Today we are going to be talking about the elusive question that plagues runners and endurance junkies everywhere: can you grow your glutes, get that big juicy booty, or strong powerful glutes that you want for sport and performance while also doing running or endurance training?
I am definitely very pro “grow the booty” if you would like to! I also love using movements that can support our running training at the same time. With my own clients and in my program The Lyss Method, it isn’t impossible to grow your glutes while also running, but we’re often short on time. We need efficient training and we need something that allows us to support our running and endurance training goals while also supporting the booty gains or booty strength that we are looking for.
First things first – you need to be making sure that you’re eating enough. All the exercises I’m going to show you today will not magically grow your glutes without adequate protein, carbs, and calories to support your overall needs for developing and growing muscle tissue.
For that reason, I recommend if you’re someone who does have a lot of glute growth potential, or you feel like it’s a big jump of muscle mass that you need to gain to get your glutes or your booty where you want it to be, you might want to move this to an offseason goal or spend a specific or significant period of time training for a strength season or an offseason goal.
With that being said, you can also train your glutes year-round even when you’re running or endurance training, and that doesn’t mean you have to stop or only do that in the offseason. One of my favorite things to say for runners and endurance lovers is to do a little bit of hypertrophy all the time. That’s often how we gain or maintain muscle alongside our running and endurance goals.
Of course, I have to give you the disclaimer: you need to eat enough and you need to spend a significant period of time eating enough and training hard enough so that you can also support your glute gains. That might not be the best time to be pursuing that goal while maybe you’re training for a very big training event – something like a marathon or an ultramarathon or your first very long-distance thing where you’re having a hard time just balancing and recovering from the fatigue and demand of the two new things that you’re doing in your training program at once.
When we’re thinking about growing our glutes or any muscle for that matter, we want to think about:
1. Full Range of Motion – Moving through a full range of motion in most of the moves that we’re using to stress and stimulate that muscle tissue.
2. Adequate Load – Having adequate load on the bar or mechanical tension, which is going to be the main driver of muscle growth.
3. Volume – How many total reps and sets at a heavy enough weight are you doing each week.
When we’re thinking about our exercise selection for growing our glutes but also potentially complementing our running training, we want to think about things that are going to train and stimulate our lower body, specifically our glutes, in a full range of motion done at an 8 or 9 RPE out of 10 effort, leaving maybe one to four reps in the tank at most.
We really want to focus on the bread and butter movements, which are our compound movements. These are the most bang for your buck – they allow you to load the most weight and they allow you to get the most out of them while also complementing your overall strength training goals.
Over the years, a lot of people have moved away from the idea that a squat is going to develop your glutes and we’ve favored things more like the hip thrust. I will explain in a second why I’m not as much of a fan of the hip thrust, but we really want to think about those full range of motion squatting and hinging patterns specifically.
Your back squat or your full bodyweight squat is going to be taking a loaded bar where you can put a ton of weight – more than you maybe can with dumbbells – but you can also do this as a goblet squat. You’re moving through that full range of motion, getting that full stretch of the glute down there at the bottom of your squat.
Athletes who squat and squat heavy and squat often typically tend to have some pretty nice glutes. That doesn’t mean the accessory work won’t help round it out or bring the full glute together, but I really am a big fan of heavy squatting (or heavy relative to you and what you can do) when we’re thinking about growing the booty or the glutes.
The next things I love are going to be reverse lunges or split squats. These don’t need to be done just with a barbell, but for many people, holding the weight in your hands at the side or on your shoulders at some point might be limited by how much weight you’re able to do. You are absolutely fine to do all these barbell variations with dumbbells or kettlebells, but if you need to add more weight or do heavy weight, you might need to be moving to something like a barbell to distribute or increase that load more evenly.
Variations of lunges, squats, or step-ups are going to be some of the bread and butter key components of what I think work really well for growing our glutes, putting them through that full range of motion and adding adequate load to them so they can stimulate that growth.
The RDL is great because you’re going to work those glutes in a stretched range of motion, going through that full range of motion. You get that nice glute and hamstring stretch there in the back of your body.
When you’re doing this movement, you really want to think about that hinging pattern and keeping that tension in your glutes. This will also help with hamstring development as well. A lot of these compound moves are usually using your quads and your glutes or your hamstrings and your glutes simultaneously in order to develop strength.
I like the RDL over your conventional deadlift because often with the deadlift, while that does help train a multitude of muscles across the body, this starts to isolate out and increase that tension right there on the glutes a little bit more specifically.
The next thing I love are going to be a variety of step-up variations. The step-up itself is a really incredible exercise because it’s great for getting that glute through that full range of motion and really driving up with that glute. It is going to develop and use your quads as well, but it’s also going to really train that glute strength moving up, especially if you don’t kick off when you’re coming through these.
Step-ups are great, as well as lunge variations, because you can train your glutes in multiple planes of motion – you can train them going forward and to the side. The reason that we want to train our glutes in multiple planes of motion is because it allows us to target both the gluteus maximus (that big, huge, strong muscle that we think of with our glutes) but also our glute medius that gives that shelf-like feature that a lot of people are wanting or trying to train for.
The classic step-up variation is your traditional regular step-up. You can do this with a barbell or dumbbells. It’s as simple as going up on the box – you can step at about a 90-degree range of motion. You don’t want to kick off or pop off with that back leg; you just want to drive through your heel, and you can feel that tension in your glute as you step up and move your body weight upward.
When we’re working on our traditional step-up, what we can do over time is increase that range of motion of the step-up. This is a great way to increase that glute stretch, and it’s more of an advanced movement for stronger athletes and trainees but can be something that you can work towards.
You’re going to probably use less weight because it’s a higher range of motion, but then you’re going to load the glute up through that as well. There’s nothing wrong with doing lower box variations or higher ones or mixing them at different points in your training – they’re just two different ways to do the same thing.
The crossover step-up has become one of my favorite step-up variations. I love it because it’s stretching that glute through a different plane of motion, it’s using a lot of that glute, and you’re having to cross over and shift that weight in this direction to move the weight up and come over.
A less difficult but similar variation is just the side step-up or the side step-down. This can be as simple as stepping up on the side in this side plane of motion rather than moving your weight forward, or you’re using the step-downs to do a slow eccentric and control that on the way down.
Next is your classic single leg RDL. I love a single leg RDL for my runners! I think it works great on building stability from your big toe and your foot all the way up your leg, training you to maintain your body weight over that leg – often something that we see in running.
While I don’t think that our lifting has to look just like our running to benefit us (all lifting will benefit you if you’re a runner), I like some of these moves as ways to train these smaller components of things that we often struggle with or potentially can help us become a little bit more resilient.
The single leg RDL is just a fantastic accessory move all around and potentially one of my favorite glute accessory moves. Much like the barbell RDL, it’s going to work your glute and your hamstrings, whereas the step-ups are working your quads and your glutes.
One of the most common mistakes I see a lot of runners do is they underload their RDLs, especially their single leg RDLs. Don’t be afraid to increase your reps and your load – lift heavier! Especially if you have a deadlift that’s very heavy (150, 200, 250, 300 lbs), you’re going to need more than just 35 lbs in order to train effectively.
Lunge variations and split squat variations are also great for that glute development. They’re training those glutes through multiple planes of motion and full range of motion.
Something I also like is the lateral lunge. I see a lot of runners kind of butcher this with people doing half range of motion versions. I’d rather you work through a regression or a supported version of those lunges instead of doing that if you need to get through the full range of motion and get comfortable moving your whole body weight.
You also have curtsy lunges, where you’re going backwards and crossing your leg diagonally behind you. That’s a great glute stretch there, and those are some of the variations, as well as the reverse lunge, that I prefer a little bit because they are training your glutes a bit more or getting you moving in a different plane of motion.
I know everybody hates a split squat, but I want to talk about how you can make the split squat slightly more glute favorable rather than quad favorable. One of my favorite tricks for setting up your split squat: if you’re wanting to focus more on your quads during these split squats, stay more vertical, but if you want a little bit more glutes, you can lean forward a little bit more and you’ll feel that in your glute just a bit more.
Here’s my most unpopular opinion when it comes to glute gains: I don’t love the hip thrust. I think the hip thrust is clunky, it’s time-consuming to set up, you have to get out a ton of plates, it takes a lot of time out of your gym sessions, and it’s not really fun to do in my opinion.
That doesn’t mean if you like to do it that it doesn’t have a place in your training. If you want to do hip thrusts, I think that you should place them as an extra addition to the full range of motion squat, lunge, step-up, and hinge patterns that we were talking about here.
The hip thrust is a partial range of motion movement and it’s training mostly that top end of that range of motion. You can load it heavy, but you’re not getting that full range of motion that you’re wanting in order to grow your glutes.
I also don’t like it because it’s time-consuming, and I know for many runners or people who are trying to balance hybrid training goals, having to do so many things with running and lifting already takes up a lot of time, and we want to get in and out of the gym quickly.
For runners or endurance lovers, what I actually like instead is the single leg glute bridge because this thing is a killer! I think this is worse than split squats, but these have been incredibly helpful for me when it comes to my own glute strength and development for my running.
I like these because you can load them heavy, you’re isolating that glute one leg at a time, making it more challenging with an easier ability to load it with just heavy dumbbells. You’re getting on your back, you want to have that 90-degree tabletop angle, you can put the weight right there on the leg that you’re using, lift up that other leg, and go through that full range of motion.
All of these movements for the lower body are also some of my favorite training accessories in general for runners, which is why I’m bringing them up here today. I think that while they complement your running really well and I love them as running accessory moves, they also open the opportunity for us to grow our glutes or get those booty gains alongside our endurance training pursuits and goals.
A lot of The Lyss Method clients always joke: “I came to you to start hybrid or race training and I crossed the finish line, but also my butt was a lot bigger!” That’s because within my programming and my approach to training, we do a lot of heavy barbell compound lifting, but we also do a ton of step-ups and lunges and RDL variations alongside other things that complement running.
As you can see in those movements, I kept the movement controlled and steady. You want to think about having a controlled, steady tempo when you’re doing these things. That looks like not just falling down to the bottom of your step-up or plopping down to the bottom of your squat – really moving on a one-, two-, or three-second count down to the bottom, pausing, or exploding back up on that concentric.
You can manipulate or play with tempo in your training as a variable to add more tension to your glutes. One to three seconds is probably all you need for those reps and sets.
You want to think about training these in rep ranges between six to probably twelve reps. I think that’s a good window of training. I really love for runners doing a lot of six to eight reps – I think that’s a great opportunity to load things a little bit heavier and also get in the stimulus and tension that we want without doing so much volume that it leaves you fatigued.
From a hypertrophy standpoint, it also benefits you to spend some time in that more traditional 8 to 12 range as well. So I like programming for clients periods of time where you’re doing lower reps in sets (maybe three sets of 6 to 8) and then periods of time you’re doing potentially higher reps within your sets (three sets or two to three sets of 8 to 12).
The last thing is sets per week. I think starting out with your quad and glute dominant sets and then you have your hamstring and glute dominant sets – those are things that we can start thinking about training as two buckets: your hinging and your squatting patterns.
Think about starting with maybe six sets of each of those per week spread over 2 to 3 days, and then you can increase to maybe 10 sets total, 12 sets total. You’re getting a lot of crossover glute training with both your hinging and your squatting patterns.
From there, if you’re someone who has a hard time growing your glutes and you’re eating enough and crushing it in the gym, you can fill in and sprinkle in the rest of that volume with things like your barbell hip thrust or other accessory movements.
With all things muscle gaining, it’s slow and it’s a long process. For many of you, if you focus on lifting heavy, training like an athlete, eating enough, and recovering over time, these things will come. But we have to be really intentional to get muscle growth.
Your quads and hamstrings and lower body are also going to grow within this, and there’s nothing wrong with isolating out the glutes a little bit more if you need them, but also keep in mind that we want to be well-rounded athletes. A lot of the movements I showed you here today are things that are going to allow you to do that.
Ready to put this all together with a structured program? Check out The Lyss Method – my comprehensive hybrid training programs that help runners build strength, grow muscle, and improve performance all at the same time.
If you found this helpful, leave me a comment about something that you learned or your favorite lower body lift as a runner for growing those glutes!
I’m Exercise Physiologist, sports nutritionist, weight lifter, and ultra runner. I am here to bring science to your training in a no-nonsense way. I have helped thousands of women crush big lifting goals, cross race finish lines, and even do both. I’m here to help you do the same!
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