25-Minute Butt Lift Workout

A short, yet sweet, glute, hips and thighs workout. 

Your butt.

It’s an area us trainer’s like to see you work because a strong posterior equals a powerful core, a stable low back and knees that should be tracking where they should be (as opposed to that knock-kneed squat pattern that makes me cringe when I see people do it).

In fact, most physios will test a person’s glute and hip strength when someone comes in complaining of knee pain.

You see, when you squat your knees should be tracking with your second toe (see “Good” squat above).

Instead, what we see a lot of are knees tracking in towards each other (see “Bad” squat above).

This happens more with women then men too.

Because our hips tend to be wider (what is called our Q-angle, the angle from our knees to our hips bone) this creates havoc on our ability to keep our knees nice, neat and in line with our second toes.

Train the glutes

However, if we train our glutes, and in particular our outer hip area (our gluteus medius), we can help correct this from happening.

This 25-minute workout focusses on the glute med, as well as the glutes themselves, and the hamstrings and thighs.

If you have sore knees you might want to sit this one out, though. Because of the different lunge patterns we do in thew workout your knees might not like it. I suggest you do this workout instead.

4 other benefits of training your butt

1/ Better posture.

A lot of us suffer from poor posture due to sitting. All this sitting we do in a day (such as in front of the computer, in our car, on the couch) creates short and tight hip flexors (the big muscles in the front of our hips), and weak, over-stretch hip extensors (our butt muscles).

This, in turn, will cause a swayback, as well as lumbar lordosis.

Neither are really sexy-looking postures, are they?

Fix this by training your glutes, with moves like bridges and deadlifts found in today’s workout, and you will strengthen the hip extensors and turn on your sexy-looking posture.

2/ Improved performance.

Your glutes are capable of generating a lot of power, especially when it comes to running, speed, acceleration and endurance.

3/ Increased bone density.

When we hit perimenopause and leading into the years after menopause we can lose between 5-10% of our bone density. This loss can lead to osteoporosis, a progressive bone disease.

Exercises that place a load on the bones, like squats, deadlifts and lunges help to postpone this loss and even reverse it.

4/ Weight loss and weight maintenance.

To lose weight you have to burn calories, and nothing burns more calories than a leg workout.

Because the glutes and hamstrings are two of the largest muscles in the body, metabolically they will eat up way more calories when trained.

The deets

Tools needed: Beginners: nothing     Intermediate/Advanced: a pair of moderate dumbbells

Where to do: home or gym

Best suited for: beginner to advanced

The full workout