensor, why wouldn't they be vertical, more vertical? Yeah.

they do three things. They abduct, but it's only the upper fibers that abduct. Yep, meaning it takes your leg away from your midline. Yeah, frontal plane abduction. So frontal plane abduction, if you're standing up, think jumping jacks. Yep, there you go. You're abducting the legs. So the upper glute max fibers abduct, but the glute med and men are the main abductors. TFL as well, but glute med is like an amazing abductor, super strong at abduction, frontal plane.

Um, the lower glute max, there's evidence that it's an adductor, but I have not found any EMG activity with adduction. Now here's what's interesting. Okay. There's the upper and lower subdivisions of the glute max. They seem to have be, um, you know, activated uniquely through EMG and the whole glute max externally rotates. The whole glute max extends the hip and

but only the upper abduct. Some people say the upper is more effective in external rotation. I think it's the entire glute max is very effective in hip external rotation. And when we swing a bat, you think, because I used to just think of these things as distinct actions. Think about swinging a bat. You're loaded up.

kind of in the stretch position a little bit, and then you contract the glutes. It does three things. You are going to extend the hips, you are going to abduct the hips, and you are going to rotate laterally the hips. They do all three things at once during swinging, striking, throwing. So that's what they're called triplanar. Now, when you bend over and you're in deep hip flexion, now the glute med and min are not...

their moment arms change where they're not even effective, very effective at abducting the thigh anymore. Maybe the posterior are, but not the middle anterior. But now the glute max becomes a better abductor of the thigh. Yeah, so if you think about this, like if you were to be standing up vertical, and I just said, you know,

do it, the jumping jack action, right? This is where you're lifting your leg out to the side. If you were to do this as a common exercise where you like lay on your side and you lift your leg up in the air, right? Now in that position, what you're saying is those small upper glute muscles, glute, glute medius, glute minimus, things like that might be adding to that action. But if you were to bend,

And now, so like I'm standing here and I'm hinging forward. I'm doing like an RDL. Like a seated hip abduction. Seated hip thing. Leaning forward. Now if I do it, those muscles aren't really active anymore. Yeah. Now that entire action has to come from my glute max, right? Well, I think. Or likely. You said may. From the sideline, the glute med is the main hip abductor. There you go. No argument about it. From bent over position, I think the posterior subdivision would be activated well.

You're going to get some activation of the hip extra rotators now become horizontal plane abductors and also the glute max. How efficient are those at building them? We don't know. But I do include those in the program. So now you said, how do I build glutes? Well, because the glutes have, first of all, the glute max has upper and lower subdivisions. And some people would even say there's the, you know,

the iliac fibers, the sacral fibers, and the coccygeal fibers. They might even separate the glute max between three subdivisions, but definitely an upper and lower. And then the glute med has multiple subdivisions in the glute min. To maximally develop them, you're going to combine a lot of different actions. There's two studies, one looking at the glute size of Olympic weightlifters.

And it shows that their glute max is larger than control sub than sedentary subjects, but their glute med and min are not. Meaning squats do not grow your glute med and min.

Also, the Plotkin study showed that squats and hip thrusts, neither one of them grew your glute medius and minimus. If you want to grow your glute med and min, you should treat it like any other muscle and train it dynamically through a full range of motion. And there's one guy, this chasm pointed out that we're all doing abjunctions straight out to the side. You really should look at the pelvic shape.

and kind of go in the plane of the glute medius, which is diagonal at 30 degrees. If you look at how the pelvis is shaped and how the glute medius, you should kick out. The problem is it's really hard for people to get that right. You have a nice way of showing it in like an instructional video. You look overhead and you tell them, turn this foot in and then drive back. But it's really hard. People...

they end up bending over. Yep. And then they're involving the glute max more. So it's really hard. And then do their foot go in front or in back? And then they end up at...

So I have ways of teaching it. But basically for sometimes when people keep screwing up my arm, just go straight out to the side. But because the glute med and men have multiple subdivisions, you probably should do different angles of abduction. You should go straight out to the side. You should go at a 30-degree angle back. You should also do maybe seated hip abduction straight up. Okay.

might develop the posterior heads more, but also on the seated hip abduction machine, bridge up, do them bridged and do them leaning forward. Cause leaning forward for the glute max bridged up, you could put blocks like yoga blocks underneath you, or just maintain the bridge position for the glute med. Okay. What about glute max? You're going to get the most bang for your buck with hip extension, hip extension exercises, take them through the most range of motion.

But now you start talking about how to put together the most comprehensive program. I know in 10 years, especially if I team up with you and we start doing studies using this MRI stuff, but God, we have a lot of questions that remain. So right now, my optimal program, you know, the scientific studies we have to guide us are few. We've got, you know, Kubo from 2019 showing deeper squats are better than shallow squats.

For glute max growth. But that just looked at knee angle. They were probably... Hinging over and yeah. They were probably... No, the beginners doing the shallow squats were probably staying vertical. And we don't have a study looking at super deep squats versus parallel. I think parallel...

would either be more effective or same. I don't think you need to go past parallel for glute growth. There's two studies on quads showing you deeper is not necessary. That Kubo study showed the same quad growth, but it showed greater adductor and glute growth going deep. And then we, so that's the study that people cling to about glutes being worked more in the stretch. There's also an unpublished study that should, I don't know why it's not published yet by Mao,

So in kickbacks, grow more glute in the stretch position, but it's a straight leg kickback. Kind of weird. Who does straight leg kickbacks? You're not stretching it the most. You're not. Yeah, yeah. And they only went to neutral. They didn't go into hip hyperextension. Yeah.

So that doesn't have a lot of ecological validity with like how we do things in the field. So the best, anyone who's scientific right now, who trains people in real life and works with people and then also tries to incorporate the science. All right. This is what a reasonably, because you get these crazy people.

in every aspect of social, like every field, every, there's these politics. You look at anything, even in your world, more of the physiology performance world, you'll get these coaches saying this way and this way, you'll get people saying just train glutes in the stretch position. Every muscle grows best from the stretch position, but that's a fascinating area. I have every study on it categorized into the folders and,

The verdict is not out on every exercise and depends how, if you're a beginner or trained and how long is long enough. But what that, what that whole category of research has not looked at is combining them into like basically what you can recover from.

because it might be that if you just could do one set a week, what would be the best thing to do? Maybe it'd be a set of walking lunges to failure. All right. If you can do two sets. Now, what if you have all the time in the world and you don't mind doing whatever it takes? Well, then I would say train three days a week at least. But what if, what if, what if you could do hip thrusts every day?

you'd probably get some people developing overuse injuries. But my point is, you could recover from that. Would that be more effective than training long muscle lengths twice a week? Yes, it wouldn't be as efficient, or possibly wouldn't be as efficient, but you could recover from way more. What if you don't create any muscle damage after a while and you just stimulate hypertrophy and you can expedite the rate at which new muscle is laid down? We don't know. There's a lot of these questions we don't know yet. So right now, train the glutes three days a week.

And follow the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is something I came up with to illustrate this concept. When you're doing vertical exercise, those are the most demanding exercises.

On the central nervous system. Well, it's funny because if you've seen the research on that, we really don't have a lot of evidence that it's more demanding on the central nervous system. Yeah, I'll hold my tongue, but go ahead. Yeah, I don't. We need to cut. We need evidence of that because people know what it means. By vertical exercise, you're meaning squats, things like that, right? Squats, deadlifts, lunges, step-ups, bulgarians, split squats, skaters, squats, pistol squats, good mornings, and all their variations. Yep. Those are the vertical exercise. The horizontal are hip,

Hip thrust, glute bridges, you know, your single leg hip thrust, your back extensions, 45 degree hypers, your kickbacks. But within those, there's, this is what makes it so complicated. You can make exercise, you can make things more knee dominant or more hip dominant, even kickbacks. What if you did kneeling kickbacks? Yeah. Then you almost, it becomes like a step up. So I'm talking about an upright kickback, you know, so, yeah.

And then a back extension off a GHD is horizontal. That's pure horizontal. 45 is halfway between, but we call it horizontal because it works the squeeze position more than the stretch. Those exercises do not beat you up.

In fact, after you've done them for a while, they don't beat you up much at all. They don't create nearly as much muscle damage. So those can be done more frequently with more volume. And then lateral exercises, those are like penalty-free volume because you never do too much. Those are going to work more of your glute medius and stuff. If you lean forward, yes, you're going to work more glute max, but they don't beat you up. We just do two to six sets at the end depending on someone's goals and

typically at the end of the workout. But if someone really wants to grow their upper glutes, I might say start with abduction. I mean, think about it. If you're really wanting to grow your upper glutes, begin with a frontal plane abduction movement and maybe end with one. So then you do the rule of thirds. You do around. And then here's another simple system.

Three times a week, pick one exercise from four categories. The first category is your thrust bridge. And this could be in any order. The second is your squat lunge. And when I say squat lunge, that means split squat, step up, single leg, leg press, um,

And then you pick a hinge and the hinge, this is where it's kind of, it could be vertical like an RDL. It could be like a 45 degree hyper. It could be a reverse hyper, but it's more straight leggedy hip extension. And then pick a, an abduction movement. The abduction could be frontal plane. It could be horizontal plane leaning forward.

It could be hip external rotation still. So I call it abduction, like lateral rotary. So you do your vertical, your horizontal, your lateral rotary, but pick an abduction, but also include abduction. There aren't many hip external rotation exercises. We do two of them. The cable cuff where you spin, those are hard to master. They're hard to teach. But anyway, when you do that system, you will fully develop your glute max and glute med and min.

Because when you do it. You pick one from each of those four. That's how you develop. Do it three times a week. Three times a week. Don't do the same exercise every time. That's boring. Lots of variation to make sure if there is an effect of range of motion, if there is an effect on activation, that you're covering all your bases. And it's more fun. And that's when I see people be like, just do RDLs. Do you imagine RDLs? These girls train three times a week.

First of all, you can't recover from doing squats and RDLs three times a week with intensity, with sufficient effort. But also, yeah, it's boring and you better be throwing in single leg RDLs that are not as taxing on the low back. So what I found is you cannot do too much. These guys that are telling people, here's a science-based glute workout. They don't train women because I'm telling you, most of them train three days a week. They train lower body three days a week.

These programs would crush people, would absolutely crush these women. I get carried away sometimes. So I don't do drop sets anymore. I don't do these crazy burnouts. I don't do crazy supersets. I'm not trying... I don't even... I even do lower reps now than I used to because...

We used to get carried away. I even used to do like sumo deadlifts with the deadlift bar and touch and go. That's like, these girls can, I had girls doing 315 back in San Diego. Ashley got 19 reps. Dominique got 11 reps. Like,

Because touch and go, you can bounce that bar up. You can move. And everyone's cheering you on. Cool, you did something good. And then you're sore for like a week. A month. You can't duplicate that for a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you're so beat down. And that's what I mean. So maybe it's muscle damage. Maybe it's like...

to fascia, to discs. Something Chris Beardsley pointed out to me. When you do a conventional deadlift, you're doing a concentric lift, right? Yep. But what happens to the erectors? You line up in the arch. Yep. You go to pull. The hips shoot up a little. The background's a little bit. You pull it up. Before the bar left the ground, the erectors went into an eccentric. You're activating it. It went into an eccentric position.

So that can create more damage, more something about the spine when you really do squats to failure, deadlifts to failure, those beach ups. So you need a good mix within those categories. Within the squat lunge category, some should be bilateral, some should be unilateral.

Some should be more quad dominant, some should be more hip dominant, meaning you can do a high bar squat with the feet elevated, but that's gonna be more quad. You can also do a low bar vertical shin box squat sitting back that's more hip dominant.

So you want to have variety within those. With the deadlifts, you want to do, sometimes you might do a conventional sumo deadlift, sometimes an RDR or stiff leg deadlift, but sometimes single leg variations, single leg and even good mornings. You can do single leg good mornings off the Smith machine. You can get good at good mornings too. People say they're dangerous, but that's because they don't start off light and work their way up. Good mornings are good variations to do, but the hinge variations should mix between deadlifts

deadlifting good mornings, and then also 45s and reverse hypers and back extensions. And then the abduction should be blended between frontal and transverse plane. And there's so many abduction movements. There's sideline hip raises, extra range sideline hip raises. My favorite are glute medius hip thrusts and glute medius kickbacks.

um you can google those but um but but basically then the hip thrust variations should blend between you could do double leg you could do single leg and b stance but mostly double leg but vary on between barbell smith machine and plate loaded devices but also you're getting plenty of work in this system you're getting plenty of stretch position work so with the hip thrust it doesn't always have to be

emphasizing full range, or you can emphasize the lockout in a few different ways. We do a lot of pauses at the top,

We do a lot of bar plus band. We connect the bar to bands, makes the lockout even harder. And you can do pulses where you're just doing the top range of motion. If you only did hip thrusts and that was all you ever did, then you should probably do some bottom pauses, bottom range of motion, ways to make the bottom harder. But you get those when you do the lunges, the squats, the RDOs. And this is the best system I've come up with. It

It's the most scientific way to train the glutes, as we know right now. Any reasonable person would say that because if you said to –

Yeah. If you said to like a bro, okay, if you put two inches on your glutes in the next few months, yeah. You think they'd train it one day a week? No one would train it one day a week. Yeah. You train a few times a week, but you got to recover from it and you can't get carried away. In fact, a lot of times when I train my girls, if I have them do reverse lunges off the Smith machine or the lever squat, the plate loaded squat, they're

And they do two hard sets. I'm like, done. Sometimes one hard set. I'm like, just be done. You set a PR. I'm like, you're going to be sore from that. And sometimes they're like, coach, I was so sore. Thank God I only did one hard set. That's something no one knows to do anymore. They don't, they always just do three to four sets. Yeah. Sometimes one and two sets is fine as well. You got to be able to recover. And if you don't recover, then what happens is this happens in my gym a lot.

typically on Fridays and which sucks is because Friday, if you train Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you have an extra recovery day. So it'd be nice to be fresh on Friday, train hard because you got two days to recover. So optimally that would be your day to push hard. But sometimes they're like, coach, I pushed myself hard on Monday, Wednesday, I'm beat down. So what they do is they do a short muscle length day or like a, they, that's when they film their, their influencer workouts. And they did, I'm like, you didn't even do that workout. Right.

but that got the most likes. So they do variety. They do their foo-foo, wimpy movements that the men, arguably so, they get pissed at. That's when they do just a...

some kickbacks, some abductions, some light... Bands. Bands and stuff. And then they do that on Friday. They rest Saturday and Sunday and come back Monday and they crush it because they did a wimpy workout. But that's auto-regulation. That's how they periodize. But ideally, they wouldn't have done too much on Monday and Wednesday to begin with so that Friday they could have still crushed it. But that's an art unto its own, how to nail your training so that you don't have to deload so much and you don't have to do radical things. But that's something we...

That takes a lot of years to master. Today's episode is sponsored by AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral drink with probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens. Initially, I was extremely skeptical of AG1, as I am with all supplement companies. But after months of discussions with their lead nutrition scientist...

and the general team at AG1, I've been impressed by AG1's commitment to sourcing the highest quality ingredients and constantly updating their formulas to have the right ingredients in the optimal amounts. AG1 also rigorously tests their products to ensure that every single batch is free of banned substances, allergens, heavy metals, microbes, pesticides, herbicides, residual solvents,

and mycotoxins. It's even earned the prestigious NSF Certified for Sport third-party testing approval stamp. Now, most people in the performance space talk a lot about macronutrients, like protein, carbohydrates, and fats. And these are obviously critically important. But so are the micronutrients like vitamins and minerals.

And even if you're eating a healthy diet, it's often hard to get enough of these vitamins and minerals, along with the probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to keep your body performing at its best. It's for these reasons, and many others, that I personally take AG1 almost every day. Now, it's of course not a replacement for eating whole, healthy foods, but it is a great way to make sure that you're plugging in any gaps in your nutrition to improve your energy, bolster your immune system, and just generally help promote a healthy gut microbiome, and more.

If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2. Couple of quick questions on that. You've made, I think, a couple of points really clear.

To maximize glute development, whether that's growth and specifically growth or strength, but growth is for the most part we're talking about. You haven't said these words directly, but it's clearly come through in all the examples and the information you provided. Consistency.

is incredibly important, right? And so all the rationale you're going back on here is we got to be able to do this more often so we can continue to progressively overload. And that's really been a backdrop here. So as somebody who's probably been responsible for more butt growth than anybody on the planet, I think that's a pretty powerful message from you that says like,

Just do enough to stimulate growth here, but don't annihilate so that you can keep training for months or years. And that's where you're going to see these big, big increases. Yes. You also used variation to get there. That is another way to keep yourself in the game, right? You can use, you call them short moment arms, right? These are again, things like short muscle length, right? Thank you.

These are different exercises that you've said don't beat you up, right? And what that means is your joints and the tissue itself won't be as hurt or sore, but you'll still get a lot of results from them so that you can continue with your progressive overload and you can be consistent, right?

One quick clarification on that little system, right? So you pick one exercise for the four different bucket areas, three days per week, and you said maximize variation. Am I picking, say, from bucket one, one exercise for Monday, one exercise that's a different one on Wednesday, and then a third different exercise on Friday? Or are you saying like every single workout, pick a totally different exercise per category? That's such a good question. So...

Ideally, what you would do is... Okay, so this is the component of the system I didn't talk about. Rotating focus. We've read about periodization our whole lives, right? And whenever you read about periodization, it's about changing volume and effort. Or like load and... Intensity, some variation of it. Intensity, what does intensity mean? Load or effort? So I don't even say intensity anymore. But like, we basically...

you start off with more volume, lighter loads, and do more sets. And then as you go up in weight and use more and more weight and train harder and harder and closer to failure, you do less. So it makes an X. Volume and effort make an X. But it was always assumed to be like what exercises? The periodization is kind of like

There aren't good books on it. If you want to read up on periodization, like I think my book, Glute Lab, is one of the best because I talked about all the nuances and stuff, but like they never talked about rotating the exercises. And I tell all these powerlifters,

And I don't presume to know more than the bodybuilders about bodybuilding and the powerlifters about powerlifting. But I do think powerlifters could get stronger because guess what? Squats and deads compete with each other. You could say they build each other, but they compete. Everything competes up to like,

you know, generally don't see people that hold world records in both. Yeah. It's usually one or the other. They might have the total as well, but that's because they're ahead and one of them really. So if you can't tell me that this lifter wouldn't have gotten better as squats, if he quit focusing on deads for a while. Right. And vice versa. You see the same thing, weightlifting, by the way, snatch and clean a jerk. Yeah. It's hard to be best of both. Yeah. One of them runs away and the other one, and you try to win that way. Right. So take some time.

I did this just recently. I went, God, when have you ever prioritized your hamstrings for like two months? So I started every workout with either a deadlift, like a stiff leg deadlift or a good morning. And then I do two different isolation movements for the hamstrings. When have you ever done three hamstring movements in one workout? I started doing that. Oh my God, it got scary for a while. I'm doing good mornings with...

345 pounds for 15 reps. I think I could have gotten 20, but I started rounding a lot. And I'm like, how far can I keep going here? But it's, it's, oh my God, I've never really prioritized. You're always doing squats first or deads, but never stiff leg. And you're not, you're never really doing as much hamstring work. So anyway, I'm going to tell how I think this applies to bodybuilding, but I'm going to tell you what I do in booty by Brett. Booty by Brett, I was realizing, okay,

And I got this one time I had this epiphany. I'm like, someone asked me how many chin-ups I could do. What's my max, you know, weighted chin-up. And I'm like, well, I can do 12, but I could get more if I trained for it. Well, why don't I train for it? Well, what would I do if I trained for it? I'd probably do chin-ups every day. And then I started thinking about all the different lists. What if you wanted to break it strongest at your bench press? What would you do?

What if you wanted to get strongest at your squats? What would you do? How often would you squat? I'd probably squat twice a week, but I can't deadlift hard not to failure twice a week. So I realized every lift has its own rules and I got, and then, then I created strong lifting. And those are the base strong lifting is like power lifting, but with six lifts squats, bench deads. So the three power lifts and then,

chin ups, military press and death and hip thrusts. Those are my six favorite lists. We got really good. In fact, I would say I'm the world's expert at getting you strong at all six lists because that is all my girls did. What I will tell you is it's rare. Like it's hard to have a hundred pound military press strict. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

But to have 135 is insane. That's like elite for a female. What I will tell you is having, if you lift, if chin up, you take your body weight and you add the toes, you add to it because you're pulling your body weight up. So if you take your six lifts, your one rep max, and I'm talking strict, people will lie, squatting below parallel, you know, the power lifting rules for the three powerless. And then with a chin up,

Not starting from here, starting from a dead hang and touching your chest to the bar. Not just getting your chin over a chest to bar. Military, you can't use your legs. They're locked out. From here, overhead. In hip thrust, full lockout, which people will just lie. They'll add 100 pounds to their hip thrust because they'll get it 80% of the way up and call that a hip thrust. It's very rare to get a 12 times body weight total. You get a 13 times body weight, there's only one person in that class so far. Yeah. And...

It's a cool thing because I think that's probably the best thing you can do for your physique is your relative total on those six lifts. And bodybuilders will say, who cares about what are at max strength? Strength doesn't matter. It does matter for natural lifters.

And yes, you can get a good physique from just doing lots of variety and mind muscle connection and focusing on slower tempos. But in my opinion, that only gets you so far. You've got to get strong. My girls with the best glutes are very strong, strong at hip thrust, strong at squats, deadlifts. I mean, if I wanted my pecs to get bigger at age 48, after all these years of lifting, guess what? I better build my bench. I can't just get there doing all the flies and all the machines. Yes, you can theoretically increase volume, but...

Um, there is, you know, tension on the muscle is paramount. And so you gotta, and not, not, not one rep max, but you got your, whatever your set of six, your set of 10, something you gotta be set in PRs and getting stronger. So anyway, what I will say is like, yeah, those power lifts, I started realizing, well, if you want to get your deadlift, the strongest possible quit prioritizing the squat, right?

Don't go for PRs. Do squats still, but don't try to progressively overload it. Save some gas. Save the gas for the deadlifts. So what I started doing with Booty About Brett is I had this rotating focus. It's a periodization method I came up with just for Booty About Brett. I wanted to publish it in like the method just based on like strength and conditioning journal because I think it's very innovative. So month one you prioritize is a well-rounded month, okay? Yeah.

That, you're, you know, and we've changed it. We've changed it. But the original Buddha Barat Preparation was a month when it was a well-rounded month. Well, in a well-rounded month, guess what you do? Monday, you squat. Wednesday, you hip thrust. And Friday, you deadlift. So that works out well because you recovered for all of them. Squat, hip thrust, deadlift. And then bench, chin up, military. And then if you do three full-body days, you're going to do a compound upper body press, a

a squat, a hinge, and a thrust. So five exercises per day for full body strength. Yep. And then the abduction for the upper and lower body are for... You throw those in because of the psychological. Everyone wants the upper body abduction for the side delts, the lower body abduction for the upper glutes. Okay. So...

After this well-rounded month, now you've been pushing everything. Now it's time to specialize. Month two is a squat-focused month. So if you're trying to build your squat, all three full-body days can be, the first lift can be a squat pattern, but one of them will typically be, some people can handle squatting three days a week. Some people can't. Why risk it?

People get FAI if they squat deep. People get knee pain, low back pain. So have two squatting days, like Monday, Friday squatting, and Wednesday a single leg, a step up, a reverse lunge, a Bulgarian split squat, something like that. Okay. Then what happens after the squat-focused month? Your knees are going to be feeling it a little bit. So it's a perfect time to transition to the hip thrust. Okay.

Okay, so now you focus on the hip thrust for a month. Every day starts out with the hip thrust variation. Typically, it's barbell hip thrust on Monday, straight sets, pause reps on Wednesday, bar plus band on Friday, or pulses or something, or one and a quarter reps. But two of the three are more focused on lockout work. Now, each one of these months, you're still going to do, you're still going to, you're going to squat, hinge,

and thrust every month. That just one is on the focus. The others are on the back burner. Okay. And then what happens at the end of the hip thrust month? You're feeling good again. All right. Now it's time for a deadlift month. And then you deadlifts, you can't deadlift. Well, you can deadlift three times a week. If you do like stiff legs, a single leg RDL and RDL, but actual full deadlifts, like a sumo or conventional, or even a trap bar or semi sumo. No, but if you do that, have one day,

Typically, like say day one, Monday might be stiff leg or RDL real strict, light, and stay a couple of weeks without a failure. Wednesday could be a hinge still, but it's a single leg hinge.

And then Friday is your heavy deadlift day because you got two days to recover. So now after the four weeks of heavy deadlifting, guess what? Your low back is taking a beating, your overall system. Now it's perfect time for a single leg month, single leg and dumbbell month. And that's what I love about that. By definition, you're taking intensity out. You're still going to get burns and you're going to feel good, but you're taking intensity out because you cut low down because you're on a single leg, period. And two studies have shown, one with step-ups, one of Bulgarians, showed they built squat strength just as well as the bilateral lift.

So you're still keeping your strength up. At minimum, you're going to maintain where you're at. You're not going to go backwards. You're going to maintain. You can even build. So it's kind of cool because some people are like,

Like I grow my glutes during the hip thrust month. I grow my glutes best during the single leg month. I grow my glutes best during the squat month. Maybe squats are good for them or maybe it's because during the squat month, hip thrusts are third and you're doing them with a mind muscle connection. Who knows? There's so many moving parts, but it's more fun training this way. So that's how I did booty by Brett. Then I started talking about, you know,

What about bodybuilders? If we've been talking about this, what if you said, Brett, can you grow your delts? I just did it this year when lengthened partials became popular. I'm like, I'm so sick of doing dumbbell lateral raises. I'm even sick of cable lateral. I want to see if I can grow doing lengthened partials and doing basically more variety. So I started training delts three times a week and they got bigger than they've ever been, I think.

And yeah, so some days I'm doing heavy dumbbells, sometimes cable, but a lot of times just doing the bottom partial. And then I got really scientific, like how do you maximally stretch this? You really should have the cable facing kind of this way and just go to here. And with a dumbbell, I don't want to do sidelining, but basically...

I don't want to go all the way up because after here, there's no tension, but I would just lay on my side and just do half, halfway up. Yep. Length and partials. And, and, and just from the greater volume, right?

I grew my delts. You guess what? You get so sick of delt day. You get so sick of training your delts. So yeah, do it for a month. But what if we did that? Because maintenance is easy. So I made a video and I don't even know if I ever posted it because it was the sexual innuendos. But I'm like, imagine having six balls. And this is what progressive overload is. But not just six. I'm saying six balls because each ball represents my favorite lift. Yep.

My six favorite for full body strength and musculature and even function. The six you listed earlier. The six I listed earlier. So imagine trying to juggle six balls. It's really hard.

But what if every time you gain strength, you set a PR, the ball grew a little bit. So every time you set a PR, the ball gets bigger. It gets to a point where you can't juggle all six of them. They're knocking into each other. They interfere with each other. And you try to go up on six lifts every month of your life. You will get nowhere. The balls will all fall to the ground and you stagnate. You get nowhere. But what if you have six balls laid out and you take two of them?

And you're like, okay. And they get bigger. It's okay. It's easy to juggle two balls. And these four are on maintenance mode. Guess what the literature shows? It's very easy to maintain size and strength with minimal volume. So these four are being- One time a week. Yeah. One time a week, a very minimal- A few sets. A few sets, yeah. One time a week or even- Every other week, yeah. So you can maintain your strength and your size with lower volume. So I started thinking maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe the bodybuilders could have seen better results-

had they switched the focus from month to month. So one month you're doing... Body part. Well, I thought about it. One for upper, one for lower. Because what bodybuilder has ever had prioritized glutes and adductors go together? Because when you go deep...

The adductors and deep, deep hip flexion actually have better leverage. So it's really, really hard to do deep stuff and not work your adductors because they have such good leverage in hip extension. Adductors, by the way, are the opposite. What we're clearly saying here is ADD, adductors versus abductors. So if the abductors, ABD, were the jumping jacks,

adductors are the ones that you're pulling your leg close, right? Together. So adductors add to the body, adductors take away. Right. So what you're saying is in a... Adductor magnus is a huge hip extensor down deep. Right. Deep hip flexion. So... Your groin muscles. So if you are squatting, say, for example, and you're doing a lot of squatting type of activities...

and say you only go a quarter of the way down or halfway down, and then you change it and you go really far down, you're very likely to notice really sore adductors. - Yeah. - Right, your groins, and this is exactly what you're talking about, because in that position, they start actually adding to hip extension, where in the top position, they don't actually do that. - They have the best leverage, and deep hip is slightly better than the glutes. - Yep.

on average. Which is why, again, you can train your groin area, if you want to think about it that way, by doing full range of motion all the way to the bottom squats. If everything else works and you don't have other issues with it, you always see tremendous growth there. So you pair adductors and glutes together. So one month for the lower body, you're focusing on glutes and adductors. One month, you're focusing on quads and one month hamstrings. Then the other stuff goes on the back burner. And then for upper body,

It's hard to do all of them because arms, arms. So I said one month focus on pecs, one month on the back and one month on the delts. What about arms? Okay. Well then you have four months and then I think you, I think three months of three months, then you're back. So I thought about a really effective system. I was going to start like body by Brett to be for guys and,

But I don't know. I don't know if I could. I'm busy with Buddha, but it's hard. Anyway, I thought that would be a fun system. And then I thought, well, instead of having every person has their system and they have all these theories, it would be, how would you test that? Well, you'd have to do a few cycles of it. So it'd have to be a nine-month study. You can have the control group do just regular tests.

Body part split training. And then this new method where basically the muscle you're prioritizing, you're training it three times a week. It's hard to train chest three days a week, you know, quads three days a week. It can be done, but that's the primary focus. That, and then you have an upper body muscle and then everything else goes on the back burner, goes on maintenance mode. Would you see better hypertrophy results? Yeah.

blasting and cruising. I don't know. It's just a theory, but it's a, it's a strong theory. A strong argument could be made. Yep. I want to go back. One thing to make sure we, we finished the loop on this one. You mentioned, what did you call it? The rule of three or something like that? What was the rule of thirds exactly again? What was that? A third of your exercises should be vertical in nature, vertical hip extension. One third should be horizontal, horizontal,

And then one-third should be lateral rotary. All right, perfect. Okay, great. Thank you for that. When you do that, interestingly, when you do that, it's not just best for the glutes. You also, because the vertical exercises are going to hit the quads and the hammies, the horizontal will get some hammies too. And, you know, so it's like you're going to get quad... Or that system I talked about where you pick a squat lunge, pick a hinge, pick a thrust bridge, pick an abduction. The squat...

lunge movements develop the quads and adductors the hinge movements develop the hammies and then so you get nice device it's a good system to use for overall development if you want to develop all the lower body of those things okay um in your whatever it is now 20 plus years of focusing on the the hip thrusts and the glutes and uh hip extensions and all things kind of in this area um

I'm sure you've interacted and had plenty of people, women or not, come up to you and say, I've tried to grow my glutes. I've tried. I've tried. It's not worked. Are there any themes that have popped up over those years and those interactions of kind of most common mistakes that they've been making? In other words, people have been like, I've been at this for a year. It's not working. What am I doing wrong, Brett? Yes. Great question. Because those types come to me and they can get results. It's really hard for some people to get stronger.

So when I talked about the environment in Glute Lab, like, yeah, you show up to Glute Lab. Yeah, you're not, you're proud of your, because you're the strongest person in your gym because you hip thrust three plates per side. And then you come in and you see, you know, in Florida, you see Dre, you see Vika, you see Diane, you see Masa, you see all these girls doing five plates per side. Yeah.

And you're like, oh my God. And not sloppy reps. That's the thing about it. I said 315 for 20. Not sloppy reps. You control it.

Full little slight pause at the top, all the way down, all the way up. Rep 20 looks a lot like rep one. It's not like arching and not, you know, hyperextending your spine and inter tilting and only getting 80% of the way up and jerking. It's a smooth tempo through a full range of motion. That is a great exercise.

indicator of someone who's going to have amazing glute development. But yeah, I would say most people just can't get strong without a trainer. And I will tell you what fuels me because I travel between Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas and San Diego. I was just in San Diego right before this. And they call it the Brett effect. They say they independently came up with it in Fort Lauderdale and in San Diego. And they just think Brett.

I don't know what it is. I've been hearing this for 20 years, 28 years. I can live so much more when you're around. I don't know what it is. And I joke that it's my pheromones. Absolutely. But it's having someone who trusts you, you know, Hey, I want you to, this, this happened the other day, Lili. She, she's, she's like a woman up. She's,

She hasn't ever deadlifted above 365 in training. She hit 405 at a competition. Then she had a back injury and she's been anyway. So I just, when you've coached for so long, you know, so much just based off bar speed. I don't know what the bar speed actually is. I'm just watching, you know what it looks like.

So you have these indicators. When I could watch my client Allegro, when I can watch Lili and I watch her go 275 and it goes boop, and she's just accelerated on the way up. You can tell when it looks, I go, you could have done that for 37 reps. I go, go 315. She goes, boop. I go, you could have done that for 37 reps. Okay. I don't know why I said 37, but I go, she goes, what do I do next? I go, go 385. She's like, what? Go 385. Don't warm up in between. I go,

What do you want to do? She goes, I want to do whatever you tell me. I go, then do 385. And then I announce it. I'm like, everyone, Lili's going for 385. And then everyone's watching. And then, you know, and I always tell them with Sumo, watch Steffi Cohen. The bar doesn't fly up. It doesn't rip off the ground like conventional. Take your time.

It could take four seconds for the plates, but you've got to maintain good posture. You panic and you round and you shoot the hips up, and now the lockout on sumo becomes infinitely harder. So she pulls it. She hits 385, puts down. She's so happy. This has happened for so many years. It fuels me, and I love it too because when I'm not around, so I travel back and forth. When I'm not around, they don't go for PRs.

When I am around, they go for it. They're like, yay, we can PR again. And it probably works out in my favor because you don't want to crush them every week. Right. So it's great. So you train at my gym just because everyone's so strong. Yeah, like if you and I trained at some gym where everyone's doing –

muscle ups and 20 like we'd be like shit i better do you can probably do a muscle up i can't but anyway never tried if everyone were doing yeah 20 pistol squats and i'm like i can barely do a pistol squat i better get my act if everyone were doing nordic ham curls like yeah going up and down and every person could do body weight nordics for five reps and we'd be like i can't even do one we'd be secretly doing nordic so a lot of it's to do with your environment yeah

So these girls can't get strong on their own. They just don't know what they're doing. Even you can tell them that's why trainers have a job. That's why, you know, as of now, personal trainers have job security because it's so hard to do on your own. Something's wrong. A lot of times it's the effort they're putting forth that

They think they're training hard, but they could really do five more reps if they really wanted to at the end of the set. A lot of times they're sabotaging themselves because, God, trainers around the world, when they hear this, are going to be nodding their head. Men and women both do this. They do it differently. Women will want to combine this.

And this will piss women off if they hear this clip, but they want to combine weights with yoga, Pilates, spin, everything else. And they'll say, well, why? Oh, your heart isn't important? Your heart health? Oh, it's not important to be flexible? Yes, but you have to prioritize. So if you want hypertrophy and you want glutes to grow and you're doing all this extra exercise and you're

You're not really training when recovered and you're not prior. You're not, you're so busy trying to fit in all your stuff. Yeah. Six balls in the air. You're trying, you gotta, you gotta train at the right time. I like to think about it. If I said you gotta, and you gotta give yourself every opportunity to PR, what are you going to do? You're going to make sure you got a good night of sleep, uh,

You're not going to go do an hour of cardio before you try and do that lift, try to hit a bench PR. You're going to eat the right amount, just the right amount, the right foods that agree with you before your workout, the right time. Some people like to eat an hour before. Some people like to train fasted. But you're going to show up.

Feeling good. You had your pre-workout a half an hour before, your coffee or whatever makes you, gives you the best chance. And that's what you got to do day in and day out for lots of years. And what I see is when you're just squeezing in your workout at the end of the day, when you're already stressed and you have already, and then you're just going through the motions, you're not going to grow like maximally. You might see some results and then too much variety, too much program hopping, too

I'm trying to do every exercise. I love all the exercises. Trust me. In my gym, I love quads and hammies too. So it's hard because in my gym, I've got...

hack squat machine, the pendulum squat machine, leg presses, Smith, the machine, the V squat. Like I've got it all. What do I do? You know, I want to hit quads. Sometimes you're like, I've been so distracted. I haven't done squats in a while. And you're going, okay, I got to get back to squats. Oh, I also have belt squats. I have all the, and yeah, they're all amazing. And they transfer to each other, which is cool. But sometimes you take your focus away.

Same thing with hamstrings. I've got every leg curl machine. I've got plate-loaded 45-degree hyper, selectorized 45-degree hyper now. You don't even have to grab a dumbbell. You just hold on to something and pull. The reverse hyper, you know, I've got plate-loaded deadlift apparatuses, the hammer strength. I've got the pit shark. We do stoop legs off that and all these –

too, like our T-bell and on the blocks, our sliding leg for the rolling, the hammy track and roller and all these cool things. And you can be distracted and

Because it's like you want your hamstrings to grow, try and get really strong at stiff legs or, you know, and then a leg or seated leg curls or something like. So trust me, I get it. But they're doing too much variety. They're not prioritizing progressive overload and PRs and doing all the things necessary to give themselves the best chance of PRing like adequate sleep, adequate protein, adequate or optimal calories, etc.,

Sometimes you'll go to women and kind of try to gauge how much protein they're taking in. Sometimes it's like they're eating 50 grams of protein in a day and they weigh 120 and they see great results when you take that to 90, 100, 110, 120, 130. They see better results that way. Like some people, it's like magic. So yeah, got to get... So inadequate protein, inadequate sleep and stress levels,

program hopping but the most is lack of effort and trying to make up trying to compensate with effort with volume and variety and it doesn't it doesn't compensate for it you can't just do all the exercises and doing 20 sets with 5 reps in the tank probably doesn't beat doing one

awesome set to true failure and writing it down in your logbook or on your app or in your notes on your phone and then trying to beat it because that requires a mental challenge too. When you know you've hip thrusted 315 for 15 and you're trying to get 20 and you're like, how the hell am I going to get 16 and seven? How am I going to get to 20?

And then you know you're hip thrusting tomorrow. You're going to be like, okay, I better eat optimally today. I better sleep optimally today. And what time am I going to train tomorrow? I'm going for 16. This is going to be tough. It's hard to do. And it doesn't always work linearly like that. That's another complication. So that's why you have variety because, yeah, you can't just go, I got 15, 16, then 17, then 18, then 19, then 20. Usually...

You get 15 and then you take a big break and you do all the things and then all of a sudden you gear up for 20 again and it happens. But yeah, that's another story. Today's episode is sponsored by David. David makes protein bars unlike any I have ever encountered. They have an amazing 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. That's right. 28 grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from that protein. This is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar.

Honestly, it's the best tasting protein bar I've had by a mile. While I often talk about the importance of getting one gram of protein per pound of body weight for things like muscle health and recovery and the promotion of lean body mass and satiety, the reality is that for most people, getting that one gram of protein per pound of body weight is really challenging. However...

David makes that easy. Their bars taste incredible and are each packed with 28 grams of protein. I eat one almost every day and always have two or three in my backpack when I'm traveling. Like literally always. Initially, I was all about the blueberry flavored one,

But these new peanut butter flavors are just a cheat code of yummy. It probably sounds funny, but I eat them as dessert all the time. When you try them, you'll know exactly what I mean. The macronutrients, one more time, are 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. If you're interested in trying these bars for yourself, you can go to davidprotein.com slash perform. Again, that's davidprotein.com slash perform.

So certainly there's issues with effort, right? And I would imagine that many people are trying really hard, but their efforts are misplaced. This is the example of doing too many different things. So lifting, maybe not lifting frequently enough, maybe not waiting long enough. It's only been a month, right? You need probably several months or you're adding in

different forms of exercise and things like that. So you're trying really hard, your effort is super high, but there's not enough focus on stimuli to drive that adaptation. There's too much distraction in the training, right? Another distraction you mentioned was changing your programs too often, right? So again, this is where effort could be high. You could be really getting a burn and really getting tired after the workout, but you did 50 different exercises or you changed them. And because of that,

You probably potentially did some maybe lower, less effective exercises. Your selection wasn't great. You were doing maybe all body weight or all light bands. And what you're saying is you might be better off picking one set of one exercise going pretty heavy and then just getting out of there, right? That would actually be a fun... That would be hilarious to do like a training study where you just have them pick...

one set to go to further and then you can do 15 sets but we're not going to track just do the mind muscle connection with those yep you know squeeze hard as you can yeah feel the squeeze feel the feel the glutes moving the weight but that would be a good system because it's hard when you say progressive overload it's hard to

pin that down for people. Does that mean do you go up on all four sets? Yep. How do you go up? Another thing that came to my mind here, I don't know how much you've experienced this or not in terms of, again, let's think with the same above, tried to grow my glutes. By the way, I should interject here. We've been talking way more about the glutes than I thought we were going to today, but you could change out glute for anything else. It doesn't actually matter. Some of the details here do matter. The specific studies and the research, and I'm going to ask here in a

But I hope what you're gleaning from this is not just only if you're sitting here thinking, I don't care that much about glutes or whatever. This is scientific principles. This is how do you answer research questions? This is specific and precision, right? So you're talking about

Not all exercises are the same. Not all muscle groups are the same. We've dug in on the glutes. So again, the answers might be different, but this is exactly how you should go about answering it if you care more about the triceps or the quads or the calves or anything else. So this is a system that you developed over, you know, again, almost 30 years now that can be applied to anything else. So I really hope that people listening today

are gleaning this out of it and going, okay, maybe you do don't have some variation of love for the glute, but this is really the nuance that goes into getting better results for a very specific question that you've really formulated a career out of. So hope that message is coming through. Now, that said, the question on this last particular topic is, again, I'm training hard. I'm trying to grow my glutes.

but mine aren't growing. I'm eating protein. I'm doing all those other things off the field. It's not hormones. Like how does one at home, whether they're a trainer, a coach, or the actual person, how do you go about figuring out which of these variations work based on your body type? And what are the things that I should be thinking about and paying attention to before I then throw an exercise out? And I can say things like, okay, great. A new study came out. It did show that the, let's just say a goblet squat is effective

Not as effective for going glutes as a barbell high bar back squat is, but I did the high bar back squat for six months and I got nowhere. Like, how do I go about that system of figuring out what works for my mechanics and my physiology?

That's such a great question. I know I used to do EMG on all my clients. And just to clarify, you said this in multiple, EMG is where we can go in and directly measure the muscle activation. So electrical signals for muscle activation. So go back, as you've heard Brett say that a bunch of times, what he's saying is direct measure of muscle activation. But continue on. Now, the problem with EMG for estimating hypertrophy, it does a good job of

Of measuring activation, the neural portion of it, the active portion, but not the passive portion, the stretch. Which is another way of saying just because a muscle is activated, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to grow.

Yeah. There's some crossover there, clearly. Well, think about this, because I feel like the long length got carried away for a while, and it was all about stretching and long length. That's been the trend in 2024. It was all about, it was the year of longer muscle lengths. Turn over a full range of motion versus a park. The pendulum can swing too far. Think about this.

There are numerous studies that show you can stretch a muscle and it will grow. Pure stretch. Pure stretch. Now, when you stretch a muscle, yes, you probably get a little bit of activation just from like protection and guarding, but like it's mostly all just passive. You're just stretching it. You're not activating it. And it grows through purely passive mechanisms. You can also just slap...

Muscle electrodes on and activate a muscle without stretching it, and it grows. EMS, and that's something that I was skeptical about years ago. And now, have you looked at the research on this over the years? Yeah, I have a catalyst suit. It's awesome. It's fantastic. It grows muscle. Yeah. Just activating the muscles through muscle stimulation. Now...

If you're doing a program like Booty by Brett where you're covering all your bases, should you do EMS on the side? Should you be stretching a muscle? Can all muscles grow through stretch? What if I wanted to stretch my delts? What do I do? I can't. I'm blocked. You could stretch your rec fem, but can you stretch your vasties enough? So when people talk about stretch, I'm like, okay, hammies, yes. Pecs, yes. Calves, yes. Not every muscle I think could benefit. But like with...

With that system I told you about earlier, putting muscles on the back burner, if you did the rotating focus, that would be a good time to say, all right, I'm going to slap electrodes on the other muscles that are not prioritizing. Oh, there you go. Keep the maintenance mode, right? Yeah. And help add to the stimulus because there's a lot of research showing that EMS grows muscles. The first time I did the catalyst suit, I got so sore.

Now, part of it was because I pegged it. Like, I just went literally to the end of the contraction capacity and did, like, a 30-minute thing on it and got so brutally sore. By the way, that's where it's active and you're fighting, you're moving against it. Even you stand there, right? I'm, like, standing there basically wearing a full body TENS unit, basically, right? Yeah. So it's over there. And it's, like, everything is squeezing. And I just, like, went to the wire and, like, squeezed as hard as you can for 20 minutes. And it turns out that's a lot of muscle contraction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I got sore. Everything. Yeah. Yeah.

So user error on that. Well, it wasn't user error. It was, I knew what I was getting into. So, so that's muscle growth through activation and no stretching, no passive. So clearly there are more multiple that, that to me shows that there have to be, there has to be multiple mechanisms leading to Rome, leading to muscle growth. So there has to be a mechanism that's more passive and a mechanism that's more active because there's separate stimuli, right?

So this is an awesome question. I will just mention briefly that I measured muscle activation back in the day with all my clients. And I learned so much with different people. Like I had this client, Sammy. She could do squats with 285 pounds back squats. But if she did a goblet squat with 50 and 70 pounds, she got more glute activation. You're moving through the same range of motion though.

So how could that not matter? More fluid activation with 20% of the weight. Something with her about having the load. So then same with a deadlift. If she had a barbell, she could do 225 pounder. I think my lean might have went up to 315. And then she did...

a 106 pound kettlebell and a 203 pound kettlebell. And something about having the load centered more, just activated her glutes a lot higher. Not everyone is like that, but she was like that. You're directly measuring her muscle, her glute activation. Glute activation in different areas. And it was the same with a 50 pound goblet squat on the front. Which traditionally should activate the glutes less, right? Because it's a front load and squat down and all that. Well, something about load being centered makes it

I think when you have kind of like lanky and you're folding and you don't have the best squat form, you're battling butt wink, you're battling having a neutral spine, you might have things shutting off and stuff. You know, we can't always assume. Anyway, I had this girl, Erin, at that same time. And she started doing all this. Well, she... I put...

Bands are how to do band seated hip abduction. And I'm like, okay, this is activating all the areas, even leaning forward, even getting your lower glute max. You're getting as high of activation doing these than you higher than doing one rep max squats. Well, how many one rep max squats can you do per week versus band seated hip abduction? So I showed her the results. Like I said,

You're getting higher band activation, like higher activation on bands than anyone I've ever seen. I think you should do bands every day. A lot of band work every day. So she got carried away. I eventually starts bringing 20 different bands to the gym. I made a post under the crazy band lady, but her glutes grew a ton. So when you have these individualized prescriptions, I think you can see better results, but

But basically, I don't have a system for that. The only thing I would try is a long-length focus twice a week. So I'd say, look, you've been doing this.

Something like booty butt brat. Let's switch to two days and let's focus on glute dominant squats, box, low bar box squats, sitting way back to parallel vertical shin. The shin doesn't have to be vertical, but it's as vertical as possible while still feeling right. And then glute dominant step ups, Bulgarians lunges, meaning glute

Like not, not a knee dominant, not an upright, letting your knee go way forward, keeping the shin pretty vertical leaning. And then, and then RDLs and let's do those. Good mornings, RDLs. Let's do these exercises for a while, but hit them hard, but just twice a week. See if you grow better from that. You're going to know within a couple of months. And then if that doesn't work, let's try a short length focus. Let's do this.

four or five days a week. We're only doing hip thrusts and bands. I did this with my client, Beth. Beth did powerlifting, but she had a coach that was all about the powerlifts.

And I said, have you ever focused on hip thrust? No, my coach hates them. Have you ever done band work? No, he thinks those are wimpy too. All right, just do hip thrust and band work for like six months and do them as frequently and as much as you can. See how that works. And her butt blew up. Yeah. Blew up. So when all these people are like, she was strong at squats and deadlifts.

They weren't working for it. And so you'll hear so many anecdotes and these scientific people, I could call them all out right now, these scientific people, and they don't care about anecdotes. And that's, and to me, they're not scientific because you can say, look at this person. They will just shut it out. Well, that doesn't mean anything. What if she wasn't doing squat? Okay. I'll show you a video of her squats and deadlifts. She had good form. What do you say then? Like they just don't want to reconcile the twos. They want to stick to one thing.

one rigid method and you've got to be flexible if you want to be a good personal trainer. So that method worked better for her. So I would do the two extremes, two days a week of long length glute work versus like five days a week of shortened position glute work. It could be a genetic reason or just anatomic. You tolerate these because if you don't tolerate an exercise well and it gives you pain or fear, inhibition, you're not going to maximally activate your glutes. So anyway...

Maybe they're a frequency versus like some people respond better frequency. Some people who even your, your anatomy, what if your moment arms are terrible in the stretch for glutes and really ideal. And, and I also think you can change through training when you do concentrics or shorter lengths, uh,

you will lose sarcomeres in series. When you do eccentrics or longer lengths, you will add sarcomeres in series. So maybe you can change the way even, and that might affect neural activation too. The muscle says, okay,

We've caused this muscle to be more effective at longer lengths or more effective at shorter lengths. And there could be, we just don't know enough right now. And that's what always frustrates me about social media right now. It's rewarded these bold claims, camps where you're very strong, like this is the method. This is what yields the best muscle growth. It doesn't reward uncertainty. It doesn't reward scientific evidence.

or cautious claims. Evidence-based as well. I get mad because I'm like, if I don't know the answer to this, then you don't know the answer to this, you know? Because no one does the research of this stuff as much as me. And I see these people making these bold claims like, we don't have the evidence for that yet. We don't know enough. We need...

There's so many studies that deep squats versus parallel squats, sumo versus conventional. There's not one training study on sumo versus conventional. Hip thrust, should you do full range? Should you do partial? Should you use bands? Should you, you know, there's, we don't have, we need, we need like 30 glute studies to be able to speak confidently about what works best. Until then, it's theoretical and we should be cautious about what we think we know.

What do you think about a system? I just sort of jotted down based on what you're saying. Checkpoint number one, if you're trying to grow your glutes and whatever exercise you're doing, whatever your program design is, it's resulting in pain, not muscle soreness, but pain. Your back is going to hurt. Your knees hurt, right? Then pretty obviously stop that. Don't do that. Right? So the checkpoint you could run through in your head is if in your program you're

You're then getting injured, whether we mean like a true injury or is this simply the kind of pain you don't want. Then we need to change your program. That seems to be like a pretty intuitive first start. So don't. Always. Why? You don't need to be in pain. And then two, this would be the consistency play. We're going to lose training volume over time. After that, and this is where I just sort of made this up. The second thing I would think about in my head is, is the actual exercise feeling like it's working?

Um, how much credit do you give or not? Should people feel their glutes working in the workout? Um, why I'm sure it doesn't have to be 10 out of 10, but if, if I'm doing hip thrusts and I don't feel my glutes getting a pump, if I don't feel them getting tired, um,

Should I be concerned that that's not working for me or am I okay there? So let me play devil's advocate and then tell you what I really think. We looked at that in the Plotkin study, 2023. Daniel Plotkin, the researcher, asked everyone, which exercise do you feel your glutes more in, hip thrusts or squats? All 20-some subjects said hip thrusts. And they grew the glutes the same. Maybe that's not a good one. But I do think it is because...

Yeah, if you don't feel your glutes much in hip thrust, it's probably not the best exercise for you.

or you should find a way, a variation, a way of carrying it out. Or like, maybe you like the Smith machine more. Maybe you like, maybe you feel it more. Yeah. You're feeling it too much in your quads, your hamstrings. How could that not help? Yeah. That's always been a thing. Since the dawn of bodybuilding, try to feel it. And every person tweaks their figures out a way to feel it more. That has to help. Yep. But it's also, when I was getting pregnant,

The advantage of being a bro, we wanted to get strong. You know, when we're in college and we're like, everyone's stronger than you, you're like wanting to get stronger. We weren't focused on feeling my delts during a military press. You know what I mean? I just wanted a stronger shoulder press. And guess what? You get really strong with pretty good form and everything develops. And that's the argument I hear everywhere.

Both sides of the argument. The people will say, oh, tell me how you do a squat without activating your glutes. But come on. I can like, I mean, when you're walking upstairs, be super upright and you'll feel your quads more. And then lean in and like let the hips come up a little more and you'll feel so much more glute walking upstairs. You can't tell me technique doesn't matter. No, it does. And we saw that in our trap bar versus conventional deadlift study.

Right. So the aggregate results are different than the individual results. Yes. Because some people, when they did a trap bar deadlift, actually kept the exact same position that they did in their conventional deadlift. Others went super vertical. It was basically like a leg press. Yeah. They're standing straight up. Yep. Where their deadlift, they were much more. So guess what happened with EMG activity? On average, no good difference because it washed out. Yeah. Right. But the individual person.

depending on their arm length primarily, right? That allowed them to stay in the same position or not. Yeah. It completely changed. So for some of our participants in that study, the trap bar deadlift was way more quad activation. But for others, it literally changed nothing.

Whatsoever between conventional and... I remember Brad Schoenfeld and I did a rear delt study. It was the first EMG study he did. He just got his Norexin unit. And we wanted to see what's better, neutral or pronated grip. Because back then everyone said if it's not pronated, it won't grow your rear delts. Well, neutral grip on average outperformed, but there were huge inter-individual differences. Some people getting way higher one way versus the other. So go with what you feel the most. Because if you're moving a muscle through the same range of motion...

and getting similar stretch, then the technique that activates it the most, in my opinion, well, but sometimes that technique can influence the stretch. So under the same... All right, if passive tension is equal...

then the higher active tension wins out. But you can't have a technique that increases active while decreasing passive. And I think that's the argument for sumo deads. Well, it gets you less stretch.

but it gets you more activation in a lot of clients. A lot of studies, there's only one study by Escamilla looking at EMG with sumo versus conventional, and they showed similar activation in the glutes, but there's probably 12 studies at this point on squats and other exercises, and sumo

In general, you get greater glute activation, but you're going to get lesser glute stretch. So there needs to be a training study. And then we need to see for ourselves. But right now, people should just be cautious. They should say, I prefer conventional because you get a little bit better stretch. Maybe, you know, but don't be like sumo is all adductor and zero gluteus maximus.

Sumo has got to be the dumbest thing ever because then you get all the TikTokers and all the – they repeat your stuff and then it becomes fact before we've ever even looked into it. So, okay, back to my list here of kind of five things. Number one, start off, don't get in pain. Two –

Hopefully you feel something either in the muscle you're trying to train that day or potentially some amount of soreness the next day. Obviously we know that more sore is not better. Feeling it, getting a pump, getting sore. These are indicators that you worked the muscle though. Seems reasonable. Yeah. If you're not in pain, you're feeling it, even getting a huge pump on the day and you're still not growing, then potentially think about going heavy. A general problem people have had, you've sort of mentioned this earlier, is

is they don't realize that, hey, you know, three sets of 50 with a band, like that may not be the jam to grow every muscle, right? You may have to go heavy. Really focus on progressive overload, yeah. Progressive overload, right? My gut is most people will be done by this one in terms of you're going to start growing at this point. But let's say...

I got that box to check. Focus on my muscle. Now focus on potentially frequency. Frequency. Right. So now I've done, I'm not in pain. My glutes are getting pumped. I'm going really heavy. I'm at 315, whatever the numbers are. Now maybe think about adding in that extra day. Volume, frequency, you could kind of play like one game here, right? Sure. So those would be kind of like four and five volume or frequency. So maybe you need to add another day with those things.

less damaging ones. So this is where more bands could come in. It's just a way of getting you more volume. But how does that kind of like five-step checklist progression sound for somebody struggling? A reasonable approach there? Is there anything else you would add to that? I would say have one in there where you really focus on mind, muscle, connection, activation. Somewhere in there saying, what if

Because there's evidence that it makes brain changes in the motor cortex. There's at least one, maybe two. I think there's a recent one, too. Showing that you get actual changes in the brain responsible for activating that muscle. So maybe if you have a little month where you focus on mind-muscle connection...

not even going to fit with squeezing the shit out of the muscle and really trying to target in your brain, you know, in that study, they looked, these bands and it was isometrics because they thought isometrics would build greater brain changes because you're focusing harder. Yep. That might make a difference. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So making sure that again, if those progression strategies aren't working, uh,

You're just trying to be more connected directly to the muscle. Those connections more. Right. And getting more out of it makes a ton of sense. We've we've gone on quite a journey thus far. I got a couple of things. If you've still got some energy left, I can go for hours. I know. I know you can't finish up on.

So one of them is the very first question I asked you is, how do you think about training men versus women? And you laid out a lot of stuff to think about. I just want to double tap on them if I can. One relating to recovery. And so I'll ask this from the scientific perspective, as well as and potentially even more important, your years of experience.

So what do we understand about men versus women in the context of strength training here regarding things like recovery? Have you truly seen that women recover more than men in general? Do they need more volume? Those are like kind of two separate questions. And then a third one I'll smuggle in here is, are there any other things physiologically like menstrual cycle phase or things like that that you have found to either be big considerations or things you've

put a lot of effort into it, and then panned out to not really matter too much. Awesome. Yes, yes, and yes. But also, it could be that women are on a permanent specialization program. Glutes. Booty Bob Bread is a glute specialization plan. Not a glute only, but it's a specialization plan. It's full body with, like, we hit quads, adductors, and hammies, but we don't do a ton of leg extensions, seated hip adductions, or leg curls. Right.

Because that would just take away from what you could potentially recover from with the glutes. You can't just hit every muscle. What if you trained every muscle like you did with Buddha by Brett, where you did 36 to 45 sets a week of glutes, with quads, with hammies, with adductors, calves, it's too much. You could never recover.

So it's maybe they, I just think they can recover better because they're on a glute specialization prep because they have reduced volume of the upper body muscles and even the quads and hammies. And even intentionally, as you said earlier, built in a day that is a more recoverable day. Yeah. So the exercise selection by default is easier to recover from. Makes sense. Yeah. But I don't think it's just that. Early on in my training career, I'm like, man.

These women can do these workouts. I tried to do one once, 2007. Tried to do what I give my girls. I was on the ground laying there for half an hour. I was like, is it possible to have a heart attack at 30, 31 or two or something? And I remember just sitting there like, wow, that made me gain respect for what I put them through. So yeah.

It could be the influence of hormones and estrogen, and they have bigger type one fiber hypertrophy. They have higher estrogen. Maybe that leads to better muscle damage repair. If you put a guy through the workouts they do, it kills them. And, but the girls can bounce back quicker. I know there was a study I read back in the day on bench press guys who would take them two or three days to get back. Like say they did a one rep max or, or, uh,

Took them two days to repeat that. The women could repeat that the next day.

And you could say, well, that's because they're not as strong relatively. But with women, they are as strong with a lot of these glute exercises as men relatively. They're stronger. Relatively, women are stronger at hip thrust than men. And again, you could say- Almost absolutely in some cases. Yeah, almost absolutely as well. And you could say, well, that's just because they do it a lot too. But I think there might be something with the anatomy. But anyway, I think they can do more volume. I think they can recover slightly quicker. So their programs can be a little more-

I think they need more volume. In other words, do they have the same effect if they were given the same amount of volume? When I train... Okay. Do they need more volume? I think the better question is, is there a different optimal volume for them for hypertrophy? I do think it would be slightly shifted upwards for women compared to men, but not double. You know, it might be that...

hypothetically speaking, say 12 sets was optimal for a muscle group for a man, whereas maybe it would be 16 for a woman. But also, we talked about earlier, it depends. Every answer is it depends. You have the people who can recover better than others and who push themselves harder too. You have the people who, there's also some weird thing about tempo. Like you have those people who, like on chin-ups, they're like...

And you're like, okay, they're done. Somehow they do another rep. And you're like, and then they get three more. And you're like, what? Because I'm done. Like people always go, whoa, you had three more in the tank. And I'm like, no, I wouldn't have gotten one more. It just looks like that because I'm a very explosive lifter. I either explode up or it won't go up at all. But anyway. I'm the same as you for the record. Some of those people, I think the more grinder you are,

that's tough to recover. Those are harder to recover from than the... But anyway, there's a lot of factors at play, but it's how hard you push yourself versus your muscle damage and recovery genetics. So I do think they can do a little more volume and a little more...

Like what's optimal volume and frequency for them is slightly higher. They don't seem to get as damaged and beat down. They seem to get beat down from trying to juggle too many forms of exercise, too many things. They tend to want to jam pack their schedule. And they're like, I don't know if men are, I'd be curious to see if,

modern day men are like that because me, I'm kind of like, I don't want to plan as many things, you know? But anyway, I think that that adds to their stress. But if they had no stress in their lives in that way, they could recover even better. And their relationship stress, they care so much about their relationships, it really weighs on them. So anyway, there are a lot of different factors and I'm probably going to get

some stuff for that comment because whenever you say there are differences between men and women you get in trouble and i'm like man i could never raise a kid not on my own like a woman can i could never do half the stuff they can do and multitasking they seem to be better at i have so much respect for a lot of my women i could not do what they do i could never do life is so hard and then you add a kid to the mix and then you had two kids and

And you're breastfeeding and you're getting woken up at night. I don't know how the hell they do it. So out of the utmost respect, I think there are definite differences and we shouldn't try to be the same. With regards to training, the biggest differences are goal related. The physiological differences, I think, are worth mentioning, like you said. I think they recover faster, can handle a little more volume. And then you said...

The third piece was... Menstrual cycle. Do you guys train differently during different phases of the cycle? So this research got popular, and then Lauren Colenso-Simple came around and just squashed it. I love it because I was like, you're going to get... She was in my lab. You know that? Yeah. She's great. She's awesome. Yeah. But here's the deal.

On average, strength doesn't fluctuate that much throughout the menstrual cycle, et cetera, but does on the individual level, just what you talked about with the trap bar deadlifts. I have women that are, especially if they're not on birth control, and when they, it's crazy because a lot of women, the day their period starts, they're weakest, but some are their strongest at that point.

And I'd be like, like I had this client, Camille in Phoenix. And I'd be like, did you start your period today? And then she's like, how'd you not go? Cause you just crush your deadlift PR. Every time she would start her period, she was a monster. Other women don't even want to train when they start, especially hip thrusts. They don't want pressure on their outdoing. You got to know these things. You have to be aware of them and be sympathetic to it. Cause everyone's different. Some are stronger. Some are weaker. Some don't want to be there. They don't want to train.

So you bargain with them. You say, oh, you start your period. You don't want to hip thrust. Don't hip thrust. Let's do kickbacks. Let's do this. Give them stuff that doesn't feel bad. So at least they make it in the gym and they feel good about themselves. But yeah, these are factors that men don't have in their lives and don't have to think about. It's an additional variable with women. And it definitely matters on the individual level because –

Some women get so nauseous, so irritable, they don't even want to—we don't have to deal with that. That is a factor that should be considered in your program design, but just on a— Personal coaching level, not a group level. On a personal level, not a group level. I don't change my programs to reflect that. But in person, I definitely change things up if the person is—

has really bad periods or period cramps and emotions associated with it, you absolutely have to change things up. Yeah. So a factor to pay attention to, but perhaps no set rules that should be automatic based on generic cycle phases and length and things like that. You look at the, I wonder if- I think Lauren's research would agree with that. Yeah. But I wonder if hormones changed are unique because you look at the graph and

And it's like, here's testosterone, here's estrogen, here's progesterone. And then you look at like premenstrual, of course, progesterone is highest, I think. And then estrogen, testosterone are lowest. Of course, like, or like, right. It makes sense that that would, you'd be your weakest there, but it doesn't on a group level. Well, maybe hormones are different depending on the person too. That's the thing. I also will tell you that like my girls, um,

My San Diego squad is all natural, right? My Florida squad, most are all natural. They're very, but I always tell them, like when girls get mad when I say all natural, they'll be like, they have breast implants. That's not what all natural means. That's not what all natural means in our world. Natty means you don't take gear. You don't take anabolic steroids. You don't take SARMs. You don't take peptides.

I don't even think peptides really are a factor now. Depending on how peptide you're talking about. Yeah, which peptides, right. Yeah, right. So I'm so close with these ladies. I've been training them for seven years in groups. When you train women in groups, they talk – it's like I'm a gay friend, but I'm not gay. That's how I get treated. Right. They will talk about anything. You're the inside. They will talk about anything in front of me because they're very comfortable. So I hear everything.

And, and they'll be like, coach, my, my testosterone levels came back. It's at 14. And I'm like, and then I'm like, okay, like you, you're super horny. That's all you talk about is sex and you're strong as hell. You can deadlift, you know, 385. You think you have a 14 testosterone level? Check it again. Yeah. But enough of them came back. I swear, like my average testosterone level of my clients is like

Not even 20. It's like probably in the teens. How? They're strong as hell. I start to wonder if...

really intense training lowers women's testosterone levels because normal is six to 90 for women. That's a 15 fold difference. But you think some of these girls, they have these amazing physiques. Can I get someone in the forties or fifties or sixties? Yeah. No one's at a 90. Yeah. But they're in the teens. A lot of things going on. They're in the teens. So yeah, that's a whole other thing that I'm would love to look into is if, should we be periodizing to let their testosterone come up or anything? Cause I'm like,

Or maybe that they're all just getting false readings because these places are lying to them to try to get them on TRT. Because I'm in a constant battle saying you don't need TRT. Look at you. You look amazing. So, yeah. Okay. Well, thank you. Those were really good insights. That's a question that comes up a lot. And there's the research on that. That's great. People can interpret that. But it's always interesting to hear a perspective of somebody who's

you know, been in the trenches with people trying to get as strong as they can, trying to grow muscle and seeing how that played into your coaching. And I think that was a very helpful answer. And I know a lot of coaches and a lot of individual people are going to go, okay, great. Now I have freedom to take the best option for me, depending on where I'm at. One last real technical question here. And then I got a couple more, but the technical one is regarding,

the glutes versus other muscles, right? You've mentioned this several times now, but I want to make sure this was really clear because I thought it was really helpful. We talk about training as if all of our muscles respond to training the exact same way, right? And so this much intensity, this much load, this much frequency, this is how you progress. But have there been any themes over your career that you've noticed about the glutes as a collective musculature? Sure.

that are significantly different than the delts or the triceps or the pecs or anything like that? Anything that jump out of either maybe things to do or things not to do that's special about the glutes? I just think they're more simple. A lot of muscles are simpler because, well,

What I like is comparing the glutes to the delts. They're both ball and socket joints, you know, a lot of movement, a lot of range of motion around them. But delts, you have three subdivisions, anterior, middle, and lateral. And you really target one division over the other. So when you talk about delt volume, when you train any upper body pressing movement, be it dips, decline, flat, push-ups, bench, incline, shoulder press,

behind the neck press, every one of them will train the anterior delts. And then going out in the, expanding out in the frontal plane more is going to activate the middle delts a lot, the side delts, but not, rear delts don't get super high on pressing. But then the rear delts get, do get activated during all the row, all the pulling motions. Yeah.

from pull downs to angled pull downs to rows, um, to even, you know, even rows upright, like more upright. So the rear delts will get, the rear delts will get activated with a lot of pulling movements. So they can handle a lot of volume because you can also add in isolation movements, but you, if you wanted to, you could do three sets of reared out raises three times a week.

If you really wanted to, you could do three sets of laterals three times a week with variety. You can do three sets of front raises three times a week, and you could be doing presses and pulls. So they can handle a lot of volume. The delts can, but they do, you know, they do, you know, shoulder flexion, abduction, you know, and then the, like the shoulder extension and the, in different planes too, and different angles and stuff. So it's,

So they're a very versatile muscle group. When you look at the glutes, the glutes aren't just the glute. It's the glute max, the glute med, the glute min. And they carry out hip extension, abduction, external rotation, poster, pelvic tilt, but also...

poster pelvic tilt should just be thought of as like short arc hip hyperextension. But anyway, like you can bend over in the, and do abduction in the, in the transverse, like being knees to chest abduction, right?

versus upright versus leaning back like frontal plane. So they do several different joint actions and then you can vary the exercises to work more in the stretch position, to stretch you more, to work the stretch more, to squeeze you more, to have more hip hyperextension, to work more in the

stretch position. It's complicated, but it's just how complicated you want to make it. It's like for glutes. Okay. Just get really strong at Bulgarians, Romanians and hip thrusts. Right. And you're going to have pretty good glute max development and throw in some ab, do some lateral band walks three times a week to warm up and you'll be fine. But no, there's more to it. Okay. Well, let's, let's think of other muscles, quads,

Well, it's so simple. It's a, it's, it's pretty much just a, the knee is a hinge joint. All right. Just get really strong at either any one of these or a variety of them. But I would say they all probably build the quads very effectively. The first is squats.

and probably high bar even better, heel elevated even better, front squats, high bar squats, whatever. But get strong at squats. You're probably going to have nice quads. But now add in hack squats or the pendulum squat or belt squats or leg press in a quad-dominant fashion. How can you not have big vasties? But what about the rec fem? It's a two-joint muscle. If you want to maximize rec fem development,

You, now you need to add in a leg extension type movement, a single joint. Well, so you added leg extensions, but leg extensions are even better when you lean back. They're probably even better when you stress the stretched position. That's on like that prime machine that really you can change the load. If you have a plate loaded, that's just pure plate, like the Titan. Yeah. Then you're only working the squeeze. I actually like to do that because I'm like everything we do works the stretched and

I like working the squeeze positions. But anyway, you could also do sissy squats or you could do reverse Nordics. And maybe you need to do some hip flexion too to maximize rec fem growth. But it's not quite as complicated as the glutes. Yep.

Hamstrings can be complicated because there's a lot of studies. Hamstrings, there's a ton of research on because of hamstring strain injuries. Injuries, right. And these range from EMG to functional MRI. It's my favorite muscle, for the record. And it is the one I think people train the least and should train more of. Yes, because foot position, like with leg extensions, doesn't seem to alter VASTI recruitment. But it does for hamstrings.

Boy, knee pain and other foot injuries and back injuries. Man, hamstrings. People just don't train them. So you have knee flexion movements and you have hip extension movements. With hip extension, you can go squeeze position with back extensions, like loaded 45s and back extensions. And you can go in knee flexion, you can work them in a stretch with seated hamstrings.

You should be leaning forward if possible, or at least as upright as possible. Don't be leaning back. You want as much stretch, but also make sure that pad is down far, and you make sure it's working all the way up into full knee extension so you're getting the maximum stretch. But then you can do lying leg curls, kneeling leg curls, and they all seem to work different, maybe like slightly different areas. Variation is a good thing for hammies.

Okay, calves. Calves are probably the simplest exercise to train because what we're finding is seated calf raises don't appear to add to the mix and neither does the squeeze position. Like there are now a few studies showing that calves almost don't even need to come up all the way. You can just do the stretch position. But if you do come up all the way, extend the set with some lengthened partials or just do more sets. But yeah, if you just want to do, you know,

A quick three sets of calf raises, you know, just do standing. You don't need to do seated. It seems to build the soleus just the same. But the seated is going to make it hard for your gastroc to get involved at all. It's going to basically be zero, right, on the seated, the calf raise. So seated been shown to not – it doesn't add to the equation when you're doing straight-legged. Right.

I don't think I've seen a stand like donkey cab raise. Does that add? I don't think it does. There is some evidence that turning the toes in versus out can help. Sure. But yeah, like basically, these calves are probably the simplest muscle to train because just do standing cab raises, work the stretch position, you're good to go.

Can the calves handle the volume? Do you need the variety in calves that you can with glutes? Pretty much, they just do plantar flexion, so you don't really need... So it's like, and then you look at the pecs. Okay, there's the upper, middle, and lower fibers. If you just get strong at like...

low incline press, you probably get most of your bang for your buck. But then you're like, okay, should I work all the angles? Should I do weighted dips? Should I do incline press? What incline? Should I vary the incline? Should I do 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90? Obviously not 90. 90 degrees would be mostly all front delts. But like, what about now your pec isolation movements? Okay.

Should you do flies or pec deck or cable crossovers? Should you just focus on the stretch? Just do dumbbell flies. Do you need to come up all the way? Why? You lose tension. Just do lengthened partials. Okay. Well, yeah.

So flies, do you need the squeeze? Should you do crossovers? Focus on the squeeze. Peck deck, where you really focus on, we don't have enough research, but to me it just makes sense. It just makes sense to be strong throughout a full range of motion and to incorporate a lot of variety. But it's like the more divergent the muscle, the bigger the muscle and more subdivisions, and the more joint actions, the more complicated it becomes. Lats, do we need to...

Does the stretch help a lot? They have better moment arms, like coming up all the way. How do you stretch the lats the most? How do you stretch the pecs the most? Like this scientist named Kazem came out and said, you stretch the pecs more with kind of like with a 45-degree arm angle. Right. All right. But what about when I do guillotine, you know, because you can lower the bar. I feel...

Some of the fibers, upper fibers stretching more that way. Should we be doing guillotine work? That doesn't agree with some people's shoulders. And it's like, what about the lats? Okay. How do you stretch the lats the most? Kazen would say do a cross body motion that might stretch the lats the most. Arguably so, but...

Sometimes you can have, if you're big muscles, you might not get the full stretch. Your anatomy might, your rib cage. For me, I can't seem to get over that much on these, but would it stretch my lats the most? And then you start altering your...

your spinal and your scapula and stuff and all that, and you can get a better stretch. And I think this stuff is very important. We should talk about it for what's optimal and not. What happens is everyone starts focusing on optimal, optimal, optimal, and then the pendulum goes too far this way, and you have these nerds like...

ripping on bent over rows and like weighted chin ups and stuff. And like, I like it because it's funny because interesting. I contradict myself. I've always liked sumo for glutes.

compared to conventional but i've always liked supinated narrow for lats compared to wide grip oh yeah and it's like but i'm not consistent because i'll say well supinated stretch you more but wide grip activates a little bit more in my opinion for lats you should probably do some stuff in the frontal plane some stuff more in the sagittal plane some stuff that goes full overhead in the full stretch even though the lats don't have good moment arms or activate here that much

You should just always use a variety. You have some muscles, because with the lats, you've got different divisions, upper, middle, lower, and how do you maximize the size of each? And it's like, I like analyzing everything, geeking out on the biomechanics. Just don't let it take away from the basics and getting strong at the basics. Because, yeah, if you look at the way...

Tom Platt's trained as quads. He was an animal. He got super strong at squats and hack squats. He'd go, he didn't go down. He turned the hack squat into a sissy squat and the leg extension. You're seeing him like flying up on these leg extensions, screaming and he'd go until he'd do, he was doing length and supersets and

30 years ago before they were a thing, like before they were popular, it's that intensity. But yeah, he had the greatest quad development of all time. They're absurd. And that was before they were even now, now you see since then, tell me a body part that's bigger on a guy 30 years ago than today. Only plats with his legs, his quads. Yep. That's it. Okay. Awesome. That was really, really, really helpful. Um,

Um, last thing I want to get from you here is, you know, I was telling you this before we started, you're, you're a unicorn in the field for many reasons. One of which is, I think you're one of the very few people who I really respect and enjoy who has actually built themselves. And it's not fair, but mostly on a single brand, right? So this is your company names. This is your, your exercise equipment, right?

Your Instagram, your social media is the gloop guy, right? Despite the fact you have a PhD and you've done all the things we talked about earlier, you've pushed into a single brand. And why that matters is how do you handle that then when research comes out and it says your brand maybe isn't great, right? So in other words, what I'm saying is if you were to be the lemon juice guy,

And then all of a sudden research comes out and says, hey, lemon juice is actually not great for you. And like, oh my God, what do you do? Your career, this has happened many times in your career, right? There have been many, many studies come out that, as you talked about earlier, have countered maybe what you've thought before.

And I think you've done such a beautiful job over the years of being so overt, so honest with that. You were the first guy I hear about when new studies come out on the hip thrust that show negative results. Not because you're criticizing the study. Like if that is true of the study, you'll bring that up. But rarely do you do that. Almost always it is a, hey guys, updating our thinking here. Turns out I had this idea. It doesn't work anymore.

Now it looks like that's not the case. And this is sort of how we're modifying it. So the question that I'm eventually smuggling in here is, how have you handled that? How do you think about that? And then secondarily, what are the most known problems

criticisms of the hip thrust. What has been shown scientifically? What is it not good at? What is it limited in? What are the downsides? Because I don't want this entire discussion to feel like just a big, you know, glutes is great, hip thrusts are great. And I don't mind bringing this up because you have done this more than anybody in your career about what looks like sabotaging your own brand. But to me, it's only elevated you even more because when you do say things

that are positive about the hip thrust, I feel like you generally give a fair representation of literature and you don't run away from when things don't support your brand. So what do we know about the downside? There's no really cons. That's probably not a

There's no negatives of a hip thrust, but what are the limitations? What are they not good at? When is it not the best choice? And then how have you handled that when that's happened in your career and saving your brand? If that's probably not a word that resonates with you, but you know. Great questions. If I was the hip thrust guy, yes, I'm the guy who popularized it. If I was the hip thrust guy, I'd be screwed because like, well,

I don't know if we had enough studies, you're going to find it's useful for some things, but it's not. Yeah. Then I'd be like, Oh God, I said this, but being the glute guy, I just need to flow with the research. And what I want to do is be the first to notify my people of a study. So if, if no, no one will care, like, and I want to fund this, I want to carry out the studies because then I'm the hero either way. Yeah. If I do a study on full squats versus parallel squats, um,

For glute development. For glute development. And full squats wins. All the Olympic weightlifters are like, hooray, Contreras saves the day. And then if it's to parallel, the powerlifters get to say, see, suck it, Olympic lifters. We told you. But if I, yeah, the plot can study. Menno Hanselmans and I funded that. 80 freaking grand we spent of our own money, like 40 grand each. Props to Menno.

He's funded Submarine Lab too. He's great. Yeah, we wanted MRI because we don't fully trust ultrasound for glutes. For other muscles, yeah, but glutes, it's tricky. So anyway...

I was so glad that I got to present that and help to be involved in that because it was a needed study and I was wrong. Now, the first time what you're talking about is with hip thrust was speed development. So the first study on the topic was from my PhD thesis. It looked at adolescent male rugby players and it showed that front squats led to greater vertical jumps.

but hip thrust led to better acceleration improvements in sprinting. And that was in line with the force vector hypothesis. You want to jump higher, put more force on the ground that way. You want to run faster, put more force on the ground that way. It's common sense. And then you see this in the research, kind of like you see boom and then boom. And then with hip thrust, it went back again to here. So the first study showed great results. So then a couple of researchers designed studies. Here's the deal.

I know you got hammered on the force factor theory eventually. I got hammered on it, and now it's like legit. It's back. Yeah, it's back. So the next couple of researchers who study – I got to look back at these papers. Chris Bishop was one of them, and there was one Chinese or Japanese baseball study. Wee, I think, was the last one. But anyway –

Like that baseball study showed that like hip thrust grew the baseball player's squat strength just as effectively as squats did. And that's what I found in one of my, I did a twin study and the hip thrust, the hip thrust twin grew her squat, like went from a 95 pound squat to 135 pound squat without squatting just in six weeks of hip thrusting.

And it was crazy. And it cleaned up her form too. But you look at those couple of studies, I want to look back at two things. I don't know why I don't know this. Number one, their tempo.

If they're doing like a two second up and four second down, that is the slowest hip thrust known to man. People, this is one of the most, the biggest things people are wrong about in the industry is that tempo matters so much for hypertrophy. It doesn't. Look at a lot of these bodybuilders are heaving away. They're using momentum. They're exploding because intuitively they know a lot of them were doing like length and partials to just doing bottom position stuff and

They were there sometimes ahead of the curve. Sometimes they're dead wrong, but sometimes the bros had it right. Anyway, these people out there and they will swear by it. It's like they think that like the slower the tempo, the better it is for muscle growth. And a review paper by Schoenfeld and Krieger, I think, showed that.

Two to eight seconds led to the same muscle growth. But I'm telling you... I think it's more than that, by the way. I think it's like two to 15. Like, it almost doesn't matter. The only thing is when you have like a 10-second concentric, there's... I think there's only one study on the super slow method. I think it was 10 seconds up, five seconds down, and that led to less growth. But...

You can get a variety of results, but also a new study on cheating momentum. Brad Schoenfeld did this study too. And they showed with like curls and I don't know if it was trices, but basically heaving away at curls versus very strict curls. And they had the same biceps growth. Yeah. So the strict people can say, ha, this is what I love about presenting the research because you're the champion. The strict people get to say, see,

You went lighter, use less load and got the same muscle growth and it's safer. Clearly it's going to be safer. You're going to have less injuries. And the heaving crowd can say, see, you went heavier, heaved away. You're probably going to grow other muscles because you're using some front delts and some connected tissue development. And it's more athletic. Yeah. It's more athletic and it's, and they grew the same biceps. You didn't need to go light and, and,

Super slow. Yeah. Like an athlete. So that's what I like about being. That's funny you said that because my initial instinct was that, right? Being on more of the athletic side generally. I'm like, I know. I've been like this whole don't use momentum thing. I've been against for forever. It's like, no, like move. Learn to move. It will, you'll develop.

And the bodybuilders were heaving and using momentum back in the day. Look at Ronnie Coleman. Look at these guys there. And they're not going super slow negatives. And I don't think super slow negatives help with muscle growth either. No, but they are very tiring in terms of like, they will suck all your recovery reserves out of you. It's good to do for variety. It's good to do for maybe, maybe it does. Some of these things lead to growth initially, but then you don't, you just revisit them. But anyway, I think hip thrusts are like,

one rep per second at my gym, maybe one and a half. Say what you want. Criticize me all you want, but scoreboard. Let's look at before and after pictures. And I don't mean to be cocky, but I get annoyed when... Look at my girl's glute development. Do you think we're lacking? And we're doing explosive hip thrusts. Okay, so...

What I think those initial studies, I got to look at two things. Number one, were they still sprinting? Because if these were athletes and you have them stop sprinting. For eight weeks. Then this is a detrain. This is to see if hip thrusts counteract the effects of detraining. Yeah. If they didn't get faster, but they didn't get slower, that's huge. You can hip thrust.

And while you stop sprinting and retain your sprint speed, that would be cool to know. And speed is, as we know, is the first thing to go. So not sprinting for six weeks, if this is actually the case, which it may not be.

That would be enormous. You would expect a significant loss. But also if it's a slow tempo, that doesn't have ecological validity. And that's my problem in the research. There's another way of saying that's not how people do it in the real world. No. And so I think maybe some of the other studies that came after that. So then you had a couple of studies show that hip toes didn't build sprint speed. And that's when I came out with my blog post saying I was wrong.

I thought I was ahead of the research. I wasn't. Everyone respected me for that. And now it's years later. Now there's actually a lot of evidence that hip does are better than squats. And then, but in general, horizontal exercises seem to be better at developing sprint speed. But this is interesting because the Plotkin study showed similar glute growth, but the squat group had more quad and adductor growth twice the quad and, and over two times, two and a half times, I think the adductor growth was,

Neither grew the hamstrings or glute medius minimus. So you can't tell me in sports quads and adductors aren't important. So I would never say stop squatting because you need quads, you need adductors, you need glutes, but you do need strength through a full range of motion. And squats probably get you more hip, more glute strength in the hips flex position, hip thrust in the hips extended position. But there's something about explosive movements, right?

And there's even a study showing that bands might be more effective than free weights because you explode up. So I think we need to look in more into, I have a few different glute in the first room in glute lab for a lot of bill is our hip thrust room, but I have in there a kneeling position.

The Glute Builder has a kneeling glute isolator. It's kneeling hip extension. Oh, yeah. You're bent over, you're kneeling, and you do back extension. It's like Sorenix's back attack machine, but kneeling, okay? And then you have the reverse glute ham. That's a Rogers piece where you're laying on your back, and there's a pad, and it looks like a leg curl pad, but you move it in hip extension the whole way. Well...

When I do 20-rep set of hip thrust versus the kneeling glute isolate versus the reverse glute ham, a 20-rep set will take not even 30 seconds with the hip thrust. It might be 25 seconds. A kneeling glute isolator might be 30, 35, and the reverse glute ham will be 40 to 60. It'll actually be like 60 seconds. It's a long time. And so these people talk about tempo.

And they don't consider the range of motion. So how to tell me you don't know about weight training without telling me you don't know about weight training is mention that all exercises need the same tempo. What do people do with cab raise? What about shrugs? Am I supposed to do shrugs with two seconds up, four seconds down? No. Shrugs are one second. You don't need to...

So anyway, I think that helps with athleticism is these rapid, like with hip thrust, boom, explode up. They don't beat you up as much. They don't cause much muscle damage. They're explosive concentrics. You don't have to control the negative. And you can say the negative is huge. Is it for acceleration? When you're leaning forward, accelerating is pure concentric. There's not an eccentric phase with acceleration sprinting.

I think concentric is king. And I think you need a power through the whole stride. And that's why hip thrusts are great. You're also not saying it's the only exercise to do. Oh, hell no. You look at what track. Just pick one of the many. You look at what the popular sprint coaches have always drawn. What is USATF or whatever, the track and field. What have they always done? Vertical, like Olympic squats, RDLs, Olympic lifts. Yep.

But like Charlie Francis was thrown in the reverse leg press. That's a kickback.

You know, and so add in some hip thrusts, but just make sure you're not overdoing the strength training because I would become the coach and I would over-prioritize strength that I'd actually make them all slower. I'd make them slower. Yeah. Because I'd be obsessed with getting them stronger at these exercises and really you need to save your juice for the explosive stuff, the sprinting, the plyos. It's like you said at the beginning, don't forget the priorities, right? Yes. Like make sure that the goal is there. You're just saying...

that potentially you could consider adding a horizontal movement if horizontal speed is the goal. But real quick, so that's the first time I had to say I was wrong. But then I kind of ended up being right. Anyway, I need to update that. Not a start to your own criticisms here, but okay. Then later on, with that hip thrust versus squat study, I thought for sure hip thrusts were going to win. Yeah.

And this is what annoyed me. When in terms of bigger growth? I made a post, beat out squats for glute growth. Yep. They tied. They tied for upper, middle, and lower glute max.

And so then it leads to the next hypothesis. Well, we equated volume. You don't have to equate volume in the real world. You can handle more volume. What if we would have done more volume? Blah, blah, blah. We need more studies. But I was wrong because I thought hip thrusts would beat squats and they tied. It was on beginners. Beginners seem to have more stretch-related growth due to sarcomeregenesis, which tends to stop at around, say, six, eight weeks, whatever.

But I did make a post saying I was wrong. Well, why didn't all the other guys make posts saying they were wrong too? Because they all thought squats would annihilate hip thrusts. I thought hip thrusts would beat out squats. We were all wrong, but I was the only one to say it. So anyway, that's the secret. To answer your question, how do you pivot, I guess, as new research comes out? You be the first to announce it, and then you change your programming to reflect that. You learn and you evolve. Yeah.

And that's the secret. No one's mad at you. In fact, they trust you more. But it's really hard for guys to do. It is so hard for guys to say, I was right. It's okay for guys to admit they were wrong like five years later. Back in the day, we used to think that squats grew your arms because we'd say do squats and it raised your testosterone growth hormone. Your arms are going to get jacked. And now we know that's not true. This is a real thing what you're saying, by the way. Now we know that's not true. The hormone hypothesis is,

It was probably smart. I like that we told people that, but we were wrong. But yeah, we got him to squat and deadlift by pretending it was going to build your arms. Yeah. I used to say that all the time. I used to say it too. I came across a document I gave out to my first gym and it was like so pseudoscientific. It was...

Yeah, it was full of pseudoscience. But anyway, it's fine for guys to admit they were wrong five years later, 10 years later. But at the time, it's hard to say, guys, this study just came out. Looks like I was wrong. I've been telling people that. And you can say, OK, I'd still like to see it in advanced lifters. I would still like to see. But it looks like if you say front squats suck because you're not building quads, you're just limited by upper body. Your quads could keep going, but you cave and you fall like that.

And then your study comes out saying front squats and lead to the same quad growth as back squats. You should tell your people. If you're a scientist, you tell your people. If you're a zealot, you don't mention that study. You pretend it never existed.

If you say hip thrusts suck and a study comes out showing hip thrust tight squats, you need to come out to your people and say, eh, looks like I was wrong. Hip thrusts, there might be more to hip thrusts. But either way, you should be saying we should do both. I still think squats are better than hip thrusts for gluteal length, or I still think hip thrusts are better than squats. But as of now, we should probably be doing both, especially since they –

kind of combine to form comprehensive glute strength through a full range of motion, full spectrum glute strength. And especially because they don't beat each other up. Like one doesn't beat you up as more, one's more full body, grows the quads and adductors too. One is more isolation. And guys will look you straight in the face and say, don't do any glute isolation work. And I wish women could say, oh,

I shouldn't do hip thrusts? No. I shouldn't do kickbacks? No. I shouldn't do abduction? No. Well, what do you do for your chest? Do you just do bench? Oh, you do pec deck too? What do you do for your arms? Do you do curls? Because you could just grow them doing chin-ups and close grip bench. You do curls and tricep extensions. Oh, what about your side delts? Do you do lateral raises? Because you could just say, just do military press out to the sides and

Oh, you don't even believe. So you're giving me advice. You don't follow yourself. You weird hypocrite. Do you not realize that you weird man? I don't know why guys do that with glutes. But anyway, that's how you how how how you navigate that throughout your career is you be the first to announce it to your people. You admit it. And then they just like you more because they go, this guy's always going to update us. This guy's always going to give us the science.

And then if you disagree with it, like fund your own study and look into it. You'll just learn. All we can do is learn and grow from it. And then if you're the first person to point out that hip thrusts were not needed, then

And I could pivot. I'm still the glute guy. I just said, hey, it turns out we didn't need to do squats. We just needed to do these – throw electrodes on your glutes. Yeah, yeah. And I'd be the hero because we didn't need exercise, but I don't believe that. Yeah. And then the second part to your question was what are the pitfalls with hip thrusts? I do believe when you're an expert on a topic, you should –

I could be the number one. I could write the best article to convince you that hip thrusts are amazing, but I could also write the most convincing article to say that they're worthless. I should know both sides of the argument. I should know it better than anyone. So people will say, takes forever to set up. It's a pain in the butt to set up. How did we all used to set up these stations back in the day? I don't know.

I don't like, if I go to a gym, I don't want to do, I don't want to set up the station. Yeah. It is the number one reason I don't do it. Yes. Literally the number one reason. But if you have a plate loaded device, if you've got the hammer strength, the BC strength, the, the Nautilus glute drive, the booty builder. These are all different hip thrust machines. If you've got a Smith machine, even with a bench nearby it, because sometimes they put the bench right near the, or sometimes some gyms are putting benches right by their platforms and

So people can quickly, and also matters how strong you are. If there's a bar with one at my gym, it's so easy because I got the BC Strength Thruster setups and

There's bigger plates. The bar is sitting there loaded with 135. You want to add on plates, we got plates with handles on them. So you slide them on. You got the glue loop there to connect it if you want to do bar plus band. You got the pad on the bar. You have even an air expander to sit on if you're shorter. And it's all right there. It makes it so much easier. I don't know if people realize what you said a second ago, but your company, you specifically make

weight plates that are larger in diameter. And the reason you do that is because then it makes it much easier to do hip thrusts with them. Yeah, you just slide the bar over. When you have big legs and you have standard plates, how do you get... I gotta slide myself underneath. It's a giant pain in the ass. And then you go to get in position, you're like, oh, and it's crushing you, and you have to kind of like...

Climb hip thrust. When I saw you came out with those, I chuckled so hard because I'm like, oh my God, of course you would. Of course you would make the first person to change weight place in 50 years. No, I got that idea from Mark Bell. Came out with his wagon wheels.

And so my, my, um, my coach is a glulab. We're hip thrusting off of them. And at that time, I was the best at that time. I was rolling the bar up onto rubber mats, just the two inch rubber mats that I've got from elite FTS. We'd roll them over the mats. And I'm like, the mats aren't necessary. If you have plates that are two inches bigger in diameter or actions, two inches bigger in radius. Sorry. So yeah, we came up with the bigger plates, uh,

The hip thrust station is huge. And my girls at Fort Lauderdale, they like the rotisserie station the most. The barbell, the standard, they like the rotating pad the most. Then it would be the Thruster Pro, which I use the Hammer Strengths model because only Hammer Strength almost got it perfect. But why did they make this tiny plate peg? You only fit four plates on. I've got girls that are strong. You get a strong man, they're using six, seven plates. Yeah.

So I made the plate pegs bigger, and then I made the foot plate bigger to accommodate five-footers. That's something no one does for women. These poor women out there, they finally get a hip thrust, and these gym owners are so bad at knowing what the best equipment to buy, and the manufacturers don't even test it on a shorter woman who is the market with blue machines. Right.

So the outside of the criticism of setting it up and the pain, what would be maybe the next just pain? Hip pain. Oh, like the bar on my head. Super strong. I bruised the hell out of myself there many times. Yeah. You think I of all people would have the best padding. It's hard. Yeah. It's.

Well, I mean, you're still putting, I don't care what kind of polyurethane or whatever material you have, foam, you're still going to put several hundred pounds through that foam. Yeah. So there's an optimal thickness and density combination that, but it's really, if you get it thicker, it interferes with your hip flexion. So outside of setup. If you get it denser, it doesn't pad as well. If you get it too soft, the bar sinks through. So yeah.

The hip pain and the bruises and the scar. And then in some people it can get bad. Like my girls will be like, look at this. And so sometimes when you have these crazy bruises, you can either avoid the hip thrust, but sometimes I'll sit on my client's laps backwards and you do partner hip thrusts. They hip thrust me. And I'm like, no.

I weigh 240, but I'm heavier. It feels heavier. I go, if you can get me for 20, that's hard. So they either hip thrust me or they do single leg hip thrust or they do the kneeling or like some machine that doesn't put the stress in the exact same place. Okay. And then you would say from a functional standpoint, you'll still hear people say you're lying down. It's not functional. Those people are dead wrong. I think hip thrust transfer better. If you just said, compare it to squats, okay.

I think hip thrust transfer better to sprinting speed. I would, the research on horizontal plyo says they're better for agility too, but I think squats would be better agility, but I think they're better for rotational power. Cause when you rotate, you're more in full hip extension. So I think for rotational power,

hip thrusts are going to be better. And then they seem to tie for transfer to the deadlift, hip thrusts and squats. But I bet you squats build better strength, deadlift strength off the floor and hip thrusts better, probably build better lockout strength. But as far as just straight up, they transfer the deadlift similarly. They lead to similar horizontal pressing strength, pushing against a wall as hard as you can, which is a very important sports functional performance outcome. And then they seem to tie

Hip thrusts seem to be better at isometric mid-thigh pull due to joint angle specificity. No doubt. And for jumping, they're better for horizontal jumping. Broad jumps, things like that. Broad jumps, but then for vertical jumping, they probably tie. We think squats would be better, but...

In the literature, they probably either tie or maybe a slight edge for squats. But the bottom line is you should be doing both. You should be doing both of them. Oh, yeah, they neither transfer to lumbar extension strength. What else is there?

They don't build lumbar extension specific strength. Bone mineral density? Any research on that? None on bone mineral density, but where would you do it? In the lumbar spine? Yeah. Yeah. If that was the case, I would think squats would be better. But anyway, I think what that shows is for sports performance, you need a variety of exercises, multivectorial training, force vector training. Do heavy, medium, and light stuff regularly.

in your main directions, yes, sagittal plane stuff is going to be paramount in sports because, you know, we stand on two feet, but don't be afraid to, but anyway, so the functional crowd, they're wrong. It's really hard for people to fathom that an exercise can transfer, like supine exercise can transfer to sprinting, but it does.

Then the other arguments would be, I've heard it all. Okay. It's really bad for your posture. It's going to grow your waist. It's not going to grow your waist. It doesn't activate the obliques much.

Or the rectus abdominis. It's not going to screw up your posture. It's not going to break your back. As long as you, you know, well, not as long as you just have to actually seen hardly any back injuries. No, there's not nearly as many back injuries, but I think the problem, I think my power lifters don't like it as they see someone like me doing all this weight and

So they're like, if that guy can hip thrust, then I can. And they load up too heavy. I started with 185 back in the day and worked my way up gradually. You got to start light and get full hip extension and work your way up gradually and get that feeling of that full glute squeeze and the full hip extension, full hip hyperextension going

And so they'll do it and they don't, they're going so heavy. They're only working the bottom ranges and they don't feel it much. They, if they would have went lighter and went full, say they went light, like 135 their very first time and did a pause at the top in full hip extension and did a, you know, a set of 15 with a three second pause at the top, their glutes would have been lit up and they would be convinced that it works well. But instead they lit up 405 and,

And they did 80% reps where they failed to get the 20% of full hip extension. Didn't lock it out. Didn't pause at the top because they could never reach there in the first place.

and had anterior pelvic tilt and full spinal extension trying to mask, trying to pretend you're coming up higher, but the bar didn't rise any higher. They just altered their torso to make it look like they went higher. And then their back hurts the next day. Yeah, and then their back hurts. It doesn't feel right. They don't even feel their glutes. They're like, this is stupid. Why am I even doing this? That it's redundant. If a study on squats showed that it built the glutes the same, why do it?

But when would they use that argument for any other muscle group? If lateral raises built the side delts is the same as military press, which guy would say don't do laterals then? They'd say do them both. If leg curls and stiff leg deadlifts built one of the hamstrings the same, would they be okay with that? Probably they'd say do both. They'd probably say, I bet you they grow different muscles.

different port, like the proximal versus distal or different subdivisions. We didn't look at the whole level of muscle, the full length of muscle in the semitendinosus, semimembranosus, and then long head of the biceps and short head. They would be skeptical, but they're quick to throw out glute isolation movements. Yeah. Whenever I think about this topic, a couple of things jumped to my mind. One of them is false dichotomy.

and the other is mutually exclusive, right? So when we think about this, nowhere ever do I recall you saying things like you should only ever hip thrust or that the hip thrust is ultimately always better or like any of these things. So when I say false dichotomy, what I mean is you don't have to do a hip thrust or any glute exercise as your only option. And you're not saying it's the best option. It's just looking at research to say, is it actually working?

And when studies come out to suggest it works the same or better or less, it depends on the outcome goal, right? It depends on what we're training for. And all we're looking to put sort of words in your mouth is what do we know about the quality for this outcome?

And there's never a rationale to think it is only ever going to be, say, a hip thrust versus a squat or a hip thrust versus an RDL or hip thrust. You can do both. There's no rule that says you have to choose squat or this one, right? And there's also no rule of you can't do both at different times. It's never ever going to be an answer of, is this exercise better than that one? That's just not how this stuff works. It is simply, what do we know that is positive? What do we know that is potentially limitations?

How do I put my person in the best position to likely succeed as a starting place? Right. Research, as you've outlined so far, it only shows us what's most likely to work. Most people, most of the time. Yeah. It's just a starting place from then you have to coach. It's so weird because you've been to my gym in San Diego. Yeah. Like I have strong clients. They're impressive. I would say we're the strongest all-natural, all-female gym in the world. Yeah.

I wish we could, yeah, I wish like there was like some gym in Brazil or Russia and we tested them. We tested them and they said, let's compete. Cause I could tell my girls up, we got called out. We got to compete with them. It'd be fun. But what would you do? Strong lifting? Which exercise would you do? But like, yeah, in strong lifting, the big six, I'd love to, I'd love to take on other, other gyms in the world who think they're stronger than us. Yeah.

And these girls don't take stuff. They're, like I said, all natural. And we are so strong at chin-ups, bench press, military press, squats, deadlifts, and hip thrusts. Are we as strong as the best powerlifters? No, not at squats and deads. But I got girls squatting above 315. One of the girls in strong lead squat at 405. One deadlifted 425, 405, 385, three girls, 385, so deadlift.

We're not some wimpy gym, but it's so weird. You'll see criticisms of me and they're like, he just gives us girls hip thrusts and bands. And I've never given that because I don't know the answer. So it's always been kind of that rule of thirds, you know, a third from vertical, a third from horizontal, a third from lateral rotary. But I do wonder, okay, if volume wasn't equated, what if you did just do hip thrusts and bands? Yeah.

And you contrasted that to their programs. I bet you'd get the same glute growth without quad, hamstring, and adductor growth. And then you could say, what's your goal? Do you want just glute growth or do you want all of it? And if you want all of it, probably do the rule of thirds. If you want more quads, then focus more on, you know,

Quad dominant movements. If you want more hams, focus more on hinges. But, but, but yeah, like do your squats in a quad, like more upright, right. Do a little more volume from the squat lunge category. If you want more hamstrings, do more hingey stuff. But like, yeah. One thing I like about hip thrusts is there, it's one of the most, well, everyone can do a hip thrust. People have bad anthropometries or poor anthropometries for squatting and deadlifting and,

But hip thrust, it's a bridge. You just put the bar in the middle of wherever the middle of that bridge is and the hips and you thrust. And you, anyway, what you said though, you hit the nail on the head. They're all tools. And, you know, if you're starting out and you can only afford, you could be 80% as good of a

carpenter with these tools, but you want to be the best carpenter in the world. You want to be the best at your job. You better have a lot of different specialty tools. And that's what I... I like having all the machines, all the exercise, all the exercise variations. I just told you how...

we can still do hip thrusts when their hips are hurting, when they're bruised up. I can tell you when someone's low back is hurting, here's what we do. When your knees are hurting, here's what you do. If your inner thighs are too sore, here's what you do. We have protocols for everything. If this gives you pain, try this. If

you're old and don't want this, then we're going to do this instead. You've got to have a lot of tools. And what if you're trying to grow your glutes without growing your legs? Then hip thrusts and glute bridges become a lot more friendlier options. So one more question I have for you. Why is it so hard to grow the glutes without targeting the legs? Okay, because you look at some of the most effective glute exercise are squats,

you know, lunges, deadlifts, they work a lot of muscle mass. So let's think about the glutes. Ideally, the knee would stay bent. Why? Because that's going to take the hamstrings out of it largely. When the knees are bent, the hamstrings are slackened, the glutes are going to take up more of the brunt of hip extension.

All right, but then when you sink really deep, how are you going to work the glutes without working the adductors when you're going super deep? You do deep squat. The deeper you go, the more adductors you bring into play.

So whenever you go really deep, you're going to work the adductors. If you're doing anything with knee extension, you're also working the quads. There's some evidence that when you carry out knee and hip extension at the same time, the glutes don't do as much. They don't activate as much because you're coordinating two things and you're not focusing on driving the hips forward maximally. You're coordinating those two actions. And so it's like, all right.

Straight leg hip extension is great for glutes, but it also works a lot of hammies. Knee extension work is great for glutes, but it works a lot of quads and adductors. And you better do these in the most glute dominant fashion to work a little more glutes, a little bit less quads or whatever. So just hip extension alone, what are the hip extensors?

It's not just the glute max. It's the glute max, the adductors, and the hamstrings. So anytime you do hip extension, it's those three in combination. How do you hone in on the glutes? You can say, well, why even do hip extension at all? Do abduction. Does that maximize lower glute growth if you lean forward? And if you start doing all your volume of leaning horizontal plane hip abduction, would you develop overuse injuries? Probably. Yeah.

So, you have to look at, all right, what about loaded posterior pelvic tilt? You just do a glute squeeze. That you feel mostly in the glutes, but that's such a short range of motion. Is that going to be effective at growing the glutes? We don't know. What about hip external rotation? That uses mostly glutes. Does it work the upper and lower gluteus maximus? Probably, but...

How do you create a program around that? Tough. Yeah. So in theory, you do more hip external rotation, more posterior pelvic tilt, more leaning forward abduction, abduction in the transverse plane. We have no evidence on these for growing the glutes. We have EMG evidence. Yeah.

showing high EMG activation, but they don't always work you through a full stretch. They don't move you through as much excursion as hip extension exercises do. And so it's complicated. It's tough to just target glutes without working the other muscles in the quads, the adductors, the hammies. And so this is where glute bridges become very enticing and hip thrusts and then kickbacks.

But even kickbacks, if you do kneeling kickbacks or kickbacks from a high pulley position, you're going to involve your quads. It becomes kind of like a step up. If you straight leg kickbacks, it's more like a back extension. It's like a hinge. So you do them swoopy. So there are ways to kind of make things more glute dominant.

But you'd have to do more volume because you're not doing the biggest bang for your buck exercises. So can you do more volume? It would be really fun to do a controlled experiment looking at like the basics versus like a very grow your glutes without growing the legs dominant program. And look at, do you get the total glute growth doing a lot more volume for glutes because they're not as effective, but then you don't get the quad and adductor and hamstring growth because

It's not easy to do. You're going to have to get a, you're going to have a lot of bros telling you you're doing it wrong. Yeah. But it is complicated because the glutes are,

are involved in the hip extension. Like I said, there are other hip extensors, hip abduction. You got the glute medius, glute minimus and TFL that do hip abduction as well. Hip external rotation. You got the hip, the deep six, hip external rotators. And so you kind of create a pro, even post your pelvic tilt, the abs can do it. So when you do a glute squeeze, you got to make sure it's not the abs, it's coming from the glutes. So,

So you're not going to be doing the most popular glute exercise, all the squats and lunges. You could throw those in and just do a couple sets and not do progressive overload because you shouldn't fear getting gigantic quads from just doing the occasional squat or lunge. You just might not utilize progressive overload and you've got to do them in a glute-dominant fashion, leaning forward, sitting back.

But it is hard. It's not easy to do, and it requires biomechanical thought and consideration, which I don't see from a lot of people. Another criticism of the hip thrust is just because it looks sexual in nature. Oh, sure. So what I started doing, because I heard this on podcasts by a couple people, so what I started doing is saying, I started doing reaction posts to them, and I started saying, okay, okay.

So you're saying like this looks gay to do, but what is a Romanian deadlift? You're doing loaded bending over. So you're saying you'd rather do loaded bending over as a man than loaded thrusting. Personally, I think loaded thrusting is the more manly thing to do, but you're saying... So anyway, I put it back in there, Cora, and point that out. It's always a funny thing. I'm fine doing loaded bending over. I'm fine doing loaded...

Opening and closing of your legs with abduction and adduction, and I'm fine doing loaded thrusting. It just needs to become more common and more familiar. But yeah, what it looks like shouldn't dictate. But I get it. I do get it. I hope we have a little more maturity with exercise selection than that. When you first got here today and we were talking, I said, you know, I don't want to spend that much time talking about the glutes. And well, we did the whole thing.

But that's okay. Your knowledge is vast in many other areas of strength training. And you and I love strength training. We could do this for a very long time very often. But one way or the other, we tackled a lot of information. I'll reiterate something I said earlier. Although we did focus on the glutes a lot here, I really do hope people can pull the lessons out.

to other forms of training, other training goals. You laid a lot of critical information about basic things like paying attention to what the client actually wants. It sounds funny, but that's really what you said. You noticed clearly your clients who just happen to be mostly women were really wanting a certain thing. Now, maybe other women want different things. It doesn't matter. The point from a coaching perspective was you really actually listened to what the client wanted. In this case, many of them wanted bigger glutes.

Could be selection bias there. It doesn't actually matter. It's specificity. It's getting better results because you're being more specific to the actual goals and listening to the client and not worrying about what you thought was a better exercise because that exercise worked better for you or for other clients or a study said that, right? It's paying attention. So that was one thing I learned about really thinking about the client goals. The other one was, again, the examples were glutes.

and hip thrust, but it doesn't matter. It is making sure if you're not getting progress that you are truly progressively overloading, that the effort is there and that you're not distracting it with either other exercises or other forms of exercise or other life things, making sure that there's enough stimulus in the way that you want to drive adaptation. And if you're not getting it there, then you need to think about other options, more variety, more ranges of motion, different range, less range of motion, like figuring out

What one thing at a time is you need to change until your goals actually start or the thing you're trying to target starts making progress.

And then you gave a ton of technical details. You covered a lot of biomechanics. You covered sagittal plane and frontal plane, and we covered a lot of anatomy. So hopefully people that have not had the exercise science background that you and I have will have learned a ton of things, again, whether they're coaches or themselves, so they can follow along more with research to get better application for their own individual process. And then really at the end there, we finished off with talking about how do you understand when new research comes up?

implementing, changing, and adapting so that you're staying true to your core, where your beliefs aren't changing, your principles aren't changing, but you're focused on outcomes, not methods, right? And methods come, methods go. What is the outcome you're really after? So a lot of value, hopefully, in all those areas. There's probably other summary points that I could think of, but those things kept coming back to me. Things that people say,

But you gave so many direct examples of that from the scientific literature, from physiology, from anatomy, to many, many years of experience that ultimately that's just invaluable information. I know that you provide a ton of value on your social media. You do a ton on your YouTube page and potentially, I don't know if I could spill the beans, but maybe more YouTube stuff is coming.

In the near future, I've actually been to your seminars before. I've seen you speak a bunch of different times. So you are not shy about giving out information. I'd love to know where people can learn more about you and all those things. But you have everything. You have training programs like Booty by Brett. My wife does. It's very, very affordable, reasonable, good program. So that all said, thank you for all that. As much as you are a business person and you've got money to make,

you have given away so much stuff over the years at no or very reasonable price. It's you've, you've changed a lot of people's lives. Not only have you grown some butts, but you've really educated a lot of people. So thank you for all that. And then thank you for my wife. Cause she loves your program so much. That said, man, where can people pay attention to your stuff and learn it? And what is, is the best Avenue? Yeah, it's been Instagram.com.

for the last few years like that's my main focus like you said i'm going to start focusing on youtube more and then something we should all be doing is like getting emails so newsletter we should be better at that because who knows you can't predict these social media platforms sure i don't send my newsletters out enough but i never spam people so um that's you get it brettcontrast.com

But thank you for the kind words. Always happy to come back down the road and talk about other topics or updates if we have new science. Hoping to collaborate with you on some research down the road with your new facility. Seems amazing. And I've watched you rise up through your crew. We've watched each other rise up. You were way ahead, man. Yeah, but we met through Barbell Shrugged podcast and stuff, right? And then seeing you.

Seeing you become this rock star on Andrew Huberman's podcast and seeing you grow this new research position, this new professor position. There's no one who deserves it more because I like to think I'm in the same group. We don't just read the research. We work with actual clients and it's different when you do that. You're looking at maximizing every athlete's performance on an individual level and

And you can't just apply research to the masses. You have to do a lot of testing and figure out what's going to help them, what are their deficiencies, and what are the strategies that are going to help them improve the most. And I have so much respect for you as a practitioner, as a researcher, and as a fellow person in this industry who cares about steering us in the right direction. So thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor.

And I feel very privileged to talk, to have scientific discussions with someone at your level. It's fun for me. So I had a blast, man. I hope the people enjoy it. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining today's discussion with Dr. Brett Contreras. To learn more about Brett,

follow along on his social media, see his products, courses, and other relevant items, please check the show notes for direct links. Thank you for joining for today's episode. My goal as always is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support.

First, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. And on Apple and Spotify, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot. Also, please check out our sponsors. The show would not exist without them and their exceptional products and services.

Finally, you can share today's episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it. If you have any content questions or suggestions, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I really do try my best to read them all and to see what you have to say. I use my Instagram and X profiles also exclusively for scientific communication. So those are great places to follow along for more learning. My handle is at Dr. Andy Galpin on both platforms.

We also have an email newsletter that distills all of our episodes in the most actionable takeaways. We have newsletters on how to improve fitness in VO2max, how to build muscle and strength, and much more. To subscribe to the newsletter, just go to performpodcast.com and click newsletter. It's completely free and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for listening. And never forget in the famous words of Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you are an athlete.