How To Build Powerful FUNCTIONAL GLUTES

By: Alex Pennington | April 2020

6 pack abs and a big booty.  That’s what we all want.  But what’s the best way to get these?  In this blog we will cover the later and get back into those 6 pack abs another day.  For developing a strong athletic butt, we must stick to a very important principle.  The SAID principle.  The SAID principle is an acronym for “Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands”. In other terms, the more you train your body a certain way, the more your body will develop in those specific ways.  The more you squat, the more your body will build to squat.  The more you ride a bike, the more your body will adapt to those specific positions.   How we train, is essential if we want to adapt in a specific way.  To understand how to get the most potential out of our training, the biggest bang for our buck, then we need to focus on why that specific muscle is even on our body.

Sprinting

The Glute Max, the largest and most power part of the glute, evolved from the need to run.  In human’s long and complicated past, our bodies more and more needed the ability to run fast.  Running helped us hunt, flee from being the ones hunted, and gave us an edge on our competition.  To this day, our bodies main function of running is still highly sought after in sports.  The fastest athletes are many times the highest-level athletes and are highly desired by athletic teams and programs in every corner of the world.  

Since the Glute Max had evolved to sprint, then is sprinting the answer to getting a powerful butt?  Yes.  But even more important, is sprinting with flawless technique.  The better the technique when sprinting, the more the glute max will contract and lengthen under tension.  Thus, creating newly developed muscle fibers.  

What makes sprinting better than other forms of glute training?

The biggest factor in sprinting being the optimal way of glute training, is the length that gets created under the load of the muscle. When running, the glutes are tugged on rotationally creating a full contraction on the muscle.  Also, the load that is being placed on the glute is multiplanar, which means the muscles are undergoing tension from multiple planes of motion.  There is a vertical load that comes from gravity and the weight of the body, and there is a horizontal load that comes from the direction of where the body is going.  These multiplanar loads together create torque, the stronger the torque the stronger and more developed we can make the glutes.  

Most glute training you see and read about are not multiplanar and aren’t focused on torque.  Without rotation the glutes are not getting the most that they can, thus developing a much less developed glute max.  Since the glutes function primarily through rotational forces, it is possible that your “booty building program” may do little to nothing at all.  If your program mainly consists of lunges, squats, deadlifts, and various forms of leg lifts then you may want to skip it.  Not saying it’s impossible to see “bigger booty” results from a program like that.  But if a stronger more athletic-looking butt is your goal, then there are quicker more efficient ways to go about it.

Functional Training for functional glutes

Before getting into this, I need to first state that “functional training” is one of the most misused terms in the fitness industry today.  Trust me, most functional training is not functional training.  If the functional training you see is not oriented around similar movements to running and throwing, and there are no rotational forces being applied, then most likely it is not truly functional.  Functional Patterns does this best; every exercise and training routine is oriented around running and throwing mechanics. So that means that each exercise in some way puts a multiplanar load on the glutes.  This means the glutes are literally working in each repetition of each exercise.  Just think, if every arm exercise, back exercise, or chest exercise also worked your glutes.  How fast do you think your glutes would build?  For more info on Functional Patterns training, check out functionalpatterns.com or take a look at their YouTube page.  There are hundreds of exercises that can be found there.  If you’d like to train with a Functional Patterns practitioner and learn great technique, go to https://practitioners.functionalpatterns.com/ 

Functional Glutes are Powerful Glutes.  Train them how they were meant to be used!