Get Glute Training Done Right

If there’s one muscle group that seems to dominate the fitness conversation these days, it’s the glutes. Scroll through social media and you’ll see endless variations of glute workouts promising the “ultimate burn,” the “best activation,” or the exercise that will finally make your glutes grow. And while the attention on glute training is a good thing, a lot of the conversation is still stuck in the wrong place.

Too often we judge whether an exercise is working based on how much we feel it burn.

The problem is, the burn isn’t the best indicator of whether a muscle is actually growing or getting stronger.

Research has started to highlight this disconnect. A good example is the study “Hip Thrust and Back Squat Training Elicit Similar Gluteus Muscle Hypertrophy and Transfer Similarly to the Deadlift.” In this study, researchers compared hip thrusts, often promoted as the ultimate glute exercise, with back squats. The results showed that both exercises produced similar glute hypertrophy and similar carryover to other strength tasks like the deadlift.

What’s interesting is that many people report feeling their glutes much more during hip thrusts. They often feel a bigger burn and greater “activation.” Yet despite that difference in sensation, muscle growth between the two exercises was essentially the same.

That’s an important reminder: how much a muscle burns doesn’t necessarily determine how much it grows.

This idea isn’t limited to glute training. In exercise science we know that hypertrophy is primarily driven by factors like mechanical tension, progressive overload, and sufficient training volume, not simply the sensation of fatigue in a muscle.

So when it comes to glute training, focusing only on exercises that create a big burn can actually limit our approach.

Another key piece of the puzzle is understanding how the glutes actually function.

The gluteal muscles, particularly the gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus, aren’t just simple hip extensors. Research in biomechanics shows that the glutes are tri-planar muscles, meaning they contribute to movement and stability across all three planes of motion: sagittal, frontal, and transverse.

That means the glutes help us:

• extend the hip (moving the leg backward)

• stabilize the pelvis side to side

• control rotation through the hips and trunk

If we only train them in a single plane, like endless hip thrusts, or machine kickbacks, we’re missing a big part of how these muscles actually work in real movement.

This is where thinking about the body as an integrated system becomes really valuable.

 

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One of the most important connections involving the glutes is what’s called the posterior oblique sling. This sling system connects the gluteus maximus on one side of the body with the latissimus dorsi on the opposite side through the thoracolumbar fascia. It plays a major role in activities like walking, running, and lifting because it helps transfer force between the upper and lower body.

In other words, the glutes don’t just work in isolation, they’re part of a larger network that stabilizes the spine and allows efficient movement across the body.

When we train the glutes with this concept in mind, it opens the door to smarter training strategies. Instead of only chasing isolated glute exercises, we can include movements that integrate the glutes with the rest of the body and challenge them across multiple planes.

Things like rotational patterns, lateral movements, and cross-body loading patterns can better reflect how the glutes actually function.

Ironically, these exercises may not always create the biggest burn.

But they often create something far more valuable: stronger, more resilient movement patterns.

So if you really want to get glute training right, it may be time to shift the focus. Instead of asking, “How much do I feel this in my glutes?” a better question might be, “How well does this exercise challenge the glutes within the way the body actually moves?”

Because building great glutes isn’t just about chasing a burn.

It’s about training them the way they were designed to work.

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