If you want to grow your glutes, you might think that you have no choice but to submit yourself to a squat rack or resistance machine each and every gym session.
While it's true that utilizing heavy compound movements and heavy lifts is a great way to build stronger, bigger glutes – you might be surprised to hear that there are plenty of bodyweight glute exercises that can help to build strength and mass in your leg and glute muscles.
Using bodyweight exercises is a great way to begin your strength training journey, and glute exercises without weights can still have many benefits. From developing strength to improving mobility, bodyweight glute exercises will help provide you with foundation movement principles before moving on to the best glute exercises with weights.
Benefits Of Bodyweight Glute Exercises
Interested in giving bodyweight glute exercises a go? Here are some of the benefits of using bodyweight exercises to help achieve your goals:
Convenience
Develop Movement Patterns
Reduced Chance Of Injury
Increase Strength & Endurance
Convenience
One of the best benefits of bodyweight exercises is convenience. They can be included in your workouts wherever you are, whether it's at home, on holiday or even in the gym. Glute exercises with no equipment means you can make progress toward your goals in an environment that works for you.
Develop Movement Patterns
By learning the essential movement patterns of glute exercises without weights, you'll develop the ability to move through the full range of motion. This will give you a fantastic foundation to progress onto resistance based glute exercises or leg exercises, should you want to.
Reduce The Chance Of Injury
Many people run before they can walk in the gym world, and adding resistance to exercises before you have mastered the movement pattern can potentially lead to injury – so working on the mind-to-muscle connection without weights will set you up for success in the long run.
For example, loading a barbell for a Romanian deadlift but engaging your back more than your hamstrings and glutes won't have the desired effect, and may result in injury.
Increase Strength & Endurance
Yes, adding weights to your exercises is a proven way to develop strength. However, good progress can be made with bodyweight weight exercises, especially as a beginner.
There's plenty of room to increase difficulty too. Increasing total reps, introducing isometric holds, following a slower tempo, and utilizing isolateral exercises are all great ways to make bodyweight exercises harder.
The Best Bodyweight Glute Exercises
When it comes to bodyweight glute exercises, there are plenty to choose from to keep your training mixed, challenging your body in new ways while having fun!
If you like to work out at home, on your travels are simply prefer bodyweight exercises to heavy weights, we've put together a fantastic list of the best bodyweight glute exercises for you to include in your workouts.
We've also combined the glute exercises into a bodyweight glute workout at the bottom of this article, so be sure to save it for your next glute workout without weights!
Here are 13 of the best bodyweight glute exercises, with examples!
Bodyweight Squat
Jumping Squat
Bodyweight Deadlift
Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift
Glute Bridge
Glute Bridge Iso-Holds
Single Leg Glute Raise
Skaters
Kneel To Squat
Split Squat
Curtsey Lunge
Forward Lunge
Crab Walks
Bodyweight Squats
Let’s start with the basics. Ideal for whatever stage you are in your fitness journey, the bodyweight squat is an effective leg and glute strengthening exercise that can be done anywhere and will help you build lower body muscle mass.
Jumping Squats
If you want to take your squats to the next level, jumping squats make for a great alternative. By adding an explosive movement to the workout, this exercise will challenge your fast twitch muscle fibers and help to get your heart rate up. Add these to your next bodyweight HIIT circuit and get ready to feel the burn.
Bodyweight Deadlift
A great exercise to learn the basics of a deadlift before adding weight, but also a fantastic bodyweight exercise to target your glutes and hamstrings.
Aim to retract your shoulders and keep a neutral spine, whilst bending your knees to try and touch the bottom of your shins.
Single-Leg Romanian Deadlift
When you think of deadlifts, you probably think of a heavy barbell workout. However, there are loads of deadlift variations, and even when done using only your body weight, they can still be effective. This unilateral exercise will help you to strengthen and grow your glutes and core; improving stability, balance and reducing muscular imbalances too!
Glute Bridge
Glute Bridges are a #fitspos favorite and for a good reason. This exercise isolates your glutes and so really helps to build strength and endurance. They make a great addition to your warm-ups as they will fire up your glutes and make sure they’re activated throughout your workout. If you find these too easy, try doing single-leg glute bridges. Trust us; you will feel the burn.
Glute Bridge Iso Holds
This variation of the glute bridge is a great progression from the regular glute bridge exercise.
This one's incredibly similar to the glute bridge, but by adding in a hold at the top of the bridge, we can increase the time under tension within our glutes, making the exercise much more challenging.
Single Leg Glute Raise
This single-leg glute bridge is another fantastic progression from the regular glute bridge. By elevating one leg, we can place more emphasis on one glute, building unilateral strength within our glute muscles.
This exercise also engages your core well, as it plays a key role in stabilizing the body and preventing your hip from dropping on the elevated hip side.
Skaters
Skaters are a lower body exercise that will no doubt get you to break a sweat.
With skaters being a fantastic functional movement, they make a great addition to circuit training and can easily be incorporated into your workouts. Keep the movement controlled, maintaining balance with explosive sideways bounds.
Be sure to focus on generating the power from your legs and glutes, rather than relying on momentum.
Kneel-To-Squat
Another great squat variation is the kneel-to-squat exercise. This targets your quads, along with your glutes – and will also help improve hip flexor strength and hip mobility.
For an increased challenge, hold the squat for slightly longer on each repetition.
Split Squats
Do not underestimate these bad boys! The split squat is a great glute exercise, and it won't take many reps before you start to feel the burn in your glutes and quads.
This is a great exercise for building lower body mass and improving stability, preparing the muscle groups, and learning a fundamental movement ready for progression to weighted split squats and Bulgarian split squats.
Curtsey Lunges
This lunge alternative is a really effective way to pound your gluteus medius, which is often neglected in lower-body workout programs. They also help to strengthen your abductors and adductors, which is always a bonus.
Forward Lunge
The forward lunge is a great exercise to strengthen muscles in the lower body, including the glutes.
A great functional movement, lunges are a really challenging bodyweight exercise for your lower body and help build strength in your quads, glutes and hamstrings, as well as engaging your core muscles for balance too.
Crab Walks
Here's one you've no doubt seen your favorite influencer perform at some point.
The crab walk exercise is a great lateral movement that creates significant time under tension for the glute muscles.
There is plenty of progression with this exercise, by either bending your knees more, or adding a resistance band around the outside of your lower thigh to engage the glutes more during each rep!
Bodyweight Glute Workout
Now you've got plenty of bodyweight glute exercises to choose from, it's time we incorporate some of them into a bodyweight glute workout.
For maximum effect, we'll combine a variety of the above movements to make sure we're targeting the glutes from all angles.
Be sure to complete a thorough warm-up before giving the below workout a try.
The Bodyweight Glute Workout:
1. Bodyweight Squats - 15 reps x 3 sets2. Glute Bridge Iso Holds - 12 reps x 3 sets (5-second hold at the top of each rep)3. Bodyweight Deadlift - 15 reps x 3 sets
4 Rounds Of:
30s Skaters30s Curtsey Lunges30s Jumping Squats60s rest
The Takeaway
There are so many choices when it comes to bodyweight glute exercises, and all of these are great ways to either warm up before resistance training or combine for an effective bodyweight glute workout like the example provided above.
Play around with the exercise provided, and be sure to mix things up every so often to challenge your muscles, and keep things interesting!
