Dr. Bret Contreras: How to Build Bigger Glutes & Legs

This transcript was generated using artificial intelligence and may contain errors.

Andy Galpin

The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and Life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance center at Parker University. Today's guest is Dr. Brett Contreras.

Brett has a PhD in sports science, a master's degree in exercise science, and is a certified strength and conditioning coach. Brett is known popularly as the glute guy, and that's because he spent the last 30 years of his career focusing on the science and application of maximizing muscle growth and strength development in the lower body and specifically the glute or butt muscles. We'll talk about that a lot today. You'll learn a tremendous amount about how to optimize training for the glutes, but we'll talk about much more than that. You're going to learn a lot about anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and other things as they apply to practical recommendations. Brett does a phenomenal job and has over his career of weaving these things into conversations, not so that you learn unneeded or unnecessary mathematic principles, but so that you can really maximize your understanding of why certain exercises do certain things and others do not. This is going to allow you to leave this conversation, whether you're coaching people or just here for your own personal needs, having a much better understanding of how.

How to choose the exact right exercise based upon what you're trying to get and what you're not trying to get. So Brett has spent a lot of career on people who are training that want specific development in a particular part of their lower body and not in others. You'll learn a lot about how to do that. You'll also learn about how to make sure that that exercise is doing the right thing for you personally, that you're wanting it to do. So you're going to have a lot of fun. You'll take a lot away from this. I hope you can extend these learnings again from just females to men as well, from just the lower body to the upper body as well.

And so overall, you can enhance the precision, accuracy and effectiveness of your training and fitness routines, specifically regarding developing strength and muscle size in the lower body. That all said, please enjoy my conversation today with Dr. Brett Contreras. Dr. Brett Contreras, thank you so much for being here.

Brett Contreras

Thank you for having me.

Andy Galpin

The world knows you, for the most part, as the glute guy, and we will certainly talk about the glutes today. But I know you as the guy who used to write extensive articles on the Science of strength training mechanics. I don't know how many of those things you wrote and I read many years ago before social media existed. But it's very funny for me to hear people talk about you and then my perception of you is like, this is the science guy. This is not the glute guy. This is the deep, passionate love for science guy. So I don't know where our conversation is going to go today, but I certainly know we will definitely talk about the glutes and how to train and why and all those things like that.

But I'm personally a little bit more interested in kind of the other science stuff. So that is a little bit of my lead in. I don't know how you view all that stuff, but that's my perception of Dr. Brett Contreras.

Brett Contreras

Appreciate that.

Andy Galpin

To get us started, we're gonna play the hits, right? We'll talk about the glutes and all that. But what I was really hoping to go into very first, is you made a post fairly recently that I thought was really insightful. And actually I've changed how I do stuff now permanently because of a single post that you made. And that was referring to the difference in how to train women versus men. Now, my answer, which I've changed my tune on typically is because I've trained a lot of female athletes, is there's not that many things that are different, but you actually gave some incredible insights into things that are different and how you do differently. And someone who's trained, I don't know, 80% of your clients over your career have been female.

More, I don't know. What's a fair number there?

Probably 90, 90 plus percent. What are off the top of your head, some of the major differences in coaching females. And I'll give you context for you. We're talking about strength training or strength training related activities, not endurance running and like all things like that. So kind of within this wheelhouse, how do you think about this?

Brett Contreras

It's just mainly their goals and so men can't seem to wrap their head around it.

Andy Galpin

Like, it's funny you're saying, because this was literally me.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, it's most men because we want hypertrophy everywhere. If you were like, hey, Andy, you mind if I slap a little muscle on your traps?

You'd be like, I'll take it. Each Delt. Head. Sure. Bis. Tris. Sure. Pecs. Upper. Lower. Yep. Lat.

Andy Galpin

You can't name a muscle right now that I'm not gonna say yes to.

Brett Contreras

Say yes to everything. We want to Grow everything. And so, therefore, when we do our leg days with squats and deadlifts and lunges, and that tends to grow a lot of quad and additive and glutes.

But here's the deal. A lot of women, if they lean out, if they get lean, they like the way they look. They might want a little bit more quad and not too much, but they want a lot more glute. That's the goal, is to have large glutes. In fact, now surgeries are becoming very common because of that, because it's hard to get glutes through training. Even through proper training. Some don't get the glute mass they desire.

So women want glutes. Okay, say a man wanted arms as bad as women want glutes. We said, look, we want you to get, you know, I say, I'm a man. I want the biggest arms possible. You wouldn't say that like, you wouldn't go, andy, quit doing isolation lifts and just free weights.

Andy Galpin

Only do the complex movement.

Brett Contreras

Just do. You know, you're going to get big triceps if you develop a strong bench and. And weighted dips and close grip bench. And you know you're gonna get big biceps if you do weighted chin ups and pull downs, supinated pulldowns. Right? Every guy knows that. If I said, I will give you a million bucks if you put two inches on your arms in the next six months, what would every guy do?

They'd start training it at least three days a week. You'd throw what you know out. You wouldn't go, oh, train a muscle one day a week. You'd say, no, I'm gonna train it.

Andy Galpin

I don't care what the study's saying.

Brett Contreras

You might even venture into training it every day. You might be like, I think I some curls every day. And you'd use variety. But you'd be going, I'm going to get as strong as possible at close grip bench and weighted dips. I'm going to get my weighted chin up, but that's going to make up maybe a third of your volume. Two thirds are going to be curls and tricep extensions. Now use that exact same strategy for women with the glutes.

Yes, they're going to do the squats, they're going to do their lunges, they're going to do the Romanian deadlifts, Bulgarian step ups, et cetera, and they're gonna try to get strong at those. But if that's all you did, you're leaving a lot on the table. Your maximum recoverable volume for glutes is probably 36 to 45 sets a week if you split it up properly. But here's the deal. Cause if you said, andy, you're only allowed to do breathing squats, one set to feel like where you're, you know, you grind it out, you can do squat. Squats to failure, deadlifts to failure, and like walking barbell lunges to complete failure. How many sets could we squeeze in a week and recover from it still, you know, maybe 10 sets a week tops.

Like where you're to failure, especially when.

Andy Galpin

You'Re not 22 years old and on, you know, potentially recovery aids.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, it's going to be tough. No peds.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And you're not, not, not 18 years old anymore. Okay, so you're going to do that still. You're going to still do your compound list. But then you think hip thrusts. If all you did was barbell hip thrusts, you could easily do them every other day. They don't beat you up much. They would work you at short muscle lengths.

And people will say, well, they don't grow. They work you at short muscle lengths. They're not as effective. Hold on now. We got three studies. Now we have the Plotkin 2023, we have Cassiano 2023, and now we have Bartolomeu 2024, all indicating that they're just as effective as stretch position movements. Okay, so we don't.

The jury's out on glutes for glute growth. So the jury's still out.

We need more specific research. But it seems like they're just as effective. So if they don't beat you up as much and you can do more volume, why not add those in? The other thing is, it's like delts. How much delt volume could you handle per week? It's a different thing when there's different subdivisions. So every set of bench incline military dips that you do is front delt.

And if you're in the frontal, if you're in the frontal plane, it's side delt too. People think military press, especially behind the neck press, activates the lateral delts very well. But. And technically, every pull down and row you do works the rear delts. But I know personally, I grow my rear delts way better when I perform specific movements for them and it's noticeable. So anyway, yes, you got all your compound lifts, but you could throw in. If all you were trying to do was grow your delts, you could probably do some isolation work for all three heads every other day.

Now, with the glutes, the, like, women want the shelf. They want their upper glutes too. Well, so there's the glute medius. That's a separate glute medius.

And minimus is a separate muscle. So that volume doesn't. That's separate volume. But also there's some evidence about, you know, with regards to the upper and lower gluteus maximus. We need more research because the only training study was Plotkin, and it showed the same upper and lower glute growth versus between vertical and horizontal.

But we have some EMG evidence. Like when you put bands around your knees and do hip thrusts, it tends to activate the upper glute max, not the glute medius. By the way, women will do it for the glute medius. And it doesn't activate the glute medius more, it activates the glute medius less, but it activates the upper glute max more. But not the lower glute max more. We're lacking a lot of research, but my point is you can do a lot of volume if your main goal is glutes. So quit thinking about bro splits.

Quit thinking about, you know, a man decided one day, look at the human body. Look at it. Imagine on an anatomy chart, okay, I'm going to split this upper half into five, five different days. I'm going to split this lower half into just one day for everything.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Now, you see some bodybuilders over the years who did do break their lower body into a quad focus in a hamstring focus. But bodybuilders, bodybuilding is not about male bodybuilding is not about glute development now. And so most of the male bodybuilders, they don't. They just. If you do steroids and train your legs, you end up with fine glute development. And it's about getting shredded glutes. That's diet and conditioning.

So they don't train for maximum glute hypertrophy. If they did, they would have separate glute days. And so they don't care about that. The women care about that. And then male, some men care about maximizing glute size. Like me, a guy who never had any glutes. That's why I became the glute guy.

I had to study my butt off to grow, to grow them. Because I'm like, I'm doing these exercises, I don't feel them working my glutes as, as, you know, as well as I should. So that's the main difference with women, they want glute development is their number one goal. So they're going to train glutes three days a week, most of them.

Andy Galpin

Okay. You threw out so much gold right there. We're going to take a very long time unwinding and packing a lot of the things. There's a lot of terminology in there that I followed along with it.

Probably missed some people, though. I want to make sure everything you just said, people can grasp how helpful and important that was. So we're probably going to spend a large chunk of the next few minutes here going back through some of those things. But to summarize the initial question again, the context I laid out for you was women. This is the strength training side of the equation. This isn't mobility. This isn't necessarily body composition or fat loss or endurance.

This is simply if women want to lift weights and men want to lift weights, what are some of the things we should think about that differentiates them and the case you made pretty eloquently. There is oftentimes certainly not everyone.

Brett Contreras

Real quick, this is important. I want to give some shout outs, some credit. You said this is about. This is about hypertrophy mainly. Like, this isn't about athleticism. But I would have never came up with these methods that I've popularized if it weren't for my strength coaching background.

Andy Galpin

We're gonna get into that here right.

Brett Contreras

Now, submerge into that world. But they were doing three lower body workouts a week and recovering from them. I'm going. Bodybuilders tell you to train legs one day a week. And I'm like, they're doing knee dominant movement and a hinging movement every training session. And then they're doing glute activation work. And I'm like, why do you have to do glute activation work?

Well, you have to wake up the glutes in all three planes. Why can't we turn those into strengthening movements? Why are we using little bands and doing 10 glute bridges? Let's load those suckers up. That's what gave me the idea. So anyway, it's interesting that I came up with my ideas of hypertrophy because of the strength coaching world, but keep going.

Andy Galpin

Yes. Okay, so the summary for training men versus women, in this case, what you're honing in on is the fact that we don't necessarily, on aggregate, as a general statement, not every woman, not every man. Right. Just. You're saying you've trained probably tens of thousands of women at this point, have been through your programs and things like that. What you're just saying is, on average, most people that have come through your systems want more glute development, want to have bigger glute muscles, where men also maybe want big glutes, but also want bigger arms and things like that. The other thing that you would want to think about here is there's often a case when women don't want hypertrophy in certain areas.

So they will oftentimes will want bigger glutes, but not want bigger thighs. Right. So part of what you're talking about here and all the. The exercises and the methodologies you just laid out are ways that can help you potentially grow the glutes without also then growing the. The. The thighs and other parts.

Did I have that?

Brett Contreras

And. And by the way, that was a blog post I wrote in 2010, and I realized this is a thing. And say you don't have big glutes and you're a woman. And then from the side view, I go and get your quads and hamstrings bigger.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And then your glutes don't grow. They look even smaller now. It's proportion.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

And that's something that men can't seem to fathom, because why would you not want big quads and hammies? But if you have a certain aesthetic. You know, a lot of Asian women that I've trained who have muscular quads, but then flat glutes, they don't want to do more squats. And I'm trying to get them to. I'm going, squats are good for your glutes. And they go, no, they grow my quads. Brett, you have me front squatting155, and my quads are huge.

I don't want to do squats anymore. I've learned this over many, many decades of training women. So you actually make their glutes proportionally look smaller when you do that. So it depends on the. If you train the thin person that needs muscle everywhere versus the person who has big legs and flat. So. And we all have the right to train.

I mean, every man does it. Every. Every bro has problem areas and strong points. And so you look at all everyone who, you know, there people's training splits, and we all have a preference that we throw in that makes our training unique compared to everyone else's.

Andy Galpin

All right, so you're not necessarily saying there's a difference in physiology or anything like that.

Brett Contreras

It's just goals.

Andy Galpin

It's the goals.

Brett Contreras

The physiology, I think, doesn't. You don't even really need to take that. Yes, you, you, you know, all of it, all the differences in hormones and everything and the recovery differences and stuff. But I don't think that the. That has to change much at all. It's just a matter of preference. And then some women who are listening to this will be like, why would you not want to grow the quads and hammies?

Or I don't care about glutes. I get. I just want to be strong.

And that's fine. But we're talking about the masses. And most women, they look at the human body and they go, I want to split it up this way. I want to. They look at the lower body and say, I want to do that three times a week. And upper body, they typically do. Some do none.

Yeah, Some do twice a week, two. Two upper body sessions. Some just do full body training and work it into their. I would say with my programs that are right for like Booty by Brat, it's three full body days. But here's the deal. You do one press, one compound press could be vertical, could be horizontal. You do one pole compound, whether it's a chin up, a pull down, or a row, and you do that three times a week.

That beats what most of them are doing for body part split training. And I don't want to go off on a big tangent here, but with like Booty by breath, I. I will tell them I want to get in 10 chin ups eventually. And they're like, what? I can't even do one. Well, keep doing negatives. But having that goal will do more for your upper body development than having your one back day a week where you do these wimpy pull downs and put it on £70.

Yeah, because that's what all my girls will want to just put on 60 and 70. They don't go to 80. 90. I'm like, you're. You. What do you weigh? I weigh one. 130. Then you need to be doing 130.

You want to be able to do chin ups. You better be doing 130 for reps. Yeah. And anyway. But that tends to develop their upper bodies really, really well. And then, you know, a lot of women, especially in bikini, they want the side delt. So throw in your lateral raises.

But it depends on the women. They tend to want to do upper body twice a week. And some of them will have a back day and a shoulder day. And I don't think that's as wise as having two upper body days because of frequency. But anyway, they always have at least two lower body workouts a week. Always two, sometimes three. And some girls go crazy and want to train glutes every day.

I got creative in how to make that work because they're obsessed. And I get it, we've all been there. But they're like, I want to train glutes every day.

How could you do that? Well, it's doable. It's just you got to do more shortened short muscle position stuff, more band work, and then people will say, bands suck. Okay, how come during COVID people's upper glutes grew like crazy because they got a glute loop around doing tons of abduction because they're bored as hell. So they work.

Andy Galpin

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My wife does it. She loves it. It's three days a week of total body every day. And then you have.

Brett Contreras

If you have to listen to my voice, if you hear it in the.

Andy Galpin

Background, I don't know, you're. If anything, it helps me. It's three days a week, total body. And then there's two additional bonus days that are just for the glutes that you do. So that's what you're referring to when your program is such that if you only want to do it three days a week, fine. If you also want to do four or five, you can sort of add those things on. And the way that you've gotten around that, as you just mentioned, is those additional days, you just call it a pump, but it's non damaging, non fatiguing things that will stimulate a little bit of growth, but it's not going to crush you your next workout.

Because those three workouts are when you're getting your true maximal mechanical tension and stimuli and things like that. So I want to walk through that whole program.

Brett Contreras

But before we go, side note on mechanical tension, I just called Brad up. I'm like, brad, why do we say mechanical tension? What else could it be? Psychological tension. Let's drop the word mechanical. Is it just tension? Muscular tension on the muscle.

Why do we have to say mechanical? Anyway, keep going.

Andy Galpin

Okay. All the way back, though, you started off your career, you mentioned a little bit of your backstory I've heard, you know, before you didn't have large glutes as a kid. You wanted to develop them, so you kind of got focused in this area. I, I said initially where I had first saw your stuff was again, I don't even know, probably before 2010. I don't know. When did you start writing for. For things.

Brett Contreras

2009.

Andy Galpin

For teenage, right? Yeah, teenage and stuff all the time over there. These, like.

It's very funny. The strength conditioning nerds are going to understand this. The rest of you probably won't. But these things, like T Nation were like the only thing we had.

Brett Contreras

T Nation was the greatest. And like early 2000s, some of the.

Andy Galpin

Articles were wild on there. And then there'd be people like you. And I'm like, my God, this is a, like, this is a dissertation.

Brett Contreras

This is references all the top strength coaches. You wanted to be a top.

Andy Galpin

That's how you earned your stripes.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Actually, like a little bit of a side note, you're the example I also give of people think that, wow, you got a million followers. Because you did.

No, no, no, no. Like you were famous in this whole field way before Instagram existed. From things like putting your Chops in on those articles, speaking at scientific conferences before you had a PhD, I don't even know if before you had a master's degree, but you were using science as best you could in applications. So you spent, I don't know, what was it? At least 10 years, just purely coaching and writing for the most part. You have probably 25 years of lifting.

Brett Contreras

Yourself, 33 years of lifting. 28 years of coaching.

Andy Galpin

28 years of coaching. And this is a lot of high volume personal coaching. You have to be in the top half a percentile of people with a PhD in the field in terms of coaching hours.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Like, not that many people there. Right. So at what point in that journey did you get super focused on the glutes? You mentioned why the personal side? And then I'm gonna ask this, inflammatory on purpose. When did you, Brett Contreras, invent the hip thrust?

Brett Contreras

Okay, so.

Andy Galpin

And I'm a little bit smiling when I say that. I know some of the backstory, but I actually don't know the whole answer here.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, I think you'll be pleased to hear it. Okay, so when I was 16 years old, so I'm 48. So when I was 16, it was 1992. I'm. I. I wanted to lift weights for two reasons, and maybe every guy does this in the beginning, to stand up to bullies and to get laid. I look, I would look at my body in the mirror.

My friends were like athletes and they were developing, and I'm like, I'm this scrawny. What girl would ever want to see me naked? I. I wish I had the confidence that other people do that, don't care that just have the gift of gab and women love them. But I was like, I was insecure. I was like, why would anyone want to ever hook up with me? I'm so scrawny.

And I hated being bullied more than anyone. I remember getting my, like, back when we grew up, it was kind of worse now. I was a teacher for six years. I taught high school math for six years.

It's not as bad. Yeah, they have anti bullying policies, thank God. But back then, I'd have some kid come up and slam my head into the locker or something. And one time I was out at an event, and then some guy's like, I don't want to hear you talk. If I hear you talk, I'm going to hit you in the face. And he was the toughest guy in the school. I didn't speak the whole night.

And all of a sudden someone's like, brett, Brett. And I'm like, I can't talk. And then I answered them and he happened to be coming up and he just hit me in the jaw. And I was like, oh, I wish I was bigger than him. I wish I could bully him. And that's what I really fueled me to start lifting weights. But I heard two specific instances, I heard these girls saying, I can't wait to go to football practice and watch the guys training.

I love staring at their butts. And I'm like, oh, great, I'm going to be a 40 year old virgin.

You know, women want glutes. I. I don't even. I look so bad from behind my butt. And then, and then the next story is I'm playing golf with my sister's boyfriend, bending over to swing. We're on the ninth hole and he's like. And it's so funny because he became so descriptive.

He was like, you know, Brett, your back goes right into your legs. It's like you're missing the gluteal musculature. Most people have like a prominence that juts out and you're just, your back goes right in your legs. And I'm like, why do you feel so comfortable talking about my biggest insecurity? I remember just going, I am not okay with this. I'm going to do something about this. So I started reading everything I could.

And in the bodybuilding mags you had just read their leg day, they didn't talk about glutes. It was, what does Ronnie Coleman do for his quads and hammies? Because they will not mention glutes. It's like the muscle whose name shall not be mentioned. It's bizarre. They still to this day have this homophobic association with glutes and with hip thrusts. It's weird.

I cover a lot of it on my Instagram, like my idols, you know, Tom Platz, the first thing he ever posted on his Facebook page was drop the useless hip thruster. I'm like, he didn't want to make a post about. And he's my Tom Platts legs. Sure.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Like, Lee Priest just made a. I just responded to an interview. And he's like, bashing hip thrusts so bad. And if you're a, if you're a man doing hip thrusts, take your tampon out.

And it's funny. So I had to learn about glutes through other, basically through bodybuilders, what they did for the leg days, but also through other resources. And When I was 19 years old, my cousin bought Me this book, the Complete Guide to Butt and Leg Development. And that was 1995. I still have the book. It's on my coffee table in Vegas. I still flip through it.

It's still in mint condition, but I read it on Christmas. I just left the party and went into my room and read it for, like, two hours. Came back to the party. I'm like, this is my favorite present.

How did you know? And he goes, dude, I've never met someone so obsessed with the glutes. And, you know, it was 1995, and since then, my enthusiasm for glutes has never diminished. I'm still just as excited, but it was because I had no glutes. And no one becomes the glute guy if they just born with good glute genetics. Because if you have good glute genetics, guess what? You never need to do an isolation movement.

You just squat. And then you're the guy going, lol. Just squat.

Quit doing that stupid kickback. Quit doing that stupid exercise. Just squat. You know?

Andy Galpin

Yeah. I'm going to be real honest. Like, that was definitely me for a good decade or more. That's a part of my physique that it, you know, grows very easy and very well. And so I definitely dismissed much of these things. In fact, more than that, I was pretty aggressive earlier in my career. Like, you don't need any of these things. Just squat. Just squat.

It took me age, like, it does everybody else to go, oh, you know what? Not everyone's like me, right? So I don't need to emphasize.

Brett Contreras

And as you age, you get injuries. Injuries are what taught me a lot. Half of what I know is by working around, you get an injury and you work around stuff, you're like, oh, my God, I like this. Or, oh, my God, I came back stronger. I was missing something. So you asked about the hip thrust.

So it's October 10, 2006.

Andy Galpin

There's a date, exact date.

Brett Contreras

I'm watching UFC. UFC fights with my girlfriend. At the time, her name was Jeannie. And, you know, UFC fights in Phoenix, Arizona or Scottsdale. Come on.

At like, 9, 10 o'clock. So we're watching the fights, and I'm. I didn't care who won. It was Ken Shamrock versus Tito Ortiz, their third fight. I don't care who wins. I just want it to be a good fight.

Cause I, like.

Andy Galpin

I was in Phoenix on that fight, by the way.

Brett Contreras

Really?

Andy Galpin

That's crazy.

Brett Contreras

We were within a few miles of each other.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, I was at athlete's performance.

Brett Contreras

Really? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I know exactly where that, that, that was back before it was X exos or whatever. And so I'm watching the fights and I'm like, man, Tito, you know, mounts him.

And I'm like, ken, do something. Don't just lay there. Because I had a twin brother growing up and we would always, you know, grapple and you'd straddle the person. You'd be kick bucking like a bronco. Eventually you buck the person off. I had done a couple years of jiu jitsu training. I know the jiu jitsu guys can say, oh, if you have your hooks in.

But in mma, they don't have their hooks in. You can if you're really freakish strong, a hip, a good hip bump or whatever they call it now. But a powerful glute bridge can help get you out of that. And glutes help in a lot of ways in mma. But anyway, I started thinking at the time, I'm like, that should be an exercise now. At that time, I'm reading articles on teenage from Eric Cressy and these guys saying, do these glute bridges and I would do them. And I'm like, I love these.

I love the way it feels. But I could do a hundred. So I was going, how could you load that? Also, you're limited by the ground. How could you sink deeper? I went out to my garage, I had an idea, and I thought, I'm going to move my glute ham developer a few feet away from my reverse hyper. I called Jeannie, Jeannie, come out here, help me.

She gets out there, she's like, why can't we do this tomorrow? And I'm like, fine, I'll do it myself. Yeah, I'll do it myself. And I'm trying to move this GHD across the floor, but I did it. And then I'm like, a male weighs.

An average male weighs about 180 pounds. That's four 45 pound plates. I didn't think of the idea to use the barbell for a long time. I took four plates, I put a dip belt. It was so hard because I stood in the dip belt, tried to get up to my legs, and then I had to lay back on the glute ham developer, shimmy the weight belt up to my lap and put my feet on the reverse hyper.

Andy Galpin

Oh, this is super safe.

Brett Contreras

Oh, good. They could split apart and you'd fall. I know. Immediately I sunk all the way down, Thrust it up 1. I remember I got to like 15 and I felt my left glute start to. I felt like it was gonna. I was gonna pull it.

I was like, God, it's. I'm worried I'm gonna tear this thing if I keep going. So I set the weight down, and I'm like, oh, my God. I have a pump from one set. I had never felt that feeling before in 2006.

And I went. I went out to my front yard, looked up in the sky.

I'm not religious. I'm not even very spiritual. And I looked up in the sky. I go, I'm going to spend the rest of my life making this exercise as popular as humanly possible. From this point on, my whole life changes.

And I knew it. And it was just this random where your life is going this way and now it's going this way. And so people will say, so this is crazy. So I start giving it to all my clients. I'm giving it with body weight, and then I'm like, figuring out different ways to load it. And then my aunt says, you should. I said, I want to write an article for teenage.

And I think I'm ready now. This is going to be my first article, which it was dispelling the glute myth. That was my first article.

Andy Galpin

That was your first article.

Brett Contreras

That was the article heard around the world.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Because I come out of the gate strong, and I said, I didn't know.

Andy Galpin

That was your first one.

Brett Contreras

And so I'm like, this is the way you build your glutes. I have me hip thrusting 405 people around the world. Start doing it right away. That's the time when people would have said, this is awkward, Brett. We're doing that. That was heard round the T nation back then. They had that forum.

Of course, I was meeting guys down the road. Like when I went and got my PhD, this guy from New Zealand, this guy Sam, he's like, do you remember the day you post that article? I went and did them. I did 405. And because he's a powerlifter, he's like, it was awesome. Do you remember? That was me.

So the very next day, guys in New Zealand, guys all over the world were doing it. If someone was doing them, that would have been the time. People don't like Brett. This is awkward. We're doing this here. No one was doing hip thrusts. They never existed.

But now the weirdest thing happened in the world at that time. I saw it took me a while to think of using a barbell. I told my aunt about it. She goes, sounds like you need to. Invent something. And I go, I don't know how to invent anything. And she goes, sure you do.

You were always good at drawing. Draw some up right now. I did. I applied for a patent. I still have the patent.

I don't enforce my patent. I could probably make an extra $2 million a year if I enforced it. I feel guilty because I want there to be as many hip thrust machines as possible. And so.

But, yeah, they're all.

Andy Galpin

So you have the actual patent on the hip thrust?

Brett Contreras

I have the patent since I think I was awarded in maybe 2009. And you can pull it up. You can Google Brett Contrera's patent comes up on Google. You can see my original patent, all my drawings. But it took me a while to think of the barbell hip thrust. So my first invention was a scorcher. And it was like that idea, the rounded back pad.

I had a angled foot plate, but it was this monstrosity. But that's. So I opened up lifts. My first gym in Scottsdale. That's all we did for hip thrust was always off the scorcher, never anything else. And we did three types of hip thrusts. We did band hip thrust because I said you need bands, and it needs to be anchored low, so there's tension at the start and tension at the top.

So the thing was elevated. And then there was band tension from way down low. But you get to the top, and it was, like, insane. So we did band hip thrusts. We did single leg hip thrusts. And I gave a unit to Gunner Peterson.

He trained JLO back then. He's like, Brett, this is JLo's favorite exercise. But you need handles on this. I wonder if he remembers this. You need handles on this so they don't wobble around. So I put handles on the unit. It was great.

Single leg hip thrusts off the scorcher are amazing because it actually changes the strength curve. It's hardest at the bottom.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And you can do that off two benches. If you get two benches and you actually go all the way down to where your butt touches the ground and then comes up, it is hard off the bottom. So we would do single leg sinking really deep coming up. And then we do barbell. But the barbell were hilarious. This is what we did in my first gym. Trainer on this side, trainer on this side.

So we'd have to have to. Every time someone did barbell hip thrust, they'd be like, coach, I'm ready. And we'd have to run over. We'd be training, like 10 people at a time we'd run over two trainers, pick the barbell up, the person slides underneath, gets in position, drop it in their lap, they do their set of hip thrusts. Then we pick the barbell.

You get out of it. And we did that for two years. And by the way, I remember when I said, why can't you use the barbell? The thing is, it would hurt. You need padding. And I Googled thick bar padding.

I Googled this in, like, you know, 2008. And Hampton was the only one making this thick barbell pad for squats. And that became. So I made Hampton a lot of money until people started making their own.

Andy Galpin

Oh, wow.

Brett Contreras

Squat sponge. The squat sponge came out, and then, like, we started making ours. And. But people also use the Eric's balance pads, so we'd use those too. Those were the game changer for the hip thrust. So. All right, so now I decide to write an ebook.

Cause when I blogging was popular back in the day. You blogged, but you needed a money maker. So I made an ebook. I'm like, I can't be telling people do these hip thrusts off the scorcher.

They don't have a scorcher. How can I make this mainstream? Well, they could do it off a bench. When you've only done the scorcher and then you do it off the bench, you're like, I don't feel it on my hammies. I don't feel like I'm sinking deep enough. It just doesn't feel right. But then you get used to it.

So whatever you do the most you like, and then everything else kind of feels weird. But anyway, we start doing off the bench. Cause I'm like, I need to teach everyone how to do it using regular equipment. No one did a barbell hip thrust off a bench for a couple years now. I didn't just think of the barbell hip thrust. I also thought of the barbell glute bridge and the single leg hip thrust. And you're sitting here going, brett, you're looking me in the face saying, no one ever did a single leg hip thrust. No. No one ever sat on a bench and did a single egg hip.

There's at least. There's no evidence of it now. Okay, so prove me wrong. So when I wrote my glue ebook, I did my research. You know, I'm a researcher. I'm not lazy. I searched for a whole week of my life, like, eight hours a day.

I thought of every term you could come up with for the first term. Could be pelvic. Floor, supine, glute, hip, whatever. And then the second term could be raise, lift, thrust, bridge, push up, like. And I, and I did every combination of those. And I searched 30 pages deep. I go to forums and search.

I did see like someone glute bridging a keg. I found, later on I found some evidence. So here's. If you're a Brett Contrez haters, I'm going to give you four pieces of evidence you can use against me. Okay, the first piece is the evolution of the bench press. So I have this book from 1924, Super Strength by Alan Calvert, and it's 101 years old. So anyway, real quick, I'm going to fast forward to modern day.

If I made a post right now, like if you post this clip. If we were to collaborate on a post, there'd be at least 10 people that write LOL. I was doing those in the 90s, I was doing those in the 2000s and they remember it that way. I'm not doubting that they think that. I'm not saying they're lying.

They don't have good memory. They were doing that after 2009. Or they'll be like, my dad was doing that. And I always say, okay, I'm a historian, I would love to talk to the people.

How'd you do it? What padding did you use?

What set rep schemes? How frequently? How strong were the people? But there's no evidence. And what they will always say, this is crazy to me because we've reached a period of time where people are so insanely stupid that they think that we don't have history of anything before camera phones. So I'll say prove it. Like, give me evidence.

I'm happy to. I'll send out a newsletter. Hey, turns out I didn't invent the hip thrust.

This person did. I will give credit and they'll go lol. Like, we had camera phones back then. And I'm like, oh my God, I have a book that's 101 years old with 200 pictures in the back of it in black and white. A hundred years ago we had cameras. We brought cameras to the gym. We have a whole history before camera phones exist.

And these people are so like, inexplicable how insanely stupid they are. They are the dumbest.

Andy Galpin

So anyway, it's not that you necessarily maybe didn't invent the hip thrust, but you have yet to find any evidence.

Brett Contreras

Trainer invented the hip thrust in 2003. That's the only evidence I have. She used a stability.

Okay, so I'll go for the four pieces. Number one is Beyonce in 2003.

She's on a VHS. Is that the VH1? VH1, VH1.

Andy Galpin

There you go.

Brett Contreras

MTV's. Yeah, the MTV channel.

Like the counterpart. VH1 had a series called Rockin Bodies. And someone sent me this and I'm like, this was not.

This was after 2006. No, it was not. And she's on a stability ball and she's got a little barbell and she's doing hip thrusts. That's the only time I've ever seen a barbell hip thrust being performed. But it is with like a 30 pound barbell. And she doesn't have the best form. But I'd never seen it until.

I didn't see that until a few years ago. So you could say Beyonce's trainer. It shows her in the video. There's a little extra. So whoever this is, she could be given credit for inventing the hip. Gross.

Andy Galpin

You could find her name, Right?

Brett Contreras

And then if you look at the book, okay, that book I told you about in 1995, it has pelvic raises. It shows glute bridges and single glute bridges, but it doesn't show them with weight. But if you go to the back of the program, the back of the book has programs and it says in one part, weighted pelvic raises.

Andy Galpin

Okay.

Brett Contreras

But it doesn't show how to weight it.

Andy Galpin

Gotcha.

Brett Contreras

Now, that would be off the ground, but that would be a weighted glue bridge or whatever. But it doesn't say how. Now you look at the book.

Super Training by Mel Siff. Classic. There is some pictures from 1977, credit to Yuri Verkhoshansky, this Russian sports scientist. Rest in peace. And these are all hip thrusts. It looks like Kama Sutra drawings, but they're all hip thrusts. And you can see these are single leg hip thrusts.

There's one, the person against a bench and they're pushing against their hips. That's an isometric hip thrust. And then there's single leg, where you've got your foot on a kettlebell on your foot, and you're doing single leg hip thrust. And they're special exercise to develop sprinting. Who would have known that 50 years later we'd now have evidence that hip thrusts are actually better for sprinting than the vertical hip extension exercises? So that was ahead of its time. But these are hip thrust variations.

And then another piece was from the late 1800s, early 1900s, the invention of the bench press. So they didn't always have benches. So what they first started in the strongmen back then, they'd have to kind of do a pullover and press.

You just were laying on the ground. You just had to get the bar over your head. Then they started making bigger discs and you could roll it over, which is what I ended up doing with BC Strength, with hip thruster plates. Even bigger. But back then, they had to get it over their head. And then they do a press. And then people started realizing if I.

So it was like Arthur Saxon had the record, then George Hackenschmidt, and then this Joe Nord Quest. And he did it from a. He would elevate his.

Because you could bend. You could. If you turn it into a glute bridge and turn in a decline, you were even stronger.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

And then some guys started realizing, hell, I'm just gonna. They call it a belly toss.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett Contreras

So they would put it on their belly and toss it up and lock it out. So then that was the belly toss method. And then some guy named George L. Rich, he was so flexible, he could just go and bridge it all the way up to lock out, put his hips down.

Andy Galpin

Oh, nice.

Brett Contreras

And then at that point, they're like, this isn't even using pressing muscles. This is silly.

So the powers that be. Hoffman. What is Hoffman's name?

Andy Galpin

Bob Hoffman.

Brett Contreras

Bob Hoffman. Bob Hoffman decided this is stupid.

Let's get away with all this. Yeah. Let's just do the strict floor press. And that's when benches start coming along. So they were doing, like, belly tosses, but for one rep, not for reps. And it wasn't with the goal of building glutes. It was to have a stronger bench, which is what you'll see high school kids doing now in gyms, doing anything they can to get a stronger bench press.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

And interestingly, back then, bench press is some of the same criticisms are what you see of hip thrusts today. Quit being late. They were a lazy man's exercise.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

Standing exercises are functional. This is how you build the real functional muscle. Who wants to artificially expand the pecs? These aren't, you know, functional muscles. The real muscles are your shoulders and your biceps. And you should. You should be doing curls and overhead presses.

Who lays down to do an exercise? And then bodybuilders, you know, started doing the bench, and then it took off and then. But it was criticized in the beginning. And it's going to be bad for your posture. It's going to be non functional. It's going to lead to injury, and then people ignored them. And then it now is the most popular exercise today.

And the same thing is happening with hip thrusts now with the invention of these plate loaded devices and these selectorized devices. Those are the best selling pieces of equipment right now.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

It's like you're a modern gym. The ladies want the hip thrust machines.

Andy Galpin

I would be hard pressed to believe nobody in the history of the world ever did a loaded hip thrust before Brett Contreras. But of course, that's not what you're really saying.

Brett Contreras

Well, that's why I tell people then, because I had a coach tell me he was doing. I go, how come you never posted about it? Why didn't you? You didn't realize it was going to be popular.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, yeah.

Brett Contreras

It's just like that's the way history works.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. It just wasn't very popular at all before you. So at minimum, we could say you were the one that brought it to the lexicon.

Brett Contreras

Sure.

Andy Galpin

You were not doing it in every gym. It was not certainly in studios. Now you can't go to a gym that doesn't have a hip thrust machine of some kind.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. So, yeah, no one will argue that Brett cantrip popularize it.

I just don't. I just don't like being, like, basically being called a fraud, as if I take credit for something I never did. In fact, back in the day, people were like, calling it the Contreras hip thrust or two bloggers calling it the cht. And I'm like, don't make it about me. I want this to be popular on its own. Everyone knows I invented it, and then now no one knows I invented it. Because the world changed.

Social media kind of became a copycat game. Back in our day, we gave credit. We always gave credit. If you didn't give credit, you. You were, you know, dead in your tracks.

Andy Galpin

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That's parkerseminars.com I can't wait to see you there. Okay, so really fast, before we go into some more details about how to train and some of the things, walk me through the difference between a hip thrust and a glute bridge. You mentioned single leg glute bridges. You mentioned different loading strategies for people that are thinking like, I don't know the difference here. What is that difference again between a glute bridge, a hip thrust? Why does it matter?

Brett Contreras

If you're on the ground, It's a glute bridge. You can do that one leg, two. Two legs. Best way to do is off the Smith machine, though, because you're on a bench. It's plate loaded. You just load the plates up and you can go all the way down to the ground. You can always go sit on the bench sometimes if the plates.

If you're a smaller person, you don't even get to touch down before the plates touch down.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

Okay.

Andy Galpin

So your back is on the ground, your feet are on the ground, and you're elevating your hips up in the air with some load on your hips. That's a glute bridge.

Brett Contreras

That's a glute bridge.

Andy Galpin

One leg, two leg.

Brett Contreras

And if you elevate your feet from that position, it's a foot elevated glute bridge.

Andy Galpin

So you put your feet up on a bench.

Brett Contreras

Yep.

Andy Galpin

Which allows you to get your hips up higher and increase the range of.

Brett Contreras

Motion, but doesn't increase the quad activity. Right. If. If you. Now you elevate your shoulders, that's a hip thrust.

Andy Galpin

So now you're putting your back up on a bench.

Brett Contreras

Put your back up on a bench. And now if you elevate both your shoulders and feet, that's a dual elevated or foot elevated Hip thrust.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

So, yeah, basically, hip thrusts are going to build your quads a little bit more, probably. If you want all glute growth and no quad, no hamstring, no adductor, then the glute bridge is probably your lift. Because the thing is, you could say, do kickbacks, do these exercises, but these are not exercises easy to progressively overload over the years. Glute bridges, you can. And hip thrust. That's why they're so effective. They're very conducive to progressive overload.

Same with squats, deadlifts and bench press, the most effective exercises. You can keep loading them, you can have a standardized range of motion, a way to perform it. You do it this way every time. When you get stronger, you're utilizing progressive overload. You should be growing muscle over time. Yes, there are neural effects and coordination effects, but you should grow muscle over time. And that's why I say make it a goal to hip thrust.

315 for 20. That's your best bet to getting glutes and people.

Andy Galpin

315 pounds for 20 reps for a 250 pound man.

Brett Contreras

So it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's kind of crazy because you think every other lift you're like, well, size matters.

What do they weigh? But I found that when you're bigger, like hip thrusts, it's easier to hip thrust. When you're smaller, it's just more comfortable. You know, when you're bigger, your belly gets in the way, you're just cramped in there, and body weight adds to it. So I, I would like to say, you know, maybe 2.5 times body weight for 20 reps.

But really, 315 for 20 is very simple. Probably the best metric, if there had to be one. But obviously with genetics. Yeah, yeah, genetics are super strong.

Andy Galpin

I want to linger on that really, really fast. Again, what you're saying is, you personally having trained, again, thousands, if not tens of thousands of individuals, not NFL players, 90% female, probably most of them sub 200 pounds. What one or two of them have ever been able to hip thrust?

315 for 20. Like how many?

Brett Contreras

Every client I have, Ken.

Andy Galpin

Every client you have.

Brett Contreras

And not just, all right, you go to an Olympic weightlifting gym, what are you going to see?

Andy Galpin

Snatches and cleaning jerks.

Brett Contreras

Well, what equipment?

Andy Galpin

Oh, yeah, you're going to see barbells.

Brett Contreras

Well, you're going to see plates, squat stands.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. Platforms, power racks. That's it. Yeah.

Brett Contreras

What are you going to see if you go to glute lab? Hip thrust stations in San Diego, we've got like 12 against the wall, just against the one wall in the Astroturf.

That's what we do here. And the other thing is. Yeah. If you trained at Westside back in the day, do you think you would have been stronger?

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Well, if you train at glute lab, you think you're three. Fifteen for five is impressive. And then you look at these girls and they're freaks. Yeah, freaks.

They're doing 4, 4 95. They're doing 585.

Andy Galpin

Didn't you have a girl just to 800 or something like that?

Brett Contreras

So there's a. There's. I have not. I've seen one legit 800 pound hip thrust from a woman.

Her name was Daria. Now, the problem is people don't lock it out.

Full legit lockout. I've been watching hip thrusts, millions and millions of reps. I'm very skilled at seeing. Did you reach full hip extension? They have these Guinness Book of World Records and like, contests now, you see, And I get tagged in them. Like they didn't even come close to locking it out. Yeah, you got to reach full hip extension.

This girl Daria, she did 810 or 800. I think it was 800 legit. In training, she had done one of my strong lifting competitions. The thing is, hip thrusts are last. So you've already done squats and deads. She. She didn't get seven.

I think it was like 7:35 or something. She.

Andy Galpin

Well, nonetheless, call me still impressed.

Brett Contreras

At £700, she hit 765 legit. Full lockout.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

One of the coolest experiences of my life. And I think she could have done 800. There's another girl, Katie Soniero, I think could get to an 800 pound hip thrust legit. She's doing the rotisserie one now that's using the rotating pad that's on.

Andy Galpin

Oh, that slides with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett Contreras

That's on my thruster 3.0. The girls like it more. That also changes the torque angle curve to where it's hardest off the ground. The lockout becomes easy.

Andy Galpin

Oh, because you can roll back.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. It just changes it to where I did it the other day because I did it for the first time. It was always hard at the bottom. It feels. I'm too.

I got a belly, you know, it's too. I'm too wedged in. So I did like, I did it with bands and I did. I think I did 4, 405 for 12. And my client Dre is like, lol, coach, I'm stronger than you. I'm like, dre, it's my first time I did him. I'm still stronger than you.

I hope I'm stronger. I'm.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Literally twice your size. So I did it again, and it was. It's. It's. It's really hard at the bottom, and then it gets easier as you come up. It's really different. In fact, at the top, I'm like.

I feel like I'm going to tip over. It's kind of. You're kind of scared that you're going to flip over. But that's an interesting debate because now you're changing. So with that rotating pad, you. A lot of the men who criticize the hip thrust say, well, it's easy at the bottom, hardest at the top. Well, you can make it with this design.

You can change that around.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

But anyway, now there's that. Katie's doing like 900 pounds for four reps or something. It's crazy. Or, yeah, maybe it's 800 for four, but she's crazy.

Andy Galpin

It's a lot.

Brett Contreras

Anyway, there's. Women can get stronger than men at this.

I would love to. Relatively. Relatively stronger. I have never seen a man legit lock out a thousand. Well, maybe this guy. I posted it. There's one guy who looked like he had a legit lockout.

But you see the strongest powerlifters in the world, they never lock it out. And they're doing like, you know, they can get to 7,800 pounds. But it's really interesting, and I think it has to do with that. Women have possibly better leverage at lockout, especially with their adductors, some of their muscles. But maybe their glutes can get. Their glutes can probably get relatively. Maybe a little bit bigger, or at least they're training glutes three times a week.

It's going to get bigger. But I think they're maybe because they're not training their hamstrings and everything, too. So their lockout strength tends to be amazing. And I always think it's funny, what, 10 years ago, I'd have all these girls that are like, I saw this bodybuilder in the gym, and of course, that bodybuilder has a crush on one of my girls. So they're flirting, and then they see them doing hip thrust or glute bridging. They're like, oh, let me see if I can do that. And they can't do it.

And that's because they have strong glutes down deep in a hips flexed position.

Andy Galpin

Totally.

Brett Contreras

They can do half reps for days, but then you have them come up all the way and lock it out. They lack that lockout strength, which is something you will hear.

What's his face? Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones talk about how when people would start to use the machines, they're so strong in the stretch position.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

They're so weak here. It takes them a while to, you know, they're so weak here. There's this massive imbalance throughout the range of motion. So.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

So I, I, I do think that there are some anatomical differences that make women stronger at hip thrust. But also just comes down to, for women, the hip thrust is their bench press. Yeah. You know.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, of course.

Brett Contreras

Guys ask you how much do you bench women, how much you thrust, you know.

Andy Galpin

Right. Yeah. So, so you've mentioned now a handful of anatomical terms and you've, you've peppered in a little bit about how to train them differently. But I want to complete that picture if we can. So just give me the really basic overview of the glute anatomy. Right. The couple of different muscles there.

And then what I really want to get to on that is how do I train them differently if I need to? So if I want my glutes to get bigger, do I need to be having bands? Do I, should I not use them? Like, give me that whole picture of saying, okay, Brett, I want my butt bigger. Do all I have to do is hip thrust? Do I need to add anything else? What are adductors?

Complete that whole picture about what am I looking at anatomy wise? And then what implications do I have for training?

Brett Contreras

Okay, so anatomically you have attachments at the ilium, the sacrum, and the coccyx. It's mostly the sacrum. Like, so the glute max will tailbone. Yeah. Attaches a little bit to the pelvis, you know, and then the sacrum and a little bit to the coccyx. And then it inserts onto the gluteal tuberosity of the femur, but also onto the it band.

Andy Galpin

And it's attached to the back of your thigh. Like the back of your thigh muscle.

Brett Contreras

Kind of the lateral edge of it though.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

There aren't many muscles like the glutes. It's like a, it's like a quadrilateral. Is that, why don't I remember this? I used to teach geometry. It's, it's a, it's, it's almost rectangular shaped in a way.

Andy Galpin

Right. Well, if we contrast this to the, like the quadriceps muscle groups.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Those all come into the patella. Have one insertion point on that front of your knee. That's that knob down there.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

So what you're talking about is the glutes are different because they don't have that single point of landing, broadly being.

Brett Contreras

A fan of attachment, because they attach. Okay. So because they attach to the floor, femur and pelvis and sacrum, that alone is a big deal. But now you look at their fascial attachments. So first of all, there's some fascial attachments to the pelvic floor, giving us some implications with that kind of like urinary and cons in, like the pelvic floor function. Then you have the attachment onto the it band, which then attaches down to the tibia. So now it's almost like that can be considered a tendon.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

So it makes it. That would make it a biarticular muscle, you know.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. Meaning it's going to both extend your hip and rotate it out. Right. Because it is attached to the outside.

Brett Contreras

It attaches to the tibia. Not just.

All right, like. Okay, so you're talking about when it contracts. I'll get to that in a second.

Andy Galpin

Okay.

Brett Contreras

But it also attaches to the thoracolumbar fascia, to the glute medius fascia. A lot of stuff kind of blends in together. So if you consider the thoracolumbar fascia into the latter and the lat on to the arm, you've got kind of the glute max, possibly affecting things up and down the chain from the arm to the lower leg.

Andy Galpin

So your back, shoulder. Right.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. So for that reason, these people tend to over exaggerate and act like these, like, anatomy trains and stuff. And the fascia is everything and these myofascial meridians and everything.

But I do think it's. If you looked at. If you took a step back and looked at the human muscular anatomy chart or like, picture, you'd be like, the glutes are the keystone. They are the keystone muscle. That's why I'm okay being the glute guy. I would not want to be the pet guy who's got the keystone. They're the planteris guy. Yeah. So they.

They affect a lot of things. And it's like that centerpiece. So. So then you look at the subdivisions. Okay. So the glute medius that's been separated into anterior and posterior divisions. Subdivisions. It could have.

It probably has anterior, middle and posterior glute Medius isn't talked about that much, but it's. It's. People act like you can target them one, one or the other. And I like they're they over the glute medius overlaps the glute minimus. How do you target. They'll be like, kick out at this angle for glute me and this angle for. For glute. Glute min.

Andy Galpin

Right. So you've got glute max is the big one we think of as glass.

Brett Contreras

So the glute meat and min are.

Andy Galpin

Up, upper outer, up on outside. Right below your hip bone.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. And then the glue max is a diagonal shaped. And the fiber directions are, you know, around 40 degrees. Ish. They all, they, they change between. I can't remember. There's a couple papers looking at the exact fiber directions, but it's like.

And then when it contracts, you can see bodybuilders squeezing their glutes, posing. They become pretty horizontal.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

When you. So people will say. I've heard people say, oh, glute max is just a hip extensor. It's just. If it was just a hip extensor, why wouldn't they be vertical? More vertical? Yeah. They do three things.

They abduct, but it's only the upper fibers. The abduct.

Andy Galpin

Yep. Meaning it takes your leg away from your midline.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. Frontal plane abduction. So frontal plane abduction. If you're standing up, think jumping jacks.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

There you go. Abducting the legs. So the upper glute max fibers abduct, but the glute me and men are the main abductors. TFL as well. But glute me is like an amazing abductor. Super strong at abduction. Frontal plane, the lower glute max. There's evidence that it's an adductor, but I have not found any EMG activity with adduction.

Now here's what's interesting. Okay. There's the upper and lower subdivisions of the glute max. They seem to have be, you know, activated uniquely through emg. And the whole glute max externally rotates. The whole glute max extends the hip, but only the upper abduct. Some people say the upper is more effective in external rotation.

I think it's the entire glute max is very effective in hip external rotation. And when we swing a bat, you think. Because I used to just think of these things as distinct actions. Think about swinging a bat, you're loaded up kind of in the stretch position a little bit, and then you contract the Glutes, it does three things. You are going to extend the hips, you are going to abduct the hips and you are going to rotate laterally the hips. They do all three things at once during swinging, striking, throwing. So that's what they're called. Triplanar. Now when you bend over and you're in deep hip flexion.

Now the glute med and min are, are not their moment. Arms change where they're not even effective, very effective at abducting the thigh anymore. Maybe the posterior are, but not the middle and anterior. But now the glute max becomes a better abductor of the thigh.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. So if you think about this, like if you were to be standing up vertical and I just said, you know, do it, the jumping jack action, right. This is where you're lifting your leg out to the side. If you were to do this as a common exercise, where you like lay on your side and you lift your leg up in the air. Right. Now in that position, what you're saying is those small upper glute muscles, glute, glute medius, glute minimus, things like that might be adding to that action. But if you were to bend forward and now so like I'm standing here and I'm hinging forward, I'm doing a.

Brett Contreras

Like a seated hip abduction, seated hip thing, leaning forward.

Andy Galpin

Now if I do it, those muscles aren't really active anymore.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Now that entire action has to come from my glute max. Right.

Brett Contreras

Well, I think or likely when you said may the. From the sideline, the glute meat is the main hip abductor.

Andy Galpin

There you go.

Brett Contreras

No argument about it. From bent over position, I think the posterior subdivision would be activated. Well, you're going to get some activation of the hip. Extra rotators now become horizontal plane abductors. And also the glute max.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

How efficient are those at building them? We don't know, but I do include those in the program.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

So now you said, how do I build glutes? Well, because the glutes have, first of all, the glute max has upper and lower subdivisions and some people even say there's the, you know, the iliac fibers, the sacral fibers and the coccygeal fibers. They might even separate the glute max between three subdivisions, but definitely upper and lower. And then the glute mead has multiple subdivisions in the glute man. To maximally development them, you're going to do combine a lot of different actions. There's two studies One looking at the glute glute size of Olympic weightlifters and it shows that their glute max is larger than control sub than sedentary subjects. But their glute meat and min are not.

Meaning squats do not grow your glute medium in also, the Plotkin study showed that squats and hip thrust, neither one of them grew your glute medius and minimus. If you want to grow your glute meat and men, you should treat it like any other muscle and train it dynamically through a full range of motion. And there's one guy, this chasm pointed out that we're all doing ab junctions straight out to the side. You really should look at the pelvic shape and kind of go in the plane of the glute medius, which is diagonal at 30 degrees. If you look at how the pelvis is shaped and how the glute medius you should kick out. The problem is it's really hard for people to get that right. Yeah, you have a nice way of showing it in like an instructional video.

You look overhead and you tell them turn this foot in and then drive back. But it's really hard. People, they end up bending over.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

And then they're involving the glute max more. So it's really hard. And then do their foot go in front or in back? And then they end up at. So I have ways of teaching it, but basically for sometimes when it gets, when people keep screwing up, just go straight out to the side. But because the glute mead and men have multiple subdivisions, you probably should do different angles of abduction. You should go straight out to the side.

You should go at a 30 degree angle back. You should also do maybe seated hip abduction. Straight up might develop the posterior heads more. But also on the seated hip abduction machine, bridge up. Do them bridged and do them leaning forward. Because leaning forward for the glute max bridged up, you could put blocks like yoga blocks underneath you or just maintain the bridge position for the glute med.

Okay, what about glute max? You're going to get the most bang for your buck with hip extension. Hip extension exercises take them through the most range of motion. But now you start talking about how to put together the most comprehensive program I know in 10 years, especially if I team up with you and we start doing studies using this MRI stuff. But God, we have a lot of questions that remain. So right now, my optimal program, the scientific studies we have to guide us are few. We've got Kubo from 2019 showing deeper squats are better than shallow squats.

Andy Galpin

For glute max.

Brett Contreras

For glute max growth. But that just looked at knee angle. They were probably hinging over and yeah, they were probably. No, the beginners doing the shelving squats were probably staying vertical. And we don't have a study looking at super deep squats versus parallel. I think parallel would either be more effective or same. I don't think you need to go past parallel for glute growth.

There's two studies on quads showing you deeper is not necessary. That Kubo study showed same quad growth, but it showed greater adductor and glute growth going deep. And then we. So that's the study that people cling to about glutes being worked more in the stretch. There's also an unpublished study that should. I don't know why it's not published yet by Mao. So in kickbacks grow more glute in the stretch position.

But it's a straight leg kickback. Kind of weird. Who does straight leg kickbacks? You're not stretching it the most. You're not. And they. And they only went to neutral.

They didn't go into hip hyperextension. So that doesn't have a lot of ecological validity with like how we do things in the field. So the best anyone who's scientific right now, who trains people in real life and works with people and then also tries to incorporate the science. All right, this is what a reasonably. Because you get these crazy in every aspect of social like every field, every. There's these politics. You look at anything even in your world more the physiology and performance world.

You'll get these coaches saying this way and this way. You'll get people saying just train glutes in the stretch position. Every muscle grows best from the stretch position. But that's a fascinating area. I have every study on it categorized into the folders. The verdict is not out on every exercise and depends if you're a beginner or trained and how long is long enough. But what that whole category of research has not looked at is combining them into basically what you can recover from.

Because it might be that if you just could do one set a week, what would be the best thing to do? Maybe it'd be a set of walking lunges to failure. All right, if you can do two sets now, what if you have all the time in the world and you don't mind doing whatever it takes? Well, then I would say train three days a week at least. But what if what if you could do hip thrusts every day? You'd probably get some people developing overuse injuries. But my point is you could recover from that.

Would that be more effective than training long muscle lengths twice a week? Yes, it wouldn't be as efficient, but possibly. It wouldn't be as efficient, but you could recover from way more. What if you don't create any muscle damage after a while and you just stimulate hypertrophy and you can expedite the rate at which muscle, new muscle is laid down? We don't know. There's a lot of these questions. We don't know yet.

So right now train the glutes three days a week and follow the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is something I came up with to illustrate this concept. When you're doing vertical exercise, those are the most demanding on the central nervous system. Well, it's funny because if you've seen the research on that, we really don't have a lot of evidence that it's more demanding on the central nervous system.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, I'll hold my tongue, but go ahead.

Brett Contreras

I don't. We need evidence of that because people know what it means.

Andy Galpin

My vertical exercise, your mini squats, things.

Brett Contreras

Like that, squats, deadlifts, lunges, step ups, Bulgarians squats, skater squats, pistol squats, good mornings and all their variations. Those are the vertical exercises. The horizontal are hip thrusts, glute bridges, you know, your single leg hip thrusts, your back extensions, 45 degree hypers, your kickbacks. But within those there's. This is what makes it so complicated. You can make exercise, you can make things more knee dominant or more hip dominant, even kickbacks. What if you did kneeling kickbacks?

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Then you almost. It becomes like a step up. So I'm talking about an upright kickback. Yeah, you know, so. And then a back extension off a ghd is horizontal, that's pure horizontal.

45 is halfway between. But we call it horizontal because it works the squeeze position more than the stretch. Those exercises do not beat you up. In fact, after you've done them for a while, they don't beat you up much at all. They don't create nearly as much muscle damage. So those can be done more frequently. Frequently and with more volume.

And then lateral exercises, those are like penalty free volume because you never do too much. Those are going to work more of your glute medius and stuff. If you lean forward, yes, you're going to work more glute max, but they don't beat you up. We just do, you know, two to six sets at the end of a. Depending on someone's goals, typically at the end of the workout. But if someone really wants to grow their upper glutes, I might say do start with abduct. I mean think about it.

If you're really wanting to grow your upper glutes, begin with a frontal plane abduction movement and maybe end with one.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

So then you do the rule of thirds. You do around. So and then here's another simple, simple system. Three times a week, pick one exercise from four categories. The first category is your thrust bridge. And this could be in any order. The second is your squat lunge.

And when I say squat lunge, it means split squat, step up, single leg leg press. And then you pick a hinge. And the hinge, this is where it's kind of. It could be vertical like an RDL. It could be like a 45 degree hyper, it could be a reverse hyper, but it's more straight leggedy hip extension. And then pick a, an abduction movement. The abduction could be frontal plane, it could be horizontal plane leaning forward.

It could be hip external rotation still. So I call it abduction like lateral rotary. So you do your vertical, your horizontal, your lateral rotary. But pick an abduction, but also include abduction. There aren't many hip external rotation exercises.

We do two of them. The cable cuff where you spin.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

Those are hard to master, they're hard to teach. But anyway, when you do that system, you will fully develop your glute max and glute meat and min the you. Because when you do pick one from.

Andy Galpin

Each of those four, that's how you do it.

Brett Contreras

Do it three times a week. Don't do the same exercise every time.

Andy Galpin

That's lots of variation to make sure if there is an effect of range of motion, if there is an effect on activation, that you're covering all your.

Brett Contreras

Bases and it's more fun. And that's when, when, when I see people be like, just do RDls.

Do you imagine RDL? These girls train three times a week. First of all, you can't recover from doing squats and RDLs three times a week with intensity, with, with sufficient effort. But also, yeah, it's boring. And it's you, you better be throwing in single leg RDLs that are not as taxing on the low back.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

So what I found is you cannot do too much. These guys that are telling people, here's a, here's a science based glute workout, they don't train women because I'm telling you, most of them train three days a week. They train Lower body three days a week. These programs would crush people, would absolutely crush these women. I get carried away sometimes. So I don't do drop sets anymore. I don't do these crazy burnouts.

I don't do crazy super sets. I'm not trying. I don't even. I even do lower reps now than I used to because we used to get carried away. I even used to do like sumo deadlifts with the deadlift bar and touch and go.

Oh, that's like these girls can. I had girls doing 315.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Back in San Diego, Ashley got 19 reps, Dominique got 11 reps. Like, because touch and go, you can bounce that bar up.

Andy Galpin

You can move.

Brett Contreras

Everyone's cheering you on. Cool. You did something good and then you're sore for like a week, a month. You can't duplicate that for a month.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Because you're so beat down. And that's what I mean. So maybe it's muscle damage. Maybe it's like damage to.

To fascia, to discs.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

Something Chris Beardsley pointed out to me. When you do a conventional deadlift, you're doing a concentric lift, right?

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

But what happens to the erectors? You lie, you line up in the arch.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

You go to pull the hips shoot up a little. The background's a little bit. You pull it up. The. Before the bar left the ground, the erectors went into an E. You're activating it, it went into an eccentric. So that can create more damage, more something about the spine.

When you really do squats to failure, deadlifts to failure, those beat jumps. So you need a good mix within those categories. Within the squat lunge category, some should be bilateral, some should be unilateral, some should be more quad dominant, some should be more hip dominant. Meaning you can do a high bar squat with the feet elevated, but that's going to be more quad. You can also do a low bar vertical shin box squat sitting back. That's more hip dominant and then that. So you want to have variety within those.

With the deadlifts you want to do. Sometimes you might do a conventional sumo deadlift, sometimes an RDR or stiff leg D, but sometimes single leg variations. Single leg and even good mornings, you can do good single leg good mornings. Off the Smith machine, you can get good at good mornings, too. People say they're dangerous, but that's because they don't start off light and work their way up. Good mornings are good variations to do, but the hinge variations should mix between deadlifting good mornings and then also 45s and reverse hypers and back extensions. And then the abduction should be blended between frontal and transverse plane.

And there's so many abduction movements. There's side lying, hip raises, extra range, sideline hip thrust. My favorite are glute medius hip thrusts and glute medius kickbacks. You can google those. But basically then the hip thrust variations should blend between. You could do double leg, you could do single leg and B stance, but mostly double leg. But vary on between barbell, Smith machine and plate loaded devices.

But also you're getting plenty of work in this system. You're getting plenty of stretch position work. So with the hip thrust, it doesn't always have to be emphasizing full range or you can emphasize the lockout in a few different ways. We do a lot of pauses at the top. We do a lot of bar plus band. Where you connect the bar to bands makes the lockout even harder. And you can do pulses where you're just doing the top range of motion.

If you only did hip thrusts and that was all you ever did, then you should probably do some bottom pauses, bottom range, among ways to make the bottom harder. But you get those when you do the lunges, the squats, the rdl. And this is the best system I've come up with. It's the most scientific way to train the glutes. As we know right now. Any reasonable person would say that. Because if you said to. If you said to like a bro.

Okay, if you put 2 inches on your glutes in the next few months. Yeah. You think they'd train it one day a week? No one would train it one day a week. You train it a few times a week. But you gotta recover from it and you can't get carried away. In fact, a lot of times when I train my girls, if I have them do reverse lunges off the Smith machine or the lever squat, the plate loaded squat, and they do two hard sets, I'm like, done sometimes one hard set, I'm like, just be done.

You set a pr. I'm like, you're going to be sore from that. And sometimes they're like, coach, I was so sore. Thank God I only did one hard set. That's something no one knows to do anymore. They don't. They always just do three to four sets.

Sometimes one and two sets is fine as well. You gotta be able to recover. And if you don't recover, then what happens is this happens in my gym a lot, typically on Fridays. And which sucks is because Friday, if you train Monday Wednesday, Friday you have an extra recovery day. So it'd be nice to be fresh on Friday. Train hard. Cause you got two days to recover.

So optimally that would be your day to push hard. But sometimes they're like, coach, I push myself hard on Monday. Wednesday I am beat down. So what they do is they do a, a short muscle length day or like a, they, that's when they film their, their influencer workouts. And they did, I'm like, you didn't even do that workout. But that got the most likes. So they do variety, they do their fufu, wimpy movements that the men arguably.

So they get pissed at. That's when they do just some kickbacks, some abductions, some light bands and bands and stuff. And then they, they do that on Friday. They rest Saturday and Sunday and come back Monday and they crush it. Yeah, because they did a wimpy workup. But that's auto regulation. That's how they periodize.

But ideally you wouldn't, they wouldn't have done too much on Monday and Wednesday to begin with, so that Fridays could have still crushed it. But that's an art onto its own. How to nail your training so that you don't have to de load so much and you don't have to do radical things. But that's something we, that takes a lot of years to master.

Andy Galpin

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And these are obviously critically important. But so are the micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. And even if you're eating a healthy diet, it's often hard to get enough of these vitamins and minerals along with the probiotics, prebiotics and adaptogens to keep your body performing at its best. It's for these reasons and many others that I personally take AG1 almost every day now. It's of course not a replacement for eating whole healthy foods, but it is a great way to make sure that you're plugging in any gaps in your nutrition to improve your energy, bolster your immune system, and just generally help promote a healthy gut microbiome and more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com perform to receive 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 + K2 again, that's drink AG1.com perform to receive 5 Free Travel Packs plus a year supply of Vitamin D3 + K2 couple quick questions on that you've made, I think, a couple of points really clear to maximize glute development, whether that's growth and specifically growth or strength. But growth is for the most part we're talking about.

You haven't said these words directly, but it's clearly come through in all the examples and the information you provided. Consistency is incredibly important. Right. And so all the rationale you're going back on here is we got to be able to do this more often so we can continue to progressively overload. And that's really been a backdrop here. So as somebody who's probably been responsible for more butt growth than anybody on the planet, I think that's a pretty powerful message from you that says like, just do enough to stimulate growth here, but don't annihilate so that you can keep training for months or years. And that's where you're going to see these big, big increases.

Brett Contreras

Yes.

Andy Galpin

You also used variation to get there. That is another way to keep yourself in the game. Right. You can use, you call them short moment arms. Right. These are again, things short moment, short muscle length. Short muscle length. Right. Thank you.

These are different exercises that you've said don't beat you up. Right. And what that means is your joints and the tissue itself won't be as hurt or sore, but you'll still get a lot of results from them. So you can continue with your progressive overload and you can be consistent. Right. One quick clarification on that little system, right? So you pick one exercise for the four different bucket areas three days per week, and you said maximize variation.

Am I picking, say from bucket one, one exercise for Monday, one exercise that's a different one on Wednesday and then a third different exercise on Friday? Or are you saying like every single workout, pick a totally different exercise per category?

Brett Contreras

That's such a good Question. So ideally, what you would do is, okay, so this is the component of the system. I didn't talk about rotating focus. We've read about periodization our whole lives, right? And whenever you read about periodization, it's about changing volume and effort or like.

Andy Galpin

Load and intensity, some variations.

Brett Contreras

Intensity. What does intensity mean?

Load or effort? So I don't even say intensity anymore. But like, we basically, you start off with more volume, lighter loads and do more sets.

And then as you. As you go up in weight and use more and more weight and train harder and harder and closer to failure, you do less, you know, so volume and so it makes an X.

Volume and effort make an X. But it was always assumed to be like, what? I'm always going, like, what exercises? The periodization is kind of like, there aren't good books on it. If you want to read up on periodization. Like, I think my book Glute Lab is one of the best because I talked about all the nuances and stuff, but, like, they never talked about rotating the exercises. And I tell all these powerlifters, and I don't presume to know more than the bodybuilders about bodybuilding and the powerlifters about powerlifting, but I do think powerlifters could get stronger because guess what?

Squats and deads compete with each other. You could say they build each other, but they compete. Everything competes up to like, you know.

Andy Galpin

Generally don't see people that hold world records in both. Yeah, it's usually one or the other. We have the total as well, but that's because they're ahead and one of them really fall.

Brett Contreras

So, yeah, if you can't tell me that this lifter wouldn't have gotten better at squats if he quit focusing on deads for a while and vice versa.

Andy Galpin

You see the same thing in weightlifting, by the way. Snatch and clean. A jerk.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

It's hard to be best of both. One of them runs away and the other one. And you try to win that way. Right.

Brett Contreras

So take some time. I did this just recently. I went, God, when have you ever prioritized your hamstrings for like two months? So I started every workout with either a deadlift, like a stiff leg deadlift, or a good morning. And then I do two different isolation movements for the hamstrings. When have you ever done three hamstring movements in one workout? I start doing that.

Oh, my God. It got scary for a while. I'm doing good mornings with 345 pounds for 15 reps. I think I could have gotten 20, but I stood rounding a lot and I'm like, how fast can I keep going here? But it's, it's. I went, oh, my God. I've never really prioritized.

You're always doing squats first or deads, but never stiff leg. And you're, you're never really doing as much hamstring work. So anyway, I'm going to tell how I think this applies to bodybuilding, but I'm going to tell you what I do in Booty by Brett.

Booty by Brett. I was realizing, okay, and I got this one time, I had this epiphany. I'm like, someone asked me how many chin ups I could do.

Like, what's my max? You know, weighted chin up. And I'm like, well, I can do 12, but I could get more if I trained for it. Well, why don't I train for it? Well, what would I do if I trained for it? I'd probably do chin ups every day. And then I started thinking about all the different lists.

What if you wanted to become strongest at your bench press, what would you do? What if you wanted to get strongest at your squats, what would you do? How often would you squat? I'd probably squat twice a week, but I can't deadlift hard. Not to failure twice a week. So I realized every lift has its own rules.

And I got. And then, then I created strong lifting. And those are the base. Stronglifting is like powerlifting, but with six lifts.

Squats, bench, deads. So the three power lifts and then chin ups, military press, and death and hip thrusts. Those are my six favorite lifts.

We got really good. In fact, I would say I'm the world's expert at getting you strong at all six lists because that is all my girls did. What I will tell you is it's rare, like, it's hard to have 100 pound military press. Strict.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, yeah.

Brett Contreras

But to have 135 is insane. That's, that's, that's like elite for a female. What I will tell you is having, if you lift, if chin up, you take your body weight and you add the toes, you add to it because you're pulling your body weight up. So if you take your six lifts, your one rep max, and I'm talking strictly, people all lie squatting below parallel. You know the, the, the powerlifting rules.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

For the three powerless and then with a chin up, not starting from here, starting from a dead hang and touching your chest to the bar, not just getting your chin over chest to bar.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

Military. You can't use your legs. They're locked out from here overhead. And hip thrust, full lockout, which people just lie. Yeah, they'll add 100 pounds of their hip thrust because they'll get it 80% of the way up and call that a hip thrust. It's very rare to get a 12 times body weight total. You get a 13 times body weight.

There's only one person in that class so far. Yeah. And it's a cool thing because I think that's probably the best thing you can do for your physique is your relative total on those six lifts. And bodybuilders will say, who cares about when we're at max strength.

Strength, does it matter? It does matter for natural lifters. And yes, you can get good physique from just doing lots of variety and mind muscle connection and focusing on slower tempos. But in my opinion, that only gets you so far. You've got to get strong. My girls with the best glutes are very strong. Strong at hip thrusts, strong at squats, deadlifts.

I mean, if I wanted my pecs to get bigger at age 48 after all these years of lifting, guess what? I better build my bench. I can't just get there doing all the flies and all the machines. Yes, you can theoretically increase volume, but there is, you know, tension on the muscle is paramount.

And so you gotta. And not, not, not one rep max. But you got whatever you're set of six, you're set at 10, something you gotta be setting PRs and getting stronger. So anyway, what I will say is like, yeah, those power lifts. I started realizing, well, if you wanted to get your deadlift as strong as possible, quit prioritizing the squat. Don't go for PRs, do squats still. But don't try to progressively overload.

Andy Galpin

Save some gas.

Brett Contreras

Save the gas for the deadlist. So what I started doing with Booty by Bread is I had this rotating focus. It's a periodization method I came up with just for Booty by Bread. I wanted to publish it in the Method Just based on Strength and Conditioning journal because I think it's very innovative. So month one you prioritize is a well rounded month, okay, that you're, you know, and we've changed it.

We've changed a bit. The original Booty by Repeaterization was a month one. It was a well rounded month. In a well rounded month, guess what you do. Monday you squat, Wednesday you hip thrust, and Friday you deadlift. So that works out well because you recovered for all of them, squat, hip thrust, deadlift, and then bench, chin up, military. And then if you do three full body days, you're going to do a compound upper body press, a compound upper body pull, a squat, a hinge and a thrust.

So five exercises per day for full body strength. And then the abduction for the upper and lower body are for you throw those in. Because of the psychological, everyone wants the upper body abduction for the side delts, the lower body abduction for the upper glutes. Okay, so after this well rounded month, now you've been pushing everything, now it's time to specialize. Month two is a squat focused month. So if you're trying to build your squat, all three full body days can be the first lift can be a squat pattern, but one of them will typically be, some people can handle squatting three days a week, some people can't. Why risk it?

People get fai, they squat deep, people get knee pain, low back pain. So to have two squatting days like Monday, Friday squatting and Wednesday, a single leg, a step up, a reverse lunge, a Bulgarian split squat, something like that. Okay, then what happens after the squat focused month? Your knees are going to be feeling it a little bit, so it's a perfect time to transition to the hip thrust. Okay, so now you focus on the hip thrust for a month. Every day starts out with the hip thrust variation. Typically it's barbell hip thrusts on Monday, straight sets, pause reps on Wednesday, bar plus band on Friday or pulses or something, or one and a quarter reps.

But two of the three are more focused on lockout work. Now, each one of these months, you're still going to do, you're still going to, you're going to squat, hinge and thrust. Every month just one is on the focus, the others are on the back burner. Okay, and then what happens at the end of the hypdos month? You're feeling good again. All right, now it's time for a deadlift month and then deadlifts. You can't deadlift.

Well, you can deadlift three times a week. If you do like stiff legs, single leg, RDL and rdl, but actual full deadlifts like a sumo or conventional or even a trap bar or semi sumo. No, but if you do that, have one day, typically like say day one, Monday might be stiff leg or rdl, real strict light and stay, stay a couple extra failure. Wednesday could be a hinge still, but it's a single leg hinge. And then Friday is your heavy deadlift day because you got two days to recover. So now after the four weeks of heavy deadlifting, guess what? Your low back is taking a beating.

Your overall system now it's perfect time for a single leg month, single leg and dumbbell month. And that's what I love about it.

Andy Galpin

So by definition, you're taking intensity out. You're still going to get burns and you're going to feel good, but you're taking intensity out because you cut load down. Cause you're on a single leg period.

Brett Contreras

And two studies have shown, one with step ups, one with Bulgarians, showed they built squat strength just as well as the bilateral lift. Yeah. So you're still keeping your strength up.

Andy Galpin

At minimum, you're going to keep. You're going to maintain where you're at.

Brett Contreras

You're not going to go backwards, you're going to maintain. You can even build. So it's kind of cool because some people are like, I grow my glutes during the hip thrust month. I grow my glutes best during the single leg month. I grow my glutes best during the squat month. Maybe squats are good for them. Or maybe it's because during the squat month, hip thrusts are third and you're doing them with a mind muscle connection. Who knows?

There's so many moving parts, but there's. It's more fun training this way. So that's how I did Booty by Brett. Then I started talking about, you know, what about bodybuilders, if we've been talking about this? What if you said, brett, can you grow your delts? I just did it this year when lengthened partials became popular. I'm like, I'm so sick of doing dumbbell lateral raises.

I'm even sick of cable lateral. I want to see if I can grow doing lengthened partials and doing basically more variety. So I started training delts three times a week and they got bigger than they've ever been, I think. And yeah, so some days I'm doing heavy dumbbells, sometimes cable, but a lot of times just doing the bottom partial. And then I got really scientific like, how do you maximally stretch this? You really should have the cable facing kind of this way and just go to here. And with a dumbbell, I don't want to do side lying, but basically I don't want to go all the way up because after here there's no tension.

But I would just lay on my side and just do half halfway up length in partials. And just from the greater volume, I grew my delts. Guess what? You get so Sick of delt day. You get so sick of training your delts. So, yeah, do it for a month. But what if we did that?

Because maintenance is easy. So I made a video, and I don't even know if I ever posted it because it was the sexual innuendos. But I'm like, imagine having six balls. And this is what progressive overload is. But not just I'm saying six balls because each ball represents my favorite lift.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

My six favorite for full body strength and musculature. And even the six you've listed earlier.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

This six I listed earlier. So imagine trying to juggle six balls. It's really hard. But what if every time you gain strength, you set a pr, the ball grew a little bit? So each, every time you set a pr, the ball gets bigger. It gets to a point where you can't juggle all six of them. They're knocking into each other.

They interfere with each other. And you try to go up on six lifts every month of your life, you will get nowhere. The balls will all fall to the ground and you stagnate. You get nowhere. But what if you have six balls laid out and you take two of them and you're like, okay. And they get bigger. It's okay.

It's easy to juggle two balls and these four on maintenance mode. Guess what? The literature shows it's very easy to maintain size and strength with minimal volume.

Andy Galpin

So these four one time a week. Yeah, one time a week. A very minimal sets a week or even every other week.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. So you can maintain your strength and your size with lower volume. So I started thinking, maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe the bodybuilders could have seen better results had they, oh, had they switched the focus from month to month. So one month you're doing body parts. Well, I thought about it. One for upper, one for lower.

Because what bodybuilder has ever had prioritized glutes and glutes and adductors go together because when you go deep, the adductors in deep, deep hip flexion actually have better leverage. So it's really, really hard to do deep stuff and not work your adductors because they have such good leverage.

Andy Galpin

And hip flexion adductors, by the way, are the opposite. What we're clearly saying here is a DD adductors versus abductors. So if the abductors, a BD or the jumping jacks adductors are the ones that you're pulling your leg close right together.

Brett Contreras

So doctors add to the body abductors take away.

Andy Galpin

Right. So what you're saying is in magnus.

Brett Contreras

Is a huge hip extensor down deep, deep hip flexion.

Andy Galpin

So your groin muscles. So if, if you are squatting, say for example, and you're doing a lot or a lot of squatting at type of activities and say you only go a quarter of the way down or halfway down and then you change it and you go really far down, you're very likely to notice really sore adductors. Right. You're groin. And this is exactly what you're talking about. Because in that position they start actually adding to hip extension.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Where in a, in a. The top position. They don't actually do that.

Brett Contreras

They have the best leverage in deep hip. Slightly better than the glutes. Yeah. On average.

Andy Galpin

Which is why again you can train your groin area, if you want to think about it that way, by doing full range of motion all the way to the bottom. Squats. If everything else works and you don't have other issues with it, you will see tremendous.

Brett Contreras

So you pair adductors and glutes together. So one month for the lower body you're focusing on glutes and adductors, one month you're focusing on quads and one month hamstrings. Then the other stuff goes on the back burner. And then for upper body it's hard to do all of them because arms, arms. So I said one month focus on pecs, one month on the back and one month on the delts. What about arms? Okay, well then you have four months and then I think you, I think three months of breeding.

Three months, then you're back. So I thought about a really effective system. I was going to start like Body by Brett to be for guys, but I don't know, I don't know if I could. I'm busy with Buddha, but it's hard. Anyway, I thought that would be a fun system. And then I thought, well, instead of having every person has their system and they have all these theories, it would be. How would you test that?

Well, you'd have to do a few cycles of it. So it'd have to be a nine month study. You can have the control group do just regular body part split training and then this new method where basically the muscle you're prioritizing, you're training it three times a week. It's hard to train chest three days a week, you know, quads three days a week. It can be done, but that's the primary focus. That. And then you have an upper body muscle and then Everything else goes on the back burner goes on maintenance mode.

Would you see better hypertrophy results? Blasting and cruising.

I don't know. It's just a theory, but it's a. It's a strong theory. A strong argument could be made.

Andy Galpin

Yep. I want to go back one thing to make sure we, We. We finished the loop on this one. You mentioned, what did you call it, the rule of three or something like that? What was the rule of thirds? Exactly. Again, what was that?

Brett Contreras

A third of your exercises should be vertical in nature, vertical hip extension. One third should be horizontal, and then one third should be lateral rotary.

Andy Galpin

All right, perfect. Okay, great. Thank you for that.

Brett Contreras

When you do that, interestingly, when you do that, it's not just best for the glutes. You also, because the vertical exercise are going to hit the quads and the hammies. The horizontal will get some hammies too. And, you know, so it's like you're going to get. Or that. Or that system I talked about where you pick a squat lunge, pick a hinge, pick a thrust bridge, pick an abduction. The squat lunge movements develop the quads and adductors, the hinge movements develop the hammies, and then so you get nice develop.

It's a good system to use for.

Andy Galpin

Overall development if you want to develop all the lower body of those things. Okay. In your. Whatever it is now, 20 plus years of focusing on the. The hip thrust and the glutes and hip extensions and all things kind of in this area. I'm sure you've interacted and had plenty of people, women or not, come up to you and say, I've tried to grow my glutes. I've tried, I've tried.

It's not worked. Are there any themes that have popped up over those years and those interactions of kind of most common mistakes that they've been making? In other words, people have been like, I've been at this for a year. It's not working.

What am I doing wrong? Brad?

Brett Contreras

Yes, great question. Because those types come to me and they can get results. It's really hard for some people to get stronger. So when I talked about the environment in glute lab, like, yeah, you show up to glute lab. Yeah. You're not. You're proud of your.

Because you're the strongest person in your gym, because you hip thrust three plates per side. And then you come in and you see, you know, in Florida, you see Dre, you see Vika, you see Diane, you see Masa, you see all these girls doing Five plates per side, and you're like, oh, my God. And not sloppy reps. That's the thing about.

I said 315 for 20. Not slapping sloppy reps.

You control it. Full little slight pause at the top, all the way down, all the way up. Rep 20 looks a lot like Rep 1. It's not like arching and not. Not, you know, hyperextending your spine and anterior tilting and only getting 80% of the way up. And jerking, though, it's a smooth tempo through a full range of motion. That is a great indicator of someone who's going to have amazing glute development. But. But, yeah, I would say most people just can't get strong without a trainer.

And I will tell you what fuels me, because I travel between Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, and San Diego. I was just in San Diego right before this, and they call it the bread effect. They independently came up with it in Fort Lauderdale and in San Diego, and they just think, brett, I don't know what it is. I've been hearing this for 20 years, 28 years. I can lift so much more when you're around. I don't know what it is. And I joke that it's my pheromones.

Andy Galpin

Absolutely.

Brett Contreras

But it's having someone who trusts you. You know, hey, I want you. This. This happened the other day. Lili, she. She's. She's, like, warming up.

She's hasn't ever deadlifted above 365 in training. She hit 405 at a competition. Then she had a back injury, and she's been.

Anyway, so I. I just. You. When you've coached for so long, you know, so much just based off bar speed, I don't know what the bar speed actually is. I'm just watching, you know, what it looks like. So you have these indicators when. When I could watch my client allegro.

When I can watch Lili and I. I watch her go 275, and it goes, boop. And she's just accelerating on the way up. You can tell when it looks. I go, you could have done that for 37 reps. I could go, 3:15. She goes, boop.

I go, you could have done that for 37 reps. Okay, I don't know why I said 37, but I go. She goes, what do I do next? I Go, go, 385.

She's like, what? Go three? Don't warm up in between. I go, what do you want to do? She goes, I want to do whatever you tell me. I go, then do 385, let's. And then I announce it.

I'm like, everyone. Lily's going for 385. And then everyone's watching. And then, you know, and I always tell with Sumo, watch Defi Cohen. The bar doesn't fly up.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

It doesn't rip off the ground like conventional. Take your time. Could take four seconds for the plates, but that means you got to maintain good posture. You panic and you. You round and you shoot the hips up. And now the lockout on Sumo becomes so infinitely harder. So she.

She pulls it. She hits three. If I put sound, she's so happy. This has happened for so many years that it fuels me. I love. And I love it too, because when that. When I'm. When I.

When I'm not around. So I travel back and forth when I'm not around. They don't go for PRs. When I am around, they go for. They're like, yay, we can PR again. And it probably works out in my favor because you don't want to crush them every week.

So it's great. So you train at my gym just because everyone's so strong. Yeah. Like, if you went. If you and I trained at some gym where everyone's doing muscle ups and 20, like, we'd be like, shit, I better do. You can probably do a muscle up. I can't.

But anyway, never tried. If everyone were doing 20 pistol squats and I'm like, I can barely do a pistol squat. I better get my active if I ever want to do Nordic ham curls going up and down. And every person could do bodyweight Nordics for five reps and we'd be like, I can't even do one. We'd be secretly doing Nordics. So a lot of it's to do with your environment. So. So these girls can't get strong on their own.

They just don't know what they're doing. Even you can tell them. That's why trainers have a job. That's why, you know, as of now, personal trainers have job security. Because it's so hard to do on your own, something's wrong. A lot of times it's the effort they're putting forth. They think they're training hard, but they could really do five more reps if they really wanted to at the end of the set.

A lot of times they're sabotaging themselves because, God, trainers around the world, when they hear this, are going to be nodding their head. Men and women both do this. They do it differently. Women will want to combine and this will Piss women off if they hear this clip. But they want to combine weights with yoga, Pilates, spin, everything else. And they'll say, well, why? Oh, your heart isn't important.

Your heart, health. Oh, it's not important to be flexible. Yes, but you have to prioritize. So if you want hypertrophy and you want glutes to grow and you're doing all this extra exercise and you're not really training recovered and you're not prior, you're not, you're so busy trying to fit in all those, yeah. Six balls in there. You're trying, you gotta, you gotta train at the right time. I like to think about it.

If I said you gotta and you gotta give yourself every opportunity to pray. What are you going to do? You're going to make sure you got a good night of sleep. You're not going to go do an hour of cardio before you go. Try and do that lift, try, hit a bench pr. You're going to eat the right amount, just the right amount, the right foods that agree with you before your workout, the right time. Some people like to eat an hour before, some people like to train fasted.

But you're going to show up feeling good, you had your pre workout a half an hour before your coffee or whatever makes you gives you the best chance. And that's what you got to do day in and day out for lots of years. And what I see is when you're just squeezing in your workout at the end of the day when you're already stressed and you have already and then you're just going through the motions, you're not going to grow like maximally, you might see some results and then too much variety, too much program hopping, trying to do every exercise. I love all the exercises. Trust me, in my gym for I love quads and hammies too. So it's hard because in my gym I've got hack squat machine, the pendulum squat machine, leg presses, Smith the machine, the V squat. Like I've got it all.

What do I do? You know, I want to hit quads. Sometimes you're like, I've been so distracted, I haven't done squats in a while and you're going, okay, I got to get back to squats. Oh, I also have belt squats. I have all the. Yeah, they're all amazing and they transfer to each other, which is cool because sometimes you take your focus away. Same thing with hamstrings.

I've got every leg curl machine. I've got plate loaded, 45° hyper selectorized 45° hyper. Now you don't even have to grab a dumbbell. You just hold on to something and pull the reverse hyper. I've got plate loaded deadlift apparatuses, the hammer strength, I've got the pitch shark, we do stick legs off that and, and all these gizmos too, like our T bell and on the blocks, our sliding leg for the rolling, the, the hammy track and roller and all these cool things. And you can be distracted because it's like you want your hamstrings to grow, try and get really strong. It's stiff legs or, you know, and then, and then a leg or seated leg curls or something like.

So trust me, I get it. But they're doing too much variety. They're not prioritizing, you know, progressive overload, load and PRs and doing all the things necessary to give themselves the best chance of PR like adequate sleep, adequate protein, adequate or optimal calories, etc. Sometimes you'll, you'll go to women and, and kind of try to gauge how much protein they're taking in. Sometimes it's like they're eating 50 grams of protein in a day and they weigh 120 and they see great results when you take that to 90, 100, 110, 120, 130. They see better results that way, like some people. It's like magic.

So yeah, got to get so inadequate protein, inadequate sleep and stress levels, program hopping. But the most is lack of effort and trying to make up, trying to compensate with effort, with volume and variety and it doesn't, it doesn't compensate for it. You can't just do all the exercises. And doing 20 sets with 5 reps in the tank probably doesn't beat doing one awesome set to true failure and writing it down in your logbook or on your app or in your notes on your phone and then trying to beat it. Because that requires a mental challenge too. When you know you've hip thrusted 3, 15 for 15 and you're trying to get 20 and you're like, how the hell am I going to get 16 and 7? How am I going to get to 20?

And then you know, you're hip thrusting tomorrow you're going to be like, okay, I better eat optimally today, I better sleep optimally today and what time am I going to train tomorrow? I'm going for 16. This is going to be tough. It's hard to do and it doesn't always work linearly like that. That's another complication. So that's why you have variety, because, yeah, you can't just go, I got 15, 16, then 17, then 18, then 19, then 20. Usually you get 15 and then you take a big break and you do all the things and then all of a sudden you gear up for 20 again and it happens.

But, yeah, that's another story.

Andy Galpin

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I would imagine that many people are trying really hard, but their efforts are misplaced. This is the example of doing too many different things. So lifting, maybe not lifting frequently enough, maybe not waiting long enough. It's only been a month, right? You need probably several months or you're adding in different forms of exercise and things like that. So you're trying really hard. Your effort is super high, but there's not enough focus on stimuli to drive that adaptation.

There's too much distraction in the training, Right. Another distraction you mentioned was changing your programs too often, right? So again, this is where effort could be high. You could be really getting a burn and really getting tired after the workout. But you did 50 different exercises or, you know, you changed them and because of that, you probably potentially did some maybe lower, less effective exercises. So your selection wasn't great. You are doing maybe all body weight or all light bands.

And what you're saying is you might be better off picking one set of one exercise, going pretty heavy and then just getting out of there. Right.

Brett Contreras

That would actually be a fun. That would be hilarious to do like a training study where you just have them pick one set to go to third and then you can do 15 sets. But we're not going to track. Just do the mind muscle connection with those. You know, squeeze as hard as you can.

Andy Galpin

Who cares, right?

Brett Contreras

Squeeze. Feel the, feel the glutes moving the weight. But that would be a good system because it's hard. When you say progressive overload, it's hard to pin that down for people. Does that mean do you go up on all four sets?

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

Do you. How do you go up?

Andy Galpin

Another thing that came to my mind here, I don't know how much you've experienced this or not in terms of. Again, let's think with the same of. I've tried to grow my glutes. By the way, I should interject here. We've been talking way more about the glutes than I thought we were going to today. But you could change out glute for anything else. It doesn't actually matter.

Some of the details here do matter, the specific studies and the research. And I'm going to ask here in a second about how the glutes are different from other muscles. But I hope what you're gleaning from this is not just. Only if you're sitting here thinking, I don't care that much about glutes or whatever. This is scientific principles. This is how do you answer research questions. This is specific and precision. Right? So you're talking about not all exercises are the same, not all muscle groups are the same.

We've dug in on the glutes. So again, the answers might be different, but this is exactly how you should go about answering it if you care more about the triceps or the quads or the calves or anything else. So this is a system that you developed over again almost 30 years now that can be applied to anything else. So I really hope that people listening are gleaning this out of it and going, okay, maybe you do don't have some variation of love for the glute, but this is really the nuance that goes into getting better results for a very specific question that you've really formulated a career out of. So hope that that message is coming through. Now. That said, the question on this last particular topic is, again, I'm training hard.

I'm trying to grow my glutes, but mine aren't growing. I'm eating protein. I'm doing all those other things out the field. It's not hormones. Like, how does one at home, whether they're a trainer, a coach, or the actual person, how do you go about figuring out which of these variations work based on your body type and what are the things that you should be thinking about and paying attention to before I then throw an exercise out and I can say things like, okay, great. A new study came out. It did show that the.

Let's just say goblet squat is. Is not as effective for going the glutes as a barbell high bar back squat is. But I did the high bar back squat for six months and I got nowhere. Like, how do I go about that system of figuring out what works for my mechanics and my physiology?

Brett Contreras

That's such a great question. I know I used to do EMG on all my clients.

Andy Galpin

And just to clarify, you said this in multiple. EMG is where we can go on and directly measure the muscle activation. So electrical signals for muscle activation.

So go back. As you've heard Brett say that a bunch of times. What he's saying is direct measure of muscle activation.

Brett Contreras

Yep.

Andy Galpin

But continue on.

Brett Contreras

Now, the problem with EMG for estimating hypertrophy, it does a good job of measuring activation. The neural portion of it, the active portion, but not the passive portion, the stretch.

Andy Galpin

And which is another way of saying just because a muscle is activated, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to grow. Yeah, there's some crossover there, clearly.

Brett Contreras

Well, think about this, because I feel like the long length got carried away for a while and it was all about stretching and long length. That's been the trend in 2024 was all about. It was the year of longer muscle lengths. Yep.

Andy Galpin

Trained over a full range of motion.

Brett Contreras

Versus a pendulum can swing too far. Think about this. There are numerous studies that show you can stretch a muscle and it will grow pure stretch. Pure stretch. Now, when you stretch a muscle, yes, you probably get a little bit of activation just from like protection and guarding, but, like, it's mostly all just passive. You're just stretching it, you're not activating it. And it grows through purely passive mechanisms.

You can also just slap muscle electrodes on and activate a muscle without stretching it, and it grows. Ems. And that's something that I was skeptical about years ago.

And now the. Have you looked at the research on this over the years?

Andy Galpin

I have a catalyst suit. It's awesome.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

So it's fantastic.

Brett Contreras

It grows muscle. Yeah. Just activating the muscles through muscle stimulation. Now if you're doing a program like Booty by Brat where you're covering all your bases, should you do EMS on the side? Should you be stretching a muscle? Can all muscles grow through stretch? What if I wanted to stretch my delts?

What do I do? I can't, I'm blocked. You could stretch your rec fem, but can you stretch your vasties enough? So when people talk about stretch, I'm like, okay, hammies, yes. Pecs, yes. Calves, yes.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Not every muscle I think could benefit. And then, but like with, with that system I told you about earlier, putting muscles on the back burner, when, if you did the prior, the rotating focus, that would be a good time to say, all right, I'm gonna slap electrodes on the other muscles that are not prioritizing.

Andy Galpin

Oh, there you go. Keep the maintenance mode, right? Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And help add to the stimulus because there's a lot of research showing that EMS grows muscles.

Andy Galpin

The first time I did the catalyst suit, I got so sore. Now part of it was because I pegged it like I just went literally to the end of the contraction capacity and did like a 30 minute thing on it and got so brutal.

Brett Contreras

That's where it's activated on the way. And you're fighting, you're moving against.

Andy Galpin

You stand there. Right, I'm standing there basically wearing a full body intens unit. Basically. Right. It's over there and it's like everything is squeezing and I just like went to the wire and like squeeze as hard as you can for 20 minutes and turns out that's a lot of muscle contraction.

And I got sore. Everything.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

So user error on that. Well, it wasn't user. It was. I knew what I was getting into, so.

Brett Contreras

So that's muscle growth through activation and no stretching, no passive. So none.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Clearly there are more multiple. That to me shows that there have to be. There has to be multiple mechanisms leading to Rome, leading to muscle growth. So there has to be a mechanism that's more passive and a mechanism that's more active because they're separate stimuli. So this is an awesome question. I will just mention briefly that I measured muscle activation back in the day with all my clients and I learned so much with different people. Like I had this client, Sammy, she could do squats with 285 pounds back squats.

But if she did a goblet squat with 50 and 70 pounds. She got more glute activation. You're moving through the same range of motion though.

Andy Galpin

So how glute activation with 20% of.

Brett Contreras

The weight with her about having the load. So then same with a deadlift. If she had a barbell she could do 225 pound or I think might have went up to 315. And then she did 106 pound kettlebell and a 203 pound kettlebell. And something about having the load centered more just activated glutes a lot higher. Not everyone is like that.

Andy Galpin

Measuring her muscle, her glute activation.

Brett Contreras

Glute activation in different areas.

Andy Galpin

It was the same with a 50 pound goblet squad. 50 pound goblet, which traditionally should activate the glutes less.

Brett Contreras

Right.

Andy Galpin

Because it's a front loading squad and all that.

Brett Contreras

Well, something about load being centered makes it. I think, I think when you have kind of like lanky and you're folding and you don't have the best squat form, you're battling butt wink. You're battling having a keep a neutral spine. You might have things shutting off and stuff. You know, we can't always assume. Anyway, I had this girl Aaron at the same time and she started doing all this. Well, she, I, I put bands or I had to do band seated hip abduction.

And I'm like okay, this is activating all the areas, even leaning forward, even getting your lower glute max. You're getting as high of activation doing these than you. Higher than doing one rep max squats. Well, how many one rep max squats can you do per week versus band seated hip abduction. So I showed her the results. Like I said, you're getting higher band activation. Like higher activation on bands than anyone I've ever seen.

I think you should do bands every day. A lot of band will get raised. So she got carried away. I eventually starts bringing 20 different bands to the gym. I made a post another crazy band lady, but her glutes grew a ton. So when you have these individualized prescriptions, I think you can see better results. But, but basically I don't have a system for that.

The only thing I would try is a long length focus twice a week. So I'd say look, you've been doing something like Booty by Brat. Let's switch to two days and let's focus on glute dominant squats box low bar box squats sitting way back to parallel vertical shin. The shin doesn't have to be vertical, but it's as vertical as possible while still feeling right. And then glute dominant, step ups. Bulgarians lunges, meaning like not, not a knee dominant, not an upright, letting your knee go way forward, keeping the shin pretty vertical, leaning. And then, and then rdls.

And let's do those good mornings rdls. Let's do these exercises for a while, but hit them hard, but just twice a week. See if you grow better from that. You're going to know within a couple of months. And then if that doesn't work, let's try a short length focus. Let's do four or five days a week. We're only doing hip thrusts and bands.

I did this with my client Beth. Beth did powerlifting, but she had a coach that was all about the power lifts. And I said, have you ever focused on hip thrusts? No, my coach hates them. Have you ever done band work? No, he thinks those are wimpy too. All right, just do hip thrusts and band work for like six months and do them as frequently and as much as you can.

See how that works. And her butt blew up.

Yeah, blew up. So when all these people are like, she was gone. She was strong at squats and deadlifts. They weren't working for it. And so you'll hear so many anecdotes. And these scientific people, I could call them all out right now, these scientific people, and they don't care about anecdotes and that's. And to me, they're not scientific because you can say, look at this person.

They will just shut it out. They'll go, well, that doesn't mean anything. What if she wasn't doing squat? Okay, I'll show you a video of her squats and deadlifts. She had good form. What do you say then? Like, they just don't want to reconcile the two.

So they want to stick to one, you know, one rigid method. And you got to be flexible if you want to be a good personal trainer. So that method worked better for her. So I would do the two extremes. Two days a week of, of long length glute work versus like five days a week of shortened position glute work.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

It could be a genetic.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Reason or just anatomy. You tolerate these because if you don't tolerate an exercise well and it gives you pain or fear, inhibition, you're not going to maximally activate your glutes. So anyway, maybe there are frequency versus, like, some people respond better frequency, some people, even your anatomy. What if your moment arms are terrible in the stretch for glutes and really ideal. And I also think you can change through training. When you do concentrics or shorter lengths, you will lose sarcomeres in series. When you do eccentrics or longer lengths, you will add sarcomeres in series.

So maybe you can change the way even. And that might affect neural activation too. The muscle says we've caused this muscle to be more effective at longer lengths or more effective at shorter lengths. And there could be. We just don't know enough right now. And that's what always frustrates me about social media right now. It's rewarded these bold claims camps where you're very strong.

Like this is the method, this is what yields the best muscle growth. It doesn't reward uncertainty. It doesn't reward scientific claims or cautious claims.

Andy Galpin

Evidence based as well.

Brett Contreras

I get mad because I'm like, if I don't know the answer to this, like then you don't know the answer to this. You know, because no one does the research of this stuff as much as me. And I see these people making these bold claims. Like we don't have the evidence for that yet. We don't know enough. We need. There's so many studies.

Deep squats versus pedal squats, sumo versus conventional. There's not one training study on sumo versus conventional hip thrust. Should you do full range, should you do partial, should you use bands, should you. You know, there's, we don't have, we need, we need like 30 glute studies to be able to speak confidently about what works best. Until then it's theoretical and we should be cautious about what we think we know.

Andy Galpin

What do you think about a system I just sort of jotted down based on what you're saying. Checkpoint number one, if you're trying to grow your glutes and whatever exercise you're doing, whatever your program design is, it's resulting in pain. Not muscle soreness, but pain. Your back is getting hurt, your knees hurt, right. Then pretty obviously stop that.

Brett Contreras

Don't do that.

Andy Galpin

Right. So the checkpoint you could run through in your head is if in your program you're then getting injured. Whether we mean like a true injury or it's just simply the kind of pain you don't want, then we need to change your program. That seems to be like a pretty intuitive first start. So don't always why we don't need to be in pain. And then two, this would be the consistency play. We're going to lose training volume over time.

Brett Contreras

Yep.

Andy Galpin

After that. And this is where like I just sort of made this up. The second thing I would think about in my head, is. Is the actual exercise feeling like it's working? How much credit do you give or not? Should people feel their glutes working in the workout? I'm sure it doesn't have to be 10 out of 10. But if.

If I'm doing hip thrusts and I don't feel my glutes getting a pump, if I don't feel them getting tired, should I be concerned that that's not working for me, or am I okay there?

Brett Contreras

So let me play devil's advocate and then tell you what I really think. We looked at that in The Plotkin Study, 2023, Daniel Plotkin, the researcher, asked everyone, which exercise do you feel your glutes more in, hip thrusts or squats? All 20 some subjects said hip thrusts, and they grew the glutes the same.

Andy Galpin

They were a good one.

Brett Contreras

Well, so. But I do think it is because, yeah, if you don't feel your glutes much in hip thrust, it's probably not the best exercise for you. Or you should find a way, a variation, a way of carrying it out or, like.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

Maybe you like the Smith machine more. Maybe you like. Maybe you feel it more.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, you're feeling it too much in your quad hamstrings.

Brett Contreras

How could that not help? Yeah, that's always been a thing when, since the dawn of bodybuilding, try to feel it and every person tweaks their figs, figures out a way to feel it more. That has to help.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

But it's. But it's also when I was getting the advantage of being a bro, we wanted to get strong, you know, and when we're in college and we're like, everyone's stronger than you. You're, like, wanting to get stronger. We weren't focused on filling my delts during a military press. You know what I mean? I just wanted a stronger shoulder press.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And guess what? You get really strong with pretty good form and everything develops. And that's the argument. I hear both sides of the argument. The people will say, oh, tell me how you do a squat without activating your glutes.

But come on. I can, like, I mean, when you're walking upstairs, be super upright and you'll feel your quads more and then lean in and, like, let the hips come up a little more, and you'll feel so much more glute walking upstairs. You can't tell me technique doesn't matter.

Andy Galpin

No, it does. And we saw that in our trap bar versus conventional deadlift study. Right. So the aggregate results are different than the individual results because some people, when they did a trap bar deadlift, actually kept the exact same position that they did in their conventional deadlift. Others went super vertical. It was basically like a leg press.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

They're standing straight up where their deadlift they were much more so guess what happened with EMG activity. On average, no difference because it washed out.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Right. But the individual person, depending on their arm length primarily. Right. That allowed them to stay in the same position or not. Yeah, it completely changed. So for some of our participants in that study, the trap bar deadlift was way more quad activation. But for others, it literally changed nothing whatsoever between conventional and.

Brett Contreras

Brad Schoenfeld and I did a rear rear delt study. The first EMG study he did. He just got his Naraxin unit.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And we wanted to see what's better neutral or pronated grip. Because back then everyone said if it's not pronated, it won't grow your rear delts.

Andy Galpin

Oh, yeah.

Brett Contreras

Well, neutral grip on average outperformed it. But there were huge inter. Inter Individual differences. Some people getting way higher one way versus the other. So go with what you feel the most. Because if you're moving a muscle through the same range of motion and getting similar stretch, then the. The. The technique that activates it the most, in my opinion.

Well, but sometimes that technique can influence the stretch. So under.

Under the same. All right, if passive tension is equal, then the higher active tension wins out. But you can't have a technique that increases activation while decreasing passive. And I think that's the argument for sumo deads. Well, it gets you less stretch, but it gets you more activation in a lot of client. A lot of clients, a lot of studies not. There's only one study by Escamilla looking at EMG with sumo versus conventional, and they showed similar activation in the glutes.

But there's probably 12 studies at this point on squats and other exercises and sumo in general, you get greater glute activation, but you're going to get lesser glute stretch. So there needs to be a training study and then we need to see for ourselves. But right now people should just be cautious. They should say, I prefer conventional because you get a little bit better stretch.

Maybe, you know, but. But don't be like, sumo is all adductor and zero gluteus maximus. Sumo's got to be the dumbest thing ever, because then you get all the tiktokers and all the. They repeat your stuff and then it becomes fact before we've ever even Looked into it. Yeah.

Andy Galpin

So okay, back, back to my list here of kind of five things. Number one, start off, don't get in pain. Two, hopefully you feel something either in the muscle you're trying to train that day or potentially some amount of soreness the next day. Obviously we know that more sore is not better.

Brett Contreras

Feeling it, getting a pump, getting sore. These are indicators that you worked the muscle though.

Andy Galpin

Seems reasonable. If you're not in pain, you're feeling it, even getting a huge pump on the day and you're still not growing then potentially think about going heavy. A general problem people have had, you've sort of mentioned this earlier is they don't realize that hey, you know, three sets of 50 with the band like that may not be the jam to grow every muscle. Right.

Brett Contreras

You may have to focus on progressive overload.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, progressive overload. Right. My gut is most people will be done by, by this one in terms of you're going to start growing at this point. But let's say I got that box check.

Brett Contreras

Focus on my muscle now.

Andy Galpin

Focus on potentially frequency.

Brett Contreras

Frequency.

Andy Galpin

Right. So now I've done. I'm not in pain, my glutes are getting pumped. I'm going really heavy. I'm at 315, whatever the numbers are. Now maybe think about adding in that extra day volume, frequency. You could kind of play what like one game here, right?

Brett Contreras

Sure.

Andy Galpin

So those would be kind of like 4 and 5 volume or frequency. So maybe need to add another day with those less damaging ones. This is where more bands could come in.

Brett Contreras

Yep.

Andy Galpin

It's just a way of getting you more volume.

Brett Contreras

Sure.

Andy Galpin

But how does that kind of like five step checklist progression sound for somebody struggling. Reasonable approach. There is anything else you would add to that?

Brett Contreras

I would say have a one in there where you really focus on mind muscle connector activation somewhere in there saying what if? Because there's evidence, there's evidence that it makes brain changes in the cortical the read the, the motor cortex.

There's a couple. There's at least one, maybe two. I think there's a recent one too showing that you get actual changes in the brain responsible for activating that muscle. So maybe if you have a little month where you focus on mind muscle connection, not even going to focus, squeezing the out of the muscle and really trying to target in your brain. You know in that study they looked these bands and it was isometrics because they thought isometrics would build greater brain changes because you're focusing harder and that might make a difference.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So making sure that again, if those progression strategies aren't working, that you're just trying to be more connected directly to the muscle, those connections more right and getting more out of it makes a ton of sense. We've gone on quite a journey thus far. I got a couple things if you've still got some energy left.

Brett Contreras

I can go for hours.

Andy Galpin

I know, I know. You can't to finish up on. So one of them is the very first question I asked you is how do you think about training men versus women? And you laid out a lot of stuff to think about. I just want to double tap on them if I can. One relating to recovery. And so I'll ask this from the scientific perspective as well as, and potentially even more important, your years of experience.

So what do we understand about men versus women, the context of strength training here regarding things like recovery? Have you truly seen that women recover more than men in general? Do they need more volume? Those are like kind of two separate questions. And then a third one I'll smuggle in here is are there any other things physiologically like menstrual cycle phase or things like that that you have found to either be big considerations or things you put a lot of effort into and then panned out to not really matter too much?

Brett Contreras

Awesome. Yes, yes and yes.

So, but, but also it could be that the women are on a permanent specialization program. Glutes Booty by Bread is a glute specialization plan.

Andy Galpin

Not a groot only, but it's a.

Brett Contreras

Specialization full body with like we, we hit quads, adductors and hammies, but we don't do a ton of leg extensions, seated hip adductions, or leg curls, because that would just take away from what you could potentially recover from with the glutes. You can't just hit every. What if you trained every muscle like you did with Buddha? Brett, we do where you did 36 to 45 sets a week of glutes of with quads, with hammies, with adductors, calves.

It's too much. You could never recover. So it's. Maybe they. I just think they can recover better because they're on a glute specialization because they have reduced volume of the upper body muscles and even the quads and hammers.

Andy Galpin

And you've intentionally, as you said earlier, built in a day that is a more recoverable day. So the exercise selection by default is easier to recover from.

Brett Contreras

So makes sense. Yeah.

Andy Galpin

So.

Brett Contreras

But I don't think it's just that early on in my training career, I'm like, man, these women can do these workouts. I tried to do1once, 2007, try to do what I give my girls. I was on the ground laying there for half an hour. I was like, is it possible to have a heart attack at 28? It goes 30, 31 or 2 or something, like. And I remember just sitting there like, wow, that made me gain respect for what I put them through. So it could be the influence of hormones and estrogen, and they have bigger type 1 fiber hypertrophy, they have higher estrogen.

Maybe that leads to better muscle damage repair. If you put a guy through the workouts they do, it kills them and. But the girls can bounce back quicker. I know there was a study I read back in the day on bench press guys, it would take two or three days to get back. Like, say they did a one rep max, or took them two days to repeat that. The. The women could repeat that the next day.

And you could say, well, that's because they're not as strong relatively, but with women, they are as strong with a lot of these glute exercises as men. Relatively. They're stronger. Relatively. Women are stronger at hip thrusts than men. And again, you could say, absolutely, yeah, almost. Absolutely. As well.

You could say, well, that's just because they do it a lot too. But I think there might be something with the anatomy. But anyway, I think they can do more volume. I think they can recover slightly quicker. So their programs can be a little more.

Andy Galpin

You think they need more volume? In other words, if. Do they have the same effect if they were given the same.

Brett Contreras

When I give them, when I train? Okay, do they need more volume? I think the better question is, what's. Is. Is there a different optimal volume for them for hypertrophy? I do think it would be slightly shifted upwards for women compared to men, but not double. You know, it might be that for men, Hypothetically speaking, say 12 sets was optimal for a muscle group for a man, whereas Maybe would be 16 for a woman. But. But also we talked about earlier. It depends.

Every answer is it depends. You have the people who can recover better than others and who push themselves harder too. You have the people who. There's also some weird thing about tempo. Like, you have those people who, like, on chin ups, they're like.

And you're like, okay, they're done. Somehow you do another rep. Yeah. And you're like. And then they get three more.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And you're like, what? How? Because I'm done. Like, people always go, wow, you had three more in the tank. I'm like, no, I was. I wouldn't have gotten one more. It just looks like that because I'm a very explosive lifter.

Yeah, I either explode up or it don't. Won't go up at all.

Andy Galpin

But anyway, I'm the same as you.

Brett Contreras

For the record, some of those people, I think the more grinder you are, that's tough to recover, those are harder to recover from than the. But anyway, there's a lot of factors at play, but it's how hard you push yourself versus your muscle damage and recovery genetics. So I do think they can do a little more volume and a little more like what's optimal volume and frequency for them is slightly higher. They don't seem to get as damaged and beat down. They seem to get beat down from trying to juggle too many forms of exercise, too many things. They tend to want to jam pack their schedule and they're like, I don't know if men are. I'd be curious to see if modern day men are like that.

Because me, I'm kind of like, I don't want to plan as many things, you know.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

But anyway, I think that that adds to their stress and. But if they had no stress in their lives and that way they could recover even better. But. And their relationship stress, they are, they care so much about their relationships. It really weighs on them. So anyway, there are a lot of different factors and I'm probably going to get some stuff for that comment because whenever you say there are differences between men and women, you get in trouble. And I'm like, man, I could never raise a kid not on my own like a woman can.

I could never do half the stuff they can do. And multitasking they seem to be better at. I have so much respect for a lot of my women. I could not do what they do. I could never do it. Life is so hard. And then you add a kid to the mix and then you add two kids and you're breastfeeding and you're getting woken up at night.

I don't know how the hell they do it. So I have the utmost respect. But I think there are definite differences and we shouldn't try to be the same.

With regards to training. The biggest differences are goal related. The physiological differences I think are worth mentioning. Like you said, I think they recover faster, can handle a little more volume. And then you said the third piece was menstrual cycle.

Andy Galpin

Menstrual cycle train differently during different phases of the cycle.

Brett Contreras

So this research got popular. And then Lauren Colenso simple came around and just squashed it. I love it because I was like, you're gonna get.

Andy Galpin

She was in my lab. You know that.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, she's great.

Andy Galpin

She's awesome.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. But here's the deal. On average, strength doesn't fluctuate that much throughout the menstrual cycle, et cetera, but does on the individual level. Just what you talked about with the trap bar deadlifts. I have women that are, especially if they're not on birth control.

And when they. It's crazy because a lot of women, the day their period starts, they're. They're weakest. But some are their strongest at that point. And I'd be like, I had this client, Camille, in Phoenix, and I'd be like, did you start your period today? And they're like. She's like, how'd you know?

I go, because you just crushed your deadlift pr Every time she would start her period, she was a monster. Other women don't even want to train when they start, especially hip thrusts. They don't want pressure on their abdomen. You got to know these things. You have to be aware of them and be sympathetic to it, because everyone's different. Some are stronger, some are weaker. Some don't want to be there.

They don't want to train. So you bargain with them. You say, oh, you start your period, you don't want to hip thrust. Don't hip thrust.

Let's do kickbacks. Let's do this. Give them stuff that doesn't feel bad, so at least they make it in the gym and they feel good about themselves. But, yeah, these. These are factors that men don't have in their lives and don't have to think about. It's an additional variable with women. And it definitely matters on the individual level because some women get so nauseous, so irritable, they don't even want to.

We don't have to deal with that. That is a factor that should be considered in your.

In your program design by just on.

Andy Galpin

A personal coaching level.

Brett Contreras

Personal level, not a group level. I don't change my programs to. To. To reflect that. But in person, I definitely change things up. If it. If. If the person is.

Has really bad periods or period cramps and emotions associated with it, you absolutely have to change things up.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. So a factor to pay attention to. But perhaps no set rules that should be automatic based on generic cycle phases.

Brett Contreras

You look at the. I wonder if.

Andy Galpin

I think Lauren's research would agree with that.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. But I wonder if hormones changed are unique because you look at the graph and it's like, here's testosterone, here's estrogen, here's progesterone. And then you look at, like, premenstrual. Of course, progesterone is highest, I think. And then estrogen, testosterone are lowest, of course. Like. Or like. Right. It makes sense that that would.

You'd be your weakest there. But it doesn't on a group level. Well, maybe hormones are different depending on the person, too.

Andy Galpin

That's the thing.

Brett Contreras

I also will tell you that, like, my girls are. My San Diego squad is all natural. Right? My Florida squad, most are all natural. They're very. But I always tell them, like, when girls get mad, when I say all natural, they'll be like, they have breast implants. That's not what all natural means.

That's not what all natural means in our world, Natty means you don't take gear. You don't take anabolic steroids. You don't take sarms, you don't take peptides. I don't even think peptides really are a factor now, depending on how peptide you talk hormones. So I'm so close with these ladies. I've been training them for seven years in groups. When you train, when women in groups, they talk.

It's like I'm. It's like I'm a gay friend, but I'm not gay. Like, that's how I get treated.

Andy Galpin

Right?

Brett Contreras

They will talk about.

Andy Galpin

You're the inside.

Brett Contreras

They will talk about anything in front of me because they're very comfortable. So I hear everything. And they'll be like, coach, my testosterone levels came back.

It's at 14. And I'm like. And then I'm like, okay, like, you're super horny. That's all you talk about is sex. And you're strong as hell. You can deadlift, you know, 385. You think you have a 14 testosterone level.

Check it again. Yeah, but enough of them came back. I swear. Like, my average testosterone level of my clients is, like, not even 20. It's like, probably in the teens. How they're strong as hell. I start to wonder if really intense training lowers women's testosterone levels, because normal is 6 to 90 for women.

That's a 15 fold difference. But you think some of these girls, they have these amazing physiques. Can I get someone in the 40s or 50s or 60s? Yeah, no one's at a 90. Yeah, but they're in the teens.

Andy Galpin

A lot of things going on.

Brett Contreras

They're in the teens. So, yeah, that's A whole other thing that I would love to look into is if should we be paradising to let their testosterone come up or anything?

Because I'm like. Or maybe that they're all just getting false readings because these places are lying down to try to get them on trt. Because I'm in a constant battle saying, you don't need trt.

Look at you, you look amazing. So, yeah.

Andy Galpin

Okay, well, thank you. Those are really good insights. That's a question that is. That comes up a lot. And there's the research on that. That's great. People can interpret that.

But it's always interesting to hear perspective of somebody who's, you know, been in the trenches with people trying to get as strong as they can, trying to grow muscle and seeing how that played into your coaching. And I think that was a very helpful answer. And I know a lot of coaches and a lot of individual people are going to go, okay, great, now I have freedom to take the best option for me, depending on where I'm at. One last real technical question here and then I got a couple more. But the technical one is regarding the glutes versus other muscles. Right. You've mentioned this several times now, but I want to make sure this was really clear because I thought it was really helpful.

We talk about training as if all of our muscles respond to training the exact same way. Right. And so this much intensity, this much load, this much frequency, this is how you progress. But have there been any themes over your career that you've noticed about the glutes as a collective musculature that are, you know, significantly different than the delts or the triceps or the pack string like that, Anything that jump out of either, maybe things to do or things not to do. That's special about the glutes.

Brett Contreras

I just think they're more simple. A lot of, a lot of muscles are simpler because. Well, what, what I like is comparing the glutes to the delts.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

They're both ball and socket joints. You know, a lot of movement, a lot of range of motion around them. But delts, you have three subdivisions, anterior, middle and lateral. And it's. You really target one division over the other. So when you talk about delt volume, when you train any upper body pressing movement, be it dips, decline, flat push ups, bench incline, shoulder press, behind the neck press, every one of them will train the anterior delts. And then going out in the expanding on the frontal plane more is going to activate the, the middle delts a lot.

The side delts but not rear delts don't get super high on pressing. But then the rear delts get. Do get activated during all the row, all the pulling motions from pull downs to angled pull downs to rows, to even, you know, even rows upright, like more upright. So the rear delts will get. The rear delts will get activated with a lot of pulling movements. So they can handle a lot of volume because you can also add in isolation movements. But you, if you wanted to, you could do three sets of rear delt raises three times a week.

If you really wanted to, you could do three sets of laterals three times a week. With variety. You could do three sets of front raises three times a week and you could be doing presses and pulls. So they can handle a lot of volume. The delts can, but they do, you know, they do, you know, shoulder flexion, abduction, you know, and then the, like the shoulder extension and in different planes too, in different angles and stuff. So, so they're very versatile muscle group. When you look at the glutes, the, the glutes aren't just the glute.

It's the glute max, the glute meat, the glute min. And they carry out hip extension, abduction, external rotation, posterior pelvic tilt. But also posterior pelvic tilt should just be thought of as like short arc hip hip hyperextension. But anyway, like you can bend over in the. And do abduction in the, in the transverse, like being knees to chest, abduction versus upright versus leaning back, like frontal plane. So they do a lot. They do several different joint actions.

And then you can vary the exercises to work more in the stretch position, to stretch you more, to work the stretch more, to squeeze you more, to have more hip hyperextension, to work more in the stretch position. It's complicated, but just how complicated you want to make it, it's like for glutes, okay. Just get really strong at Bulgarians, Romanians and hip thrusts and you're going to have pretty good glute max development. And then throw in some abdomen, do some lateral band walks three times a week to warm up and you'll be fine. But no, there's more to it. Okay, well, let's think of other muscles. Quads. Well, it's so simple.

It's pretty much just the knee is a hinge joint. All right, Just get really strong at either any one of these or a variety of them. But I would say they all probably build the quads very effectively. The first is squats and probably high bar. Even better. Heel elevated, even Better front squats, high bar squats, whatever. But get strong at squats.

You're probably going to have nice quads. But now add in hack squats or, or pendulum. The pendulum squat or belt squats or leg press in a quad dominant fashion. How can you not have big vastis? But what about the rec fem? It's a two joint muscle. If you want to maximize rec fem development you now you need to add in a leg extension type movement, a single joint.

Well, so you add in leg extensions. But leg extensions are even better when you lean back. They're probably even better when you stress the stretched position that's on like that prime machine that really you can change the load if you have a plate loaded that's just pure plate like the titanium.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

Then you're only working the squeeze. I actually like to do that because I'm like everything we do works the stretched position. I like working the squeeze position. But anyway, you could also do sissy squats or you could do reverse Nordics and you might maybe you need to do some hip flexion too to maximize rec fem growth.

But it's not as. Not quite as complicated as as the glutes. Hamstrings can be complicated because there's a lot of studies hamstrings there's a ton of research on because of hamstring strain injuries.

Andy Galpin

Injuries. Right.

Brett Contreras

And these range from EMG to.

Andy Galpin

It's my favorite muscle for the record. And it is the one I think people train the least and should train more of.

Brett Contreras

Yes. Because completely underrated foot position like with leg extensions doesn't seem to alter vasti recruitment. But it does for hamstrings.

Andy Galpin

Boy knee pain and other foot injuries and back injuries. Man, hamstrings people just don't train them.

Brett Contreras

So you have knee flexion movements and you have hip extension movements. With hip extension you could go squeeze position with back extensions like loaded 45s and back extensions. And you can go in knee flexion. You can work them in a stretch with seated hamstring. So with seated hamstring curls you should be leaning forward if possible or just at least as upright as possible.

Don't be leaning back. You want as much stretch. But also make sure that pad is down far and you make sure it's working all the way up into full knee extension. So you're getting the maximum stretch. But then you can do lying leg curls, kneeling leg curls. And they all seem to work different, maybe like slightly different areas. Variation is a good thing for hammies. Okay. Calves, calves Are probably the simplest exercise to train because what we're finding is seated calf raises don't appear to add to the mix and neither does the squeeze position.

Like, there are now a few studies showing that calves almost don't even need to come up all the way. You can just do the stretch position. But if you do come up all the way, extend the set with some length in partials or just do more sets. But yeah, if you just want to do, you know, a quick three sets of calf raises, you know, just do standing.

You don't need to do seated. That tends to. It seems to build the soleus just the same. And.

Andy Galpin

But the seated is going to make it hard for your gastroc to get involved at all. It's going to basically be zero right on the seated. The calf raise.

Brett Contreras

So seated then shown to not. It doesn't add to the equation when you're doing straight legged. I don't think I've seen us during like donkey carriage. Does that add? I don't think it does. There is some evidence that turning the toes in versus out can help.

Andy Galpin

Sure.

Brett Contreras

But yeah, like basically this calves are probably the simplest muscle to train because just do standing calf raises. Work the stretch position, you're good to go. Can the calves handle the vol. Do you. Do you need the variety in calves when you do that? You can with glutes. The cow pretty much they just do plantar flexion.

So you don't really need. So it's like. And then you look at the pecs. Okay, there's the upper, middle and lower fibers. If you just get strong at like low incline press, you probably get most of your bang for your buck. But then you're like, okay, should I work all the angles? Should I do weighted dips?

Should I do incline press? What. What incline? Should I vary the incline? Should I do 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90? Obviously not 90 degrees. 90 degrees would be mostly all front delts.

But like, what about now your pec isolation movements. Okay, should you do flies or pec deck or cable crossovers? Should you just focus on the stretch? Just do dumbbell flies. Do you need to come up all the way? Why you lose tension. Just do length and partials.

Okay, well, so flies, do you need the squeeze? Should you do crossovers? Focus on the squeeze pec deck where you really focus on. I don't. We don't have enough research, but to me it just makes sense.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

It just makes sense to be strong throughout a full range of motion and to incorporate a lot of Variety. But we, you know, it's like the more divergent the muscle, the bigger the muscle and more subdivisions, the more complex and the more joint actions, the more complicated it becomes. Lats do we need, does the stretch help a lot? They have better moment arms like coming up all the way. How do you stretch the lats the most? How do you stretch the pecs the most? Like this re.

This scientist named chasm came out and said you, you stretch the pecs more with kind of like with a 45 degree arm angle.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

All right. But maybe what about when I do guillotine? You know, because you can lower the bar, I feel some of the fibers, upper fibers stretching more that way. Should we be doing guillotine work that doesn't agree with some people's shoulders? And it's like, what about the lats? Okay, how do you stretch the lats the most heavy chasm would say do a cross body.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

Cross body motion. That might stretch the lats the most arguably. So. But you know, sometimes you can have, if you're big muscles, you might not get the full stretch of your anatomy. Might your rib cage or for me, I can't seem to get over that much on these. But would it stretch my lats the most? And then you start altering your, your spinal and your scapula and stuff and all that and you can get a better stretch.

And I think this stuff is very important. We should talk about it for what's optimal or not. What happens is everyone starts focusing on optimal, optimal, optimal. And then the pendulum goes too far this way and you have these nerds ripping on bent over rows and weighted chin ups and stuff. And I like it because it's funny because interesting, I contradict myself. I've always liked sumo for glutes compared to conventional, but I've always liked supinated narrow for lats compared to wide grip.

Andy Galpin

Oh yeah.

Brett Contreras

And it's like. But I'm not consistent because I'll say, well, supinated stretch you more, but wide grip activates a little bit more.

Andy Galpin

Then why don't you.

Brett Contreras

In my opinion, for lats, you should probably do some stuff in the frontal plane, some stuff more in the sagittal plane, some stuff that goes full overhead in the full stretch. Even though the lats don't have moment arms or activate here that much, you should just always use a variety. Yes. Some muscles, Cassia, with the lats you've got different divisions. Upper, middle, lower. And how do you build?

Maximize the size of each. And it's like, I like Analyzing everything, geeking out on the biomechanics. Just don't let it take away from, like, the basics and, like, getting strong at the basics. Because, yeah, if you look at, like, the way Tom Platz trained his quads, he was an animal. He got super strong at squats and hack squats. He'd go. He wouldn't go down.

He'd turn the hack squat into a squat.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And this leg extension, you're seeing him, like, flying up on these leg extensions, screaming, and he'd go. Until he'd do. He was doing length and super sets 30 years ago, before they were a thing. Like, before they were popular. It's that intensity. But, yeah, he had the greatest quad development of all time.

Andy Galpin

They're absurd.

Brett Contreras

And that was before they were even now. Now, you see, since then, tell me a body part that's bigger on a guy 30 years ago than. Yeah, today only. Platts with his legs, his quads.

Andy Galpin

Yep, that's it. Okay. Awesome. That was really, really, really helpful. Last thing I want to get from you here is, you know, I was telling you this before we started. You're a unicorn in the field for many reasons, one of which is I think you're one of the very few people who I really respect and enjoy who has actually built themselves. It's not fair.

But mostly on a single brand, right? So this is your company names, this is your. Your exercise equipment, your Instagram, your social media is the glute guy, right? You, despite the fact you have a PhD and you've done all the things we talked about earlier, you've pushed into a single brand. And why that matters is how do you handle that? Then when research comes out and it says your brand maybe isn't great.

Brett Contreras

Right?

Andy Galpin

So in other words, what I'm saying is if you were to be the. The lemon juice guy, and then all of a sudden, research comes out and says, hey, lemon juice is actually not great for you. And like, oh, my God, what do you do? Your career. This has happened many times in your career, right? There have been many, many studies come out that, as you talked about earlier, have countered maybe what you've thought before. And I think you've done such a beautiful job over the years of being so overt, so honest with that.

You're the first guy I hear about when new studies come out on the hip thrust that show negative results. Not because you're criticizing the study. You're like, if that is true of the study, you'll bring that up. But rarely do you do that. Almost Always. It is a. Hey, guys.

Updating our thinking here. Turns out I had this idea. It doesn't work anymore. Now it looks like that's not the case, and this is sort of how we're modifying it. So the question that I'm eventually smuggling in here is, how have you handled that? How do you think about that? And then secondarily, what are the most known criticisms of the hip thrust?

What has been shown scientifically? What is it not good at? What is it limited in? What are the downsides? Because I don't want this entire discussion to feel like just a big, you know, glutes is great.

Hip thrusts are great. And I don't mind bringing this up because you have done this more than anybody in your career about what looks like sabotaging your own brand. But to me, it's only elevated you even more because when you do say things that are positive about the hip thrust, I feel like you generally give a fair representation of literature and you don't run away from when things don't support your brand. So what do we know about the downside? There's no really cons. That's probably not a. There's no negatives of a hit thrust.

But what are the limitations? What are they not good at? When is it not the best choice? And then how have you handled that? When that's happened in your career and saving your brand? If that's probably not a word that resonates with you, but, you know, great questions.

Brett Contreras

I. If I was the hip thrust guy. Yes. I'm the guy who popularized it. If I was the hip thrust guy, I'd be screwed. Because, like, well, I don't know if we had enough studies. You're going to find it's useful for some things, but it's not. Yeah. Then I'd be like, oh, God, I said this.

But being the glute guy, I just need to flow with the research. And what I want to do is be the first to notify my people of a study. So if. If no one will care.

Like, and I want to fund this. I want to carry out the studies, because then I'm the hero either way.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

If I do a study on full squats versus parallel squats for glute development. For glute development and full squats wins, all the Olympic weightlifters are like, hooray. Contreras saves the day. And then if it's to parallel, the power lifters get to say, see?

Suck it, Olympic lifters. We told you. But if I. Yeah, the plotkin study, Menno Hanselman and I funded that.

80 freaking grand. We spent of our own money like 40 grand each. Props to Menno.

Andy Galpin

We wanted MRI lab too. He's great.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, we wanted MRI because we don't fully trust ultrasound for glutes, for other muscles. Yeah, but glutes, it's tricky. So anyway, I was so glad that I got to present that and helped be involved in that because it was a needed study and I was wrong. Now the first time, what you're talking about is with hip thrust, with speed development. So the first study on the topic was from my PhD thesis. It looked at adolescent male rugby players and it showed that front squats led to greater vertical jumps, but hip thrusts led to better acceleration, improvements in sprinting. And that was in line with the force vector hypothesis.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

You want to jump higher, put more force on the ground that way. You want to run faster, put more force on the ground that way.

It's common sense. And then you see this in the research, kind of like you see boom and then boom. And then with hypthoros it went back again to here. So the first study showed great results. So then a couple of researchers designed studies. Here's the deal.

Andy Galpin

I know you got hammered on the force vector theory.

Brett Contreras

Eventually I got hammered on it. And now it's like legit.

Now it's, it's back. Yeah, it's back. So the next couple of researchers who study. I gotta look back at these papers. Chris Bishop was one of them. And there was one Chinese or Japanese baseball study. We, we, I think was the lesson.

But anyway, like that baseball study showed that like hip thrusts grew. The, the baseball players squats squat strength just as effectively as squats did. And that's what I found in one of my, I did a twin study and the hip thrust, the, the, the hip thrust twin grew. Her squat like went from a 95 pound squat to 135 pound squat without squatting just in six weeks of hip thrusting. And it was crazy. It was. And it cleaned up her form too.

Like she hip thrust. So but you, you look at those two, those couple of studies, I want to look back at two things. I don't know why I don't know this.

Number one, their tempo. If they're doing like a two second up and four second down, that is the slowest hip thrust known to man. People. This is one of the most, the biggest things people are wrong about in the industry is that tempo matters so much for hypertrophy. It doesn't look at a Lot of these bodybuilders are heaving away. They're using momentum, they're exploding because intuitively they know a lot of them were doing like length and partials too, just doing bottom position stuff. They were.

They're sometimes ahead of the curve, sometimes they're dead wrong. But sometimes the bros had it right. Anyway, these people out there, and they'll swear by it. It's like they think that, like, the slower the tempo, the better it is for muscle growth. And a review paper by Schoenfeld and Krieger I think showed two to eight seconds led to the same muscle growth. But I'm telling you it's more than.

Andy Galpin

That, by the way. I think it's like 2 to 15, like it almost doesn't matter.

Brett Contreras

The only thing is when you have like a 10 second concentric, there's. I think there's only one study on the Super SL method. I think it was 10 seconds up, 5 seconds down. And that led to less growth. But you can get a variety of results. But also a new study on cheating momentum. Brad Schoenfeld did this study too.

And they showed with curls and I don't know if it was triceps, but basically heaving away at curls versus very strict curls. And they had the same biceps growth. So the strict people can say, ha. This is what I love about presenting the research, because you're the champion. The strict people get to say, see you went lighter, used less load and got the same muscle growth. And it's safer. Clearly it's going to be safer.

You're going to have less injuries. And the heaving crowd can say, see, you went heavier, heaved away. You're probably going to grow other muscles because you're using some front delt and.

Andy Galpin

Some connective tissue development. And it's more athletic.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, it's more athletic. And they grew the same biceps. You didn't need to go light and. And super slow.

Andy Galpin

Train like an athlete, right?

Brett Contreras

So that's what I like about being.

Andy Galpin

That's funny you said that, because my initial instinct was that, right. Being on more the athletic side generally, I'm like, I know I've been like this whole don't use momentum thing I've been against for forever because I'm like, no, like, move, learn to move. It will, you'll develop.

Brett Contreras

And the bodybuilders were heaving and using momentum back in the day. Look at Ronnie Coleman. Look at these guys. They're. And they're not going super slow negatives. And I don't think super slow negatives help with Muscle growth either?

Andy Galpin

No, but they are very tiring in terms of like, they will suck all your recovery resources.

Brett Contreras

I think it's good to do for variety. It's good to do for. Maybe. Maybe it does some of these things lead to growth initially, but then you don't.

You just revisit them. But anyway, I think hip thrusts are like one rep per second at my gym.

Maybe one and a half. Say what you want, criticize me all you want, but scoreboard. Let's look at before and after pictures. And I don't mean to be cocky, but like, I get annoyed when look at my girl's glute development. Do you think we're lacking and we're doing explosive hip thrusts. Okay, so what I think those initial studies, I gotta look at two things. Number one, were they still sprinting?

Because if these were athletes and you have them stop sprinting for eight weeks, then this is a detrain. This is to see if hip thrusts counteract the effects of detraining.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

If they didn't get faster, but they didn't get slower, that's huge. You can hip thrust and while you stop sprinting and retain your sprint speed. That would be cool to know.

Andy Galpin

And speed is, as we know, is the first thing to go. So not sprinting for six weeks, if this is actually the case, which it may not be, that would be enormous. You would expect a significant loss. Yeah.

Brett Contreras

But also if it's a slow tempo, that. That doesn't have ecological validity. And that's my problem in the research.

Andy Galpin

Is another way of saying that's not how people do it in the real world.

Brett Contreras

No. So, and so I'd like. So I think maybe some of the other studies that came after that. So then you had a couple studies show that hypdos didn't build sprint speed. And that's when I came out with my blog post saying I was wrong. I thought I was ahead of the research. I wasn't.

Everyone respected me for that. And now it's years later. Now there's actually a lot of evidence that hypdos are better than squats. And then. But in general, horizontal exercises seem to be better at developing sprint speed. But this is interesting because the plot can study showed similar glute growth, but the squat group had more quad and adductor growth. Twice the quad and over two times, two and a half times.

I think the adductor growth neither grew the hamstrings or glute medius minimus. So you can't tell me in sports, quads and Adductors aren't important. So I would never say stop squatting because you need quads, you need adductors, you need glutes, but you do need strength through a full range of motion. And squats probably get you more hip. More glute strength in the hips flexed position, hip thrust in the hips extended position. But there's something about explosive movements. And there's even a study showing that bands might be more effective than free weights because you explode up.

So I think we need to look in more into. I have a few different glute. In the first room in glute lab, Fort Lauderdale is our hip thrust room. But I have in there a kneeling. The glute builder has a kneeling glute isolator. It's kneeling hip extension.

Andy Galpin

Oh, yeah.

Brett Contreras

You're bent over, you're kneeling, and you do back extension. Like it's like Sorenex's back attack machine, but kneeling. Okay. And then you have the reverse glute ham. That's a Rogers piece, where you're laying on your back and there's a pad and you. It's almost like a, like, it looks like a leg curl pad, but you move it in hip extension the whole way. Well, when I do 20 rep set of hip thrust versus the kneeling glute isolate versus the reverse glute ham, a 20 rep set will take not.

Not even 30 seconds. With the hip thrust, it might be 25 seconds. A kneeling glute isolator might be 35, 30, 35. And the reverse glute ham will be 40 to 60. It's gonna be like 60 seconds.

Andy Galpin

It's a long time.

Brett Contreras

And so these people talk about tempo and they don't consider the range of motion. So how to tell. Tell me you don't know about weight training without telling me you don't know about weight training. Mention that all exercise need the same tempo.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

What do people do with calories? What about shrugs? Am I supposed to do shrugs with two seconds up, four seconds down? No, shrugs are one second.

You don't need to. So anyway, I think that helps with athleticism is these rapid, like with hip thrusts, boom, explode up. They don't beat you up as much.

They don't cause much muscle damage. They're explosive concentrics. You don't have to control the negative. And you can say the negative is huge. Is it for acceleration? When you're leaning forward, accelerating, it's pure concentric. There's not an eccentric phase with acceleration.

Sprinting, I think concentric is king and I think you need to power through the whole stride and that's why hip thrusts are great.

Andy Galpin

So you're not saying it's the only exercise to do?

Brett Contreras

Oh hell no. You look at what just one, you.

Andy Galpin

Look at what of the many what.

Brett Contreras

The sprint popular sprint coaches have always drawn. What is us ATF or what are the track and field, what have they always done? Vertical, like Olympic squats, RDLs, Olympic lifts. But like Charlie Francis was thrown in the reverse leg press. That's a kickback, you know. And so add in some hip thrusts, but just make sure you're not overdoing the strength training because I would become the coach and I would over prioritize strength that I'd actually make them all slower.

I'd make them slower. Yeah, because I'd be obsessed with getting them stronger at these exercises. And really you need to save your juice for the explosive stuff, the sprinting, the plyos.

Andy Galpin

Just like you said at the beginning, don't forget the priorities. Right, yes. Like make sure that the goal is there. You're just saying that potentially you could consider adding a horizontal movement. If horizontal speed is.

Brett Contreras

Is the priority, is the goal. Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Okay, so.

Brett Contreras

But real quick, so. So that's the first time I had to say I was wrong. But then I kind of end up being right. Anyway, I need to update that.

Andy Galpin

Not a good start to your own criticisms here, but okay.

Brett Contreras

Then later on with that hip thrust versus squat study, I thought for sure hip thrusts were going to win. And this is what annoyed me when in terms of squats for glute growth.

Yep, they tied. They tied for upper, middle and lower glute max. And so then it leads to the next hypothesis. Well, we equated volume. You don't have to equate volume. In the real world you can handle more volume. What if we would have done more volume?

Blah blah blah. We need more studies. But I was wrong because I thought hip thrusts would beat squats. And they tied. It was on beginners. Beginners seem to have more stretch related growth due to sarcomerogenesis, which tends to stop at around say six, eight weeks. Whatever. But I did make a post saying I was wrong.

Well, why didn't all the other guys make posts saying they were wrong too? Because they all thought squats would annihilate hip thrusts. I thought hip thrusts would beat out squats. We were all wrong, but I was the only one to say it. So anyway, that's the secret. To answer your question. How do you pivot?

I guess as new research comes out, you be the first to announce it, and then you change your programming to reflect that. You learn and you evolve. And that's the secret. No one's mad at you. In fact, they trust you more. But it's really hard for guys to do. It is so hard for guys to say I was wrong.

It's okay for guys to admit they're wrong like five years later. Oh, back in the day, we used to think that squats grew your arms because we'd say, do squats and it raises your testosterone growth hormone. Your arms are going to get jacked.

Andy Galpin

And now we know what you're saying, by the way.

Brett Contreras

Really? No, that's not true. The hormone hypothesis. It was probably smart. I like that we told people that, but we were wrong. But yeah, we got them to squat and deadlift by pretending it was going to build your arms.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, I used to say that all the time.

Brett Contreras

I used to say it too. I came across a document I gave out to my first gym and it was like, so pseudo scientific. It was, yeah, it was full of pseudoscience. But anyway, it's fine for guys to admit they were wrong five years later, ten years later. But at the time, it's hard to say, guys, this study just came out. Looks like I was wrong. I've been telling people that.

And you can say, okay, I'd still like to see it in advanced lifters. I would still like to see. But if you say front squats suck because you're not building quads, you're just limited by upper body. Your quads could keep going, but you cave and you fall like, and then this study comes out saying front squats and lead to the same quad growth as back squats. You should tell your people, if you're a scientist, you tell your people. If you're a zealot, you don't mention that study. You pretend it never existed.

If you say hip thrusts suck and a study comes out showing hip thrust, tight squats, you need to come out to your people and say, looks like I was wrong. Hip thrust. There might be more to hip thrusts. Yeah. But either way, you should be saying we should do both. I still think squats are better than hip thrust for glute length. Or I still think hip thrusts are better than squats, but as of now, we should probably be doing both.

Especially since these, they kind of combine to form comprehensive glute strength through a full range of motion, full spectrum glute strength, and especially because they don't beat each other up. Like one doesn't Beat you up as more one's more full body grows the quads and additives two. One is more isolation. And guys will look you straight in the face and say, don't do any glute isolation work. And I wish women could say, oh, I shouldn't do hip thrusts. No. I shouldn't do kickbacks. No. I shouldn't do abduction. No. Well, what do you do for your chest?

Do you just do bench? Oh, you do pec deck, too? What do you do for your arms? Do you do curls? Because you could just grow.

I'm doing chin ups and close grip bench. You do curls and tricep extensions. Oh, what about your side delts? Do you do lateral raises? Because you could just say, just do military press out to the sides. Oh, you don't even believe. So you're giving me advice you don't follow yourself, you weird hypocrite.

Do you not realize that? You weird man. I don't know why guys do that with glutes. But anyway, that's how you navigate that throughout your career, is you be the first to announce it to your people. You admit it, and then they just like you more because they go, this guy's always going to update us. This guy's always going to give us the science. And then if you disagree with it, like, fund your own study and look into it, you'll just learn.

All we can do is learn and grow from it. And then if you're the first person to point out that hip thrusts were not needed and I could pivot, I'm still the glute guy. I just said, hey, it turns out we didn't need to do squats. We just needed to do these. Throw electrodes on your glutes.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And I'd be the hero, because people would be, we didn't need exercise. But I don't believe that.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And then the second part to your question was, what are the pitfalls with hip thrusts? I do believe when you're an expert on a topic, you should.

I could be the number one. I could write the best article to convince you that hip thrusts are amazing. But I could also write the most convincing article to say that they're worthless. I should know both sides of the argument. I should know it better than anyone. So people will say, takes forever to set up. It's a pain in the butt to set up.

How did we all used to set up these stations back in the day? I don't like if I go to a gym I don't want to do. I Don't want to set up the station.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. It is the number one reason I don't do it.

Brett Contreras

Yes.

Andy Galpin

Literally the number one reason.

Brett Contreras

But if you have a plate loaded device.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

If you've got the hammer strength, the BC strength, the nautilus glute drive, the.

Andy Galpin

Booty builder, these are all different Hip.

Brett Contreras

Thrust machines machine even with a bench nearby it. Because sometimes they put the bench right near the or sometimes some gyms are putting benches right by their platforms so people can quickly. And it also matters how strong you are. If there's a bar with one. At my gym, it's so easy because I got the BC strength thruster setups, there's bigger plates. The bar is sitting there loaded with 135. You want to add on plates.

We got plates with handles on them. So you slide them on. You got the glue loop there to connect it. If you want to do bar plus band, you got the pad on the bar. You have a even an air exped to sit on. If you're shorter and it's all right there, it makes it so much easier.

Andy Galpin

I don't know if people realize what you said a second ago, but you, your company, you specifically make weight plates that are larger in diameter. And the reason you do that is because then it makes it much easier to do hip thrusts with them.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, you just slide the bar over. When you have big legs and you have standard plates and I gotta slide.

Andy Galpin

Myself underneath, it's a giant plate.

Brett Contreras

And then you go to get in position, you're like, oh. And it's crushing you and you have to kind of like climb. Hip thrust.

Andy Galpin

When I saw you came out with those, I chuckled so hard because I'm like, oh my God. Of course you would, of course you would make a person to change weight place in 50 years.

Brett Contreras

No, I got that idea from Mark Bell, came up with his wagon wheels. Oh, and some of my, my, my coaches at Glab were hip thrusting off of them. And at that time, at that time I was rolling the bar up onto rubber mats. Just the 2 inch rubber mats that I've got from Elite FTS, we'd roll them over the mats and I'm like, the mats aren't necessary if you have plates that are 2 inches bigger in diameter or actually 2 inches bigger in radius. Sorry. So yeah, we came up with the bigger plates. The hip thrust station is huge.

And my girls, Fort Lauder, they like the rotisserie station the most. The barbell, the standard, they like the rotating pad the most. Then it would be The Thruster Pro, which I use the hammer strength model because only hammer strength. Almost got it perfect. But why did they make this tiny plate peg you only fit four plates on? I've got girls that are stronger than you. Get a strong man, they're using six, seven plates.

So I made the plate pegs bigger, and then I made the foot plate bigger to accommodate five footers. That's something no one does for women. These poor women out there, they finally get a hip thrust. And these gym owners are. The gym owners are so bad at knowing what the best equipment to buy. And the manufacturers don't even test it on a shorter woman.

Who is the market with.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

Glue machines.

Andy Galpin

Yep. So the outside of the criticism of setting it up in the pain, what would be maybe the next just pain? Hip pain.

Brett Contreras

Oh.

Andy Galpin

Like the bar on my head.

Brett Contreras

Super strong.

Andy Galpin

I bruised the hell out of myself there many times.

Brett Contreras

Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

You think I, of all people would have the best padding? It's hard.

Andy Galpin

Yeah, it's. Well, I mean, you're still putting. I don't care what kind of polyurethane or whatever material you have foam, you're still going to put several hundred pounds through that foam.

Brett Contreras

Yeah. So there's an optimal thickness and density combination that.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

But it's really. If you get it thicker, it interferes with your hip flexion.

Andy Galpin

So outside of setup, get it denser.

Brett Contreras

It's. It's. It. It doesn't pad as well. If you get it too soft, the bar sinks through. So the hip pain and the bruises and the scar. And then in some people, it can get bad.

Like, my girls will be like, look at this. And so sometimes when you have these crazy bruises, you can either avoid the hip thrust, but sometimes I'll sit on my client's laps backwards, and you do partner hip thrust. They hip thrust me, and I'm like, I weigh 240, but I'm heavier. It feels heavier. I go, if you can get me for 20, that's hard. So they either hip thrust me or they do single leg hip thrusts, or they do the kneeling or like some machine that doesn't put the stress in the exact same place. Okay. And then you would say from a functional standpoint, you'll still hear people say, you're lying down, it's not functional.

Those people are dead wrong. I think hip thrust transfer better. If you just said, compare it to squats. I think hip thrusts transfer better to sprinting speed. I would. The research on horizontal plyo says they're better for agility, too. But I think squats would be better at agility.

But I think they're better for rotational power because when you rotate you're more in full hip extension. So I think for rotational power hip thrusts are going to be better. And then they seem to tie for transfer to the deadlift, hip thrusts and squats. But I bet you squats build better strength. Deadlift strength off the floor and hip thrusts better, probably build better lockout strength. Makes sense as far as just straight up they transfer the deadlifts. Similarly, they lead to similar horizontal pressing strength, pushing against a wall as hard as you can, which is a very important sports functional performance outcome.

Hip thrusts seem to be better at isometric mid thigh pull due to joint angle specificity, no doubt.

Andy Galpin

Yeah.

Brett Contreras

And for jumping they're better for horizontal jumping, broad jumps, things like that, broad jumps. But then for vertical jumping they probably tie. We think squats would be better. But in the literature they probably either tie or maybe a squat slight edge for squats. But the bottom line is you should be doing both. You should be doing both of them. Oh yeah.

They neither transfer to lumbar extension strength. What else is there? They don't build lumbar extension specific strength.

Andy Galpin

Neither one of them density. Any research on that?

Brett Contreras

None on bone mineral density. But where would you do it? In the lumbar spine? Yeah, yeah. If that was the case, I would think squats would be better. But anyway, I think, I think what that shows is for sports performance you need a variety of exercises that multi vectorial training, you know, force vector training. Do heavy, medium and light stuff in your main directions. Yes. Sagittal playing stuff is going to be paramount in sports because you know, we stand on two feet.

But don't be afraid to. But anyway, so the functional crowd, they're wrong. It's really hard for people to fathom that an exercise can transfer like supine exercise can transfer to sprinting, but it does. Then the other arguments would be, I've heard it all, okay, it's really bad for your posture. It's going to grow your waist. It's not going to grow your waist. It doesn't activate the obliques much or the rectus abdominis.

It's not going to screw up your posture, it's not going to break your back. As long as you, you know. Well, not as long as you just.

Andy Galpin

You have actually seen like hardly any back injuries.

Brett Contreras

No, there's not nearly as many back injuries. But I think the problem, I think my power lifters don't like it is they see Someone like me doing all this weight. So they're like, if that guy can hip thrust, then I can. And they load up too heavy. I started with 185 back in the day and worked my way up gradually. You got to start light and get full hip extension and work your way up gradually and get that feeling of that full glute squeeze and the full hip extension, full hip hyperextension. And so they'll do it.

And they're going so heavy they're only working the bottom ranges and they don't feel it much. If they would have went lighter and went full, say they went light like 135 their very first time and did a pause at the top in full hip extension and did, you know, a set of 15 with a 3 second pause at the top, their glutes would have been lit up and they would be convinced that it works well. But instead they lit up 405 and they did 80% reps where they failed to get the 20% of full hip extension, didn't lock it out, didn't pause at the top because they could never reach there in the first place. And had anterior pelvic tilt and full spinal extension. Trying to mask, trying to pretend you're coming up higher. But the bar didn't rise any higher.

Andy Galpin

Right, Right.

Brett Contreras

They just altered their torso to make it look like they went higher.

Andy Galpin

And then their back hurts the next day.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, and then their back hurts. It doesn't feel right. They don't even feel their glutes. And they're like, this is stupid. Why am I even doing this? Yeah, that. It's redundant. If. If a study on squats showed that it built the glutes the same, why do it?

But when would they use that argument for any other muscle group? If lateral raises built the side delts is the same as military press. Which guy would say, don't do laterals. Then they'd say, do them both. If leg curls and stiff leg deadlifts built one of the hamstrings the same, would they be okay with that?

You'd probably do both. And they'd probably say, I bet you they grow different. Different port like the proximal versus distal or different subdivisions. We didn't look at the whole lot, the whole level of muscle, the full length of muscle at every. In the, in the semi tendinosis, semimembranosis, and then long head of the biceps forms and short head. They wouldn't. They, they would be skeptical.

But they're quick to throw out glute Isolation movements.

Andy Galpin

Yeah. Whenever I think about this topic, a couple things jumped in my mind. One of them is false dichotomy and the other is mutually exclusive. Right? So when we think about this, nowhere ever do I recall you saying things like you should only ever hip thrust, or that the hip thrust is ultimately always better or like any of these things. So when I say false dichotomy, what I mean is you don't have to do a hip thrust or any glute exercise as your only option. And you're not saying it's the best option.

It's just looking at research to say, is it actually working? And when studies come out to suggest it works the same or better or less, it depends on the outcome goal. Right. It depends on what we're training for. And all we're looking to put sort of words in your mouth is what do we know about the quality for this outcome? And there's never a rationale to think. It is only ever going to be, say, a hip thrust versus a squat or hip thrust versus an RDL or hip thrust.

You can do both. There's no rule that says you have to choose squat or this one. Right. And there's also no rule of you can't do both at different times. It's never ever going to be an answer of, is this exercise better than that one? That's just not how this stuff works. It is simply, what do we know that is positive?

What do we know that is potentially limitations. How do I put my person in the best position to likely succeed as a starting place? Research, as you've outlined so far, it only shows us what's most likely to work. Most people, most of the time, it's just a starting place. From then, you have to coach.

Brett Contreras

It's so weird because you've been to my gym in San Diego. I have strong clients. They're impressive. I would say we're the strongest all natural, all female gym in the world. I wish we could. Yeah. I wish like there was like some gym in Brazil or Russia and we tested them.

We tested them and they said, let's compete. Because I could tell my girls up, we got called out, we got to compete with them. It'd be fun. But what would you do? Strong lifting. Which exercise would you do? But like.

Yeah, and strong lifting. The big six.

I'd love to. I'd love to take on other, other gyms in the world who think they're stronger than us. And, and, and these girls don't take stuff. They're like I said, all natural. And we are so strong at chin ups, bench press, military press, squats, deadlifts, and hip thrusts. Are we as strong as the best powerlifters? No, not at squats and deads, but I got girls squatting above 315.

One of the girls in strongly comp squatted 405. One deadlifted 425, 405, 385, 2, 3 girls 385.

So we're not some wimpy gym. But it's so weird. The you'll see criticisms of me, and they're like, he just gives us girls hip thrusts and bands. And I've never given that because I don't know the answer. So it's always been kind of that rule of thirds, you know, a third from vertical, a third from horizontal, third from lateral rotary. But I do wonder, okay, if volume wasn't equated. What if you did just do hip thrusts and bands and you contrasted that to their programs?

I bet you'd get the same glute growth without quad hamstring and adductor growth. And then you could say, what's your goal? Do you want just glute growth or do you want all of it? And then if you want all of it, probably do the rule of thirds. If you want more quads, then focus more on quad dominant movements. If you want more hams, focus more on hinges. But, but, but, yeah, like, do your squats in a quad, like more upright.

Andy Galpin

Right.

Brett Contreras

Do a little more volume from the squat lunge category. If you want more hamstrings, do more hingey stuff. But like, yeah, one thing I like about hip thrusts is they're. It's one of the most. Well, everyone can do a hip thrust. People have bad anthropometries or poor anthropometries for squatting and deadlifting. But hip thrusts, it's a bridge.

Andy Galpin

Yep.

Brett Contreras

You just put the bar in the middle of wherever the middle of that bridge is, and the hips and you thrust and you. Anyway, what you said, though, you hit the nail on the head.

They're all tools. And you know, if. If you're starting out and you can only afford. You could be 80% as good of a carpenter with these tools. But you want to be the best carpenter in the world. You want to be the best at your job, you better have a lot of different specialty tools. And that's what I like, having all the machines, all the exercise, all the exercise variations.

I just told you how we can still do hip thrusts when their hips are hurting, when they're bruised up. I can tell you when someone's low back is hurting.

Here's what we do. When your knees are hurting, here's what you do. If your inner thighs are too sore, here's what you do. We have protocols for everything. If this gives you pain, try this. If you're old and don't want this, then we're going to do this instead. You got to have a lot of tools.

And what if you're trying to grow your glutes without growing your legs? Then hip thrusts and glute bridges because become a lot more friendlier options.

Andy Galpin

So one more question I have for you. Why is it so hard to grow the glutes without targeting the legs?

Brett Contreras

Okay. Because you look at some of the most effective glute exercise are squats, you know, lunges, deadlifts. They work a lot of muscle mass. So let's think about the glutes. Ideally, the knee would stay bent. Why? Because that's going to take the hamstrings out of it.

Largely when the knees are bent, the hamstrings are slackened, the glutes are going to take up more of the brunt of hip extension. All right, but then when you sink really deep, how are you going to work the glutes without working the adductors? When you're going super deep, you do deep squat. The deeper you go, the more adductors you bring into play. So how. So whenever you go really deep, you're going to work the adductors. If you're doing anything with knee extension, you're also working the quads.

There's some evidence that when you carry out knee and hip extension at the same time, the glutes don't do as much. They don't activate as much because you're coordinating two things, and you're not focusing on driving hips forward maximally. You're coordinating those two actions. If. And so it's like, all right, straight leg hip extension is great for glutes, but it also works a lot of hammies. Knee extension work is great for glutes, but it works a lot of quads and adductors. And you better do these in the most glute dominant fashion to work a little more glutes, a little bit less quads or whatever.

So just hip extension alone, what are the hip extensors? It's not just the glute max, it's the glute max, the adductors, and the hamstrings. So anytime you do hip extension, it's those Three in. In combination, how do you hone in on the glutes? You could say, well, why even do hip extension at all? Do abduction. Does that maximize lower glute growth?

If you lean forward and if you start doing all your volume of leaning front or leaning horizontal plane hip abduction, would you develop overuse injuries? Probably. So you have to look at. All right, what about loaded posterior pelvic tilt? You just do a glute squeeze that you feel mostly in the glutes, but that's such a short range of motion. Is that going to be effective at growing the glutes? We don't know what hip external rotation that uses mostly glutes.

Does it work the upper and lower gluteus maximus? Probably. But how do you create a program around that tough? Yeah. So in theory, you do more hip external, hip external rotation, more posterior pelvic tilt, more. More leaning forward abduction, abduction in the transverse plane. We have no evidence on these for growing the glutes.

We have EMG evidence showing high EMG activation, but they don't always work you through a full stretch. They don't move move you through as much excursion as hip extension exercises do. And so it's complicated. It's tough to just target glutes without working the other muscles in the quads, the adductors, the hammies. And so this is where glute bridges become very enticing and hip thrust and then kickbacks. But even kickbacks, if you do kneeling kickbacks or kickbacks from a high pulley position, you're going to involve your quads. It becomes kind of like a step up.

If you straight leg kickbacks, it's more like a, like a back extension. It's like a hinge.

So you do them swoopy. So there are ways to kind of make things more glute dominant, but you'd have to do more volume because you're not doing the biggest bang for your buck exercises. So can you do more volume? It would be really fun to do a controlled experiment looking at like the basics versus like a very grow your glutes without growing the legs dominant program. And look at do you get the total glute growth? Doing a lot more volume for glutes because they're not as effective. But then you don't get the quad and adductor and hamstring growth.

It's not easy to do. You're gonna have to get a. You're gonna have a lot of bros telling you you're doing it wrong. Yeah, but it is complicated because the glutes are involved in the hip extension. Like I said, there are other hip extensors, hip abduction. You got the glute medius, glute minimus, and TFL that do hip abduction as well. Hip external rotation.

You got the hip X, the deep six hip extra rotators. And so you kind of create a pro, even posterior pelvic tilt. The abs can do it. So when you're doing glute squeeze, you got to make sure it's not the abs, it's coming from the glutes. So you're not going to be doing the most popular glute exercise. All the squats and lunges, you could throw those in and just do a couple sets and not do progressive overload. Because you shouldn't fear getting gigantic quads from just doing the occasional squat or lunge.

You just might not utilize progressive overload. And you gotta do em in a glute dominant fashion, leaning forward, sitting back. But it is hard, it's not easy to do, and it requires biomechanical thought and consideration, which I don't see from a lot of people. Another criticism of the hip thrust is just because it looks sexual in nature. Oh, so what I started doing, because I heard this on podcasts by a couple people, so what I started doing is saying, I started doing reaction posts to them and I started saying, okay, so you're saying, like, this looks gay to do, but what is a Romanian deadlift? You're doing loaded bending over. So you're saying you'd rather do loaded bending over as a man than loaded thrusting.

Personally, I think loaded thrusting is the more manly thing to do. But you're saying, so anyway, I put it back in their court and point that out. It's always a funny thing.

Andy Galpin

I got you.

Brett Contreras

I'm fine doing loaded bending over. I'm fine doing loaded opening and closing of your legs with abduction and adduction, and I'm fine doing loaded thrusting. It just needs to become more common and more familiar. But yeah, what it looks like shouldn't dictate, but I get it, I do get it.

Andy Galpin

I, I, I, I hope we have a little more maturity with exercise selection than that. When, when you first got here today and we were talking, I said, you know, hey, I, I don't, I don't want to spend that much time talking about the glutes. And well, we, we did the whole thing.

But that's okay. There, there's your, your knowledge is vast in, in many other areas of strength training, and you and I love strength Training, we could do this for a very long time, very often, but one way or the other, we tackled a lot of information. I'll reiterate something I said earlier. Although we did focus on the glutes a lot here, I really do hope people can pull the lessons out to other forms of training, other training goals. You laid a lot of critical information about basic things like paying attention to what the client actually wants. It sounds funny, but that's really what you said. You notice clearly your clients, who just happen to be mostly women, we're really wanting a certain thing now.

Maybe other women want different things. It doesn't matter. The point from a coaching perspective was you really actually listened to what the client wanted. In this case, many of them wanted bigger glutes. Could be selection bias there. Doesn't actually matter. It's specificity. It's getting better results because you're being more specific to the actual goals and listening to the client and not worrying about what you thought was a better exercise because that exercise worked better for you or for other clients or a study said that. Right. It's paying attention.

So that was one thing I learned about really thinking about the client goals. The other one was, again, the examples were glutes and hip thrusts. But it doesn't matter. It is making sure if you're not getting progress, that you are truly progressively overloading, that the effort is there and that you're not distracting it with either other exercises or other forms of exercise or other life things. Making sure that there's enough stimulus in the way that you want to drive adaptation. And if you're not getting it there, then you need to think about other options. More variety, more ranges of motion, different range, less range of motion.

Like figuring out what one thing at a time is you need to change until your goals actually start or the thing you're trying to target starts making progress. And then you gave a ton of technical details. You covered a lot of biomechanics, you covered sagittal plane and frontal plane, and we covered a lot of anatomy. So hopefully people that have not had the exercise science background that you and I have will have learned a ton of things again, whether they're coaches or themselves, so they can follow along more with research to get better application for their own individual process. And then really, at the end there, we finished off with talking about how. How do you understand when new research comes up implementing, changing and adapting so that you're staying true to your core, Your beliefs aren't changing, your principles aren't changing, but you're focused on outcomes, not methods. Right. And methods come, methods go.

What is the outcome you're really after? So a lot of value, hopefully in all those areas. There's probably other summary points that I could think of, but those things kept coming back to me. Things that people say, but you gave so many direct examples of that from the scientific literature, from physiology, from anatomy to many, many years of experience, that ultimately that's just. That's invaluable information. I know that you provide a ton of value on your social media. You do a ton on your YouTube page and potentially, I don't know if I could spill the beans, but maybe more YouTube stuff is coming in the near future.

I've actually been to your seminars before. I've seen you speak a bunch of different times. So you are not shy about giving out information. I'd love to know where people can learn more about you and all those things. But you have everything. You have training programs like Booty by Brett, My wife does. It's very, very affordable, reasonable, good program.

So that all said, thank you for all that. As much as you are a business person and you've got money to make, you have given away so much stuff over the years at no or very reasonable price. It. You've. You've changed a lot of people's lives. Not only have you grown some butts, but you've really educated a lot of people. So thank you for all that and thank you for my wife because she loves your program so much.

That said, man, where can people pay attention to your stuff and learn it and what is. Is the best avenue?

Brett Contreras

Yeah, it's been Instagram for the last few years. Like, that's my main focus. Like you said, I'm going to start focusing on YouTube more and then something we should all be doing is like getting emails. So newsletter, we should be better at that because who knows? You can't predict these social media platforms. Sure, I don't send my newsletters out enough, but I never spam people, so that's. You get it?

BrettContrust.com but thank you for the kind words. Always happy to come back down the road and talk about other topics or updates if we have new science. Hoping to collaborate with you on some research down the road with your new facility. Seems amazing. And I've watched you rise up through your career. We've watched each other rise up.

Andy Galpin

You were way ahead, man.

Brett Contreras

Yeah, but we were like, we met through like Barbell Shrugged podcast and stuff, right? Like, and then seeing, seeing you become this rock star on Andrew Huberman's podcast and seeing you grow. This, this new research position, this new professor position, there's no one who deserves it more because I like to think I'm in the same group. We don't just read the research. We work with actual clients. And it's different when you do that. You're looking at maximizing every athlete's performance on an individual level.

And you can't just apply research to the masses. You have to do a lot of testing and figure out what's going to help them, what are their deficiencies and what are the strategies that are going to help them improve the most. And I have so much respect for you as a practitioner, as a researcher, and as a fellow person in this industry who cares about steering us in the right direction. So thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor. And I feel very privileged to talk, to have scientific discussions with someone at your level. It's fun for me.

Andy Galpin

So I had a blast, man.

Brett Contreras

Hope the people enjoy it. Yeah.

Andy Galpin

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining Today's discussion with Dr. Brett Contreras. To learn more about Brett, follow along on his social media, see his products, courses and other relevant items. Please check the show notes for direct links. Thank you for joining for today's episode. My goal, as always, is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best.

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