Build Me a Butt!! :)

[Basil87]

Hi everyone,

I am a female in my mid 20s, and I want to build a bigger butt. I know there are a million threads on this topic, but they all seem to say the same things and none have really helped me.

I have kind of a weird shape. From the front, I look like kind of an hourglass. My measurements are 39 (36DD)-28-38.5. But when I turn to the side, I feel like a backwards "P" with all boob and hardly any butt! It's not like I have absolutely nothing there, but it's small. My legs and butt are super toned and muscular with no cellulite, the butt is just small.

Every woman in my family has the same shape -- bra sizes D-DDD+ but a flat backside. My mom, who was a dancer for over 10 years of her life, always complained that no matter what she did, she never had a butt. Even when she became overweight after having three children her butt remained flat. Like my mother and aunts, I store my fat on my love handles and basically everywhere EXCEPT my butt.

I joined a gym in my late teens and early twenties and tried all the typical exercises (squats, leg press, dead lifts, and lunges). I worked out with my boyfriend and his friend at the time who was going to school to become a personal trainer so I know I was doing the exercises correctly. I actually started squatting with a lot of weight and became very toned and strong, but my butt never got any bigger. I eventually gave up and got busy with life and stopped going to the gym. I guess I finished going through puberty because my hips and butt got a little bigger on their own, but it still isn't where I want it to be.

I know that I will never have a butt like Kim Kardashian or J Lo and I don't even want it to be that big. I just want to balance out my figure a bit.

Is there anything I can do that will actually work, or should I just accept my body the way it is? It could be a heck of a lot worse after all

I don't belong to a gym and don't have the money for it. I have access to the following equipment:
-a treadmill
-an elliptical machine that allows you to add resistance but not an incline
-a set of 10lb ankle weights
-a set of 10lb dumbbells

 

[CrazyOldMan]

Building muscle requires low rep high weight work, and you don't have that kind of kit.
Rep ranges you are looking for are 10 to 6, but this should be at rep max so at the end of 10th rep you shouldn't have enough left for an 11th.
The other thing is recovery. Without this there is less growth, and many totally miss this area. Building is hit it hard, hit it fast leave it alone. Too many assume that to get best results means hitting it more often, while in reality the opposite can be true, difficult on postural muscles like the glutes.

Short of finding a friend who can sit on your shoulders while you do sets of 10 squats, and finding hevier friends as you get stronger there isn't a lot to advise. If you can find someone with an at home set up who will let you play it could be good but otherwise you need a gym with decent resistance kit to build most effectively.

There are bodyweight exercises out there like bench jumps etc.that could be good but these will be slower, and you need to find the most intense stuff you can do.

 

[Goldfish]

Best glute overdrive comes from hyperextending the hip forcefully with the glutes. Most PT's teach you not to lock out, and if you don't know how to do it, that's reasonable advice as far as safety goes (in particular when it comes to the knees and elbows), but when it comes to glutes, it also makes every glute exercise a whole lot less effective. I'd recommend learning to do glute bridges. Make sure your trunk is really tight throughout the movement (so that you hyperextend your hips, NOT your lower back), push your knees and feet out, thrust your hips up powerfully as high as they'll go, hold that top position for 1-5 seconds, and lower yourself back down. To put this into perspective for you on how potent of a glute exercise this is when done as I've just instructed, as you can see in my signature I've squatted just over 140kg and deadlifted just under 180kg...and I can make my glutes cramp from doing this at bodyweight.

The key points I'd give you are:

1) Learn to activate your glutes. I was squatting over 100kg before I started learning to use my glutes to squat (and I still need to improve my glute activation).
2) Don't just use exercises that use your glutes, use exercises that overdrive your glutes. Glute bridges and hip thrusts (essentially the same exercise as each other, just hip thrusts have your shoulders bolstered up while glute bridges are on the floor) are right up the top of the list of exercises that achieve this.