The Real Reason Your Butt Won't Grow (It Is Not Your Genetics) | Mind Pump 2940

The real reason your butt won't grow has nothing to do with how hard you're working. It's because you're training backwards. You've been going to the gym off and on for years, but your butt looks exactly the same. You've been told to eat less and do specific exercises like squats and hip thrusts, glute bridges, lunges, glute machines. You've done all that, and the size of your butt, it hasn't changed. It's not because your genetics are cursed. There is a solution, but the amount of lies, bad products, and horrible workout programs are distracting you from the truth that took us years as personal trainers to finally understand. In this episode, we're going to show you why you don't have the butt you want yet, and I'll tell you what. This works if you can't work out every day. It works if you're a busy mom. It works if you don't have a gym membership, if you don't have a lot of time, if you've never worked out consistently. Here's the truth I want you to remember. You cannot shrink your way to a better butt. You have to build one. Don't forget the glutes are a muscle, and here's some of the things you're going to learn in today's episode to transform your butt. We're going to talk about diet. We're going to talk about how to lift. We're going to talk about how to maintain the round butt that you built. Let's get to it. I'd have to say this is probably, you know, first of all, we talk about 60% of our clients as personal trainers were female clients. The majority of them wanted to lose weight, but even the ones that wanted to lose weight also always had this goal, I want to build a butt. I want to build a butt also, and this was always a main focus, and I'd say of that 60% clientele, 80% of that, so a majority of the people I trained, this was the focus, and it was always something that they had been working on for a long time and never felt like they got any traction. Those are conflicting goals, right? I want to shrink, but I also want a bigger butt. Not realizing many times, I think if you ask people to know this, but not realizing that the butt is a muscle, and if you're trying to shrink your body while simultaneously build a muscle, nothing's going to happen. You won't build the butt that you want. You can't shrink into a bigger butt, so that's one of the big things that people need to understand, and it's a muscle. You train it properly, and a lot of people now are familiar with the best exercises, but a lot of people don't know how to program the best exercises. Programming is the order of the exercises, the sets, the reps. It's how you do them. It's the total volume. That's just as important as the exercises themselves, and when you put it together the right way, it works. When you don't put them together the right way, what it feels like, and here's what the problem is, it's like years of work. Nothing's happening. I'm spending all this time in the gym. I'm getting sore. I'm doing all the right exercises. I think this is what I see on Instagram. Nothing's happening. Is it my genetics? Is it just never going to happen for me? That sucks. I think this is why people give up on this is because, obviously, genetics play a role. We've talked about this many times with any muscle group you're trying to build or physique. We can't change our genetics, and there's definitely some people that have better genetics for building a butt than other people, but it doesn't mean that every single person can't significantly improve and develop that muscle because it's a muscle. I may never be able to build my biceps to look like Phil Heath, but I absolutely can significantly change and build my biceps to look significantly bigger than what they did when I started. It's no different for the client who is like, I just want to build my butt, but I do the hip thrust. I do all these exercises, but I can't possibly do it. I don't understand. Is it my genetics? I'll never have a butt. What's interesting about that is certain muscle groups, like you're mentioning, like a bicep, most people would assume I'm going to need to eat more to be able to build size. It's interesting to me to see that that is a common thing. It's like I don't want to eat more because I don't want to get fluffy. I don't want to gain size everywhere. I just want to gain it in my butt, but in order to grow muscle, you have to be able to feed it. You do. I blame a lot of the marketing. When I think back to some of the arguably the most popular, the most famous Beachbody program was a butt and abs program. It was the Brazilian butt lift. Yeah. If you watch the marketing on it, it is saying things like not to get big and bulky and shrink your waist. They're telling you shrink your waist and build your butt, which we know is bullshit. You're not going to do the two of those things simultaneously. You're going to focus on building the butt, just like you would focus on building the muscle. But when you look at the way they use these words, like toning, like bulky, and that stuff scared people away from what they really needed to do. First off, we've talked about this on previous episodes, but toning, at least in the way it's used in fitness marketing, is not a real word. Muscles build or they shrink. That's it. There is no such thing as toning. A muscle that begins to build feels firmer. And that's what they're trying to convey by using the word tone. But what they're also trying to do is move away from a word that tends to scare people, which is build. But here's the deal. Don't be afraid of building. If you want a round butt, you want the bubble butt, you have to build it. That's what makes that happen. The other thing too, Adam, is oftentimes workout programs emphasize the wrong things or the wrong rep ranges. And the emphasis is on the burn. Yeah. The emphasis is on... It's just the feel. Yeah, the feel. It's on short rest periods. It's on these little movements. You mentioned that Beachbody program. If you watch that original... They're not even lifting weights. They're doing salsa dancing. You're going to get some stamina and it might be fun, but you're not going to build anything by doing that. In fact, the only person... Here's where genetics play a role. The only person that will build a bigger butt following a crappy workout program is someone that has insane muscle building genetics. You take somebody with bodybuilder genetics, which is less than 1% of the population, and they can do the... You can do almost anything. They can do the step-ups and the kickbacks and the dog pees and the little exercises and the burn and the no rest and not really focus on traditional strength training. And they'll build some butt muscle, but the average person is going to get no results. They'll get no results from that. You just said something else that reminds me of one of the challenges I think that a lot of clients had too was we or they attach the feeling and the burning sensation in their butt to good programming or good exercises or that it's working, therefore it should be building. And sometimes the exercises that you feel it in the butt the most are the most inferior movements you could possibly be doing for the butt. And that seems counterintuitive. Someone would be like, that's weird. I don't understand. How could the exercise that I feel it the most in my butt not be the best? Well, because some of these are these little isolation exercises. You mentioned things like kickbacks and dog pees and these movements that are really small isolation movements that you don't really do a lot of weight, but you'll feel the burn. Yeah. It's a small signal. Yeah. And so it's a very small signal and it is not going to build the glutes the way somebody wants to, but yet because you've been told those are great movements and because you feel it in your butt, you tend to lean into that thinking this is the right way to train. Look, just to give an example of this, and this is not by any stretch of the imagination, perfect workout programming, but just to illustrate what we're talking about. If you took two groups of women who wanted to build their butt, all things being equal, one group did five sets of barbell squats for five reps. Okay. They did heavy barbell squats for five reps. The other group, which by the way, would take you about, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes, maybe the other group, 90 minutes or 120 minutes of the craziest nonstop, butt building class, like the Brazilian butt lift type of workout. Just a crazy nonstop burn, whatever. The group that did the crazy burn workout would be sweaty. They'd feel the burn in the butt. They'd be exhausted. The group that did five sets of five for heavy barbell squats would feel like they didn't even work out in comparison. Whose butt would grow? The group that did the five sets of five reps. By far, not even close. It wouldn't even be in the same universe. And so this is the thing that people need to understand is if you want to build a muscle, you got to get it to be really strong. Now here's, and we talked about this earlier in the episode, you can't shrink at the same time you're trying to build. If you're trying to build a muscle, the goal is to go on it. And I'm going to use a word that scares people, a bulk. You have to eat in what's known as a calorie surplus and eat enough protein. In fact, today, more women than ever know the right exercises and even know that they need to get stronger. Although we'll get to that. We'll talk more about that, but there's still far more than when we were trainers back in the day, like 20 years ago, when we were running in gyms, getting strong with heavy weights, like no women wanted to even touch that. Oh, well, I mean, first of all, the hip thrust machine didn't exist. The squat rack had dust all over it. I mean, you just checked off number one and number two movements you could possibly do to build your butt. So they were non-existent. And building muscle, God forbid, don't even talk to me about building muscle. I'm going to just want to burn. Right. And so today more women than ever understand getting stronger, although it's still not a majority, it's way more than it used to be. They get it more women than ever understand barbell squats and hip thrusts. But oftentimes the one thing that makes a difference, the big thing that makes a difference besides workout programming, which we'll get to is diet and protein. I can't tell you how many times we'll, you know, and for people listening, we'll get callers or emails or listeners where they're struggling with this. And all we tell them to do, they're doing all, they're following our programs. They're doing lots of good things. All we tell them to do is increase their calories by 700, oftentimes 700 calories, bump your protein intake, come back in 60 days and see what happens. And they come back and go, I gained an inch and a half around my butt. Yeah. My butt built. It's actually stronger. It's actually bigger and rounder. And so oftentimes that makes the big difference. It's the diet and the protein. Don't be afraid of gaining weight. First off, if you gained five pounds of muscle on your butt, you would have a much bigger, rounder, fuller butt. But guess what? The scale would say five more pounds that has to happen. If you want to build muscle, it has to happen. Yeah. I think, um, one of the greatest challenges here is one. It's always been challenging for most of my clients to hit protein intake consistently. And then in addition to that, when you're eating protein, it's very satiating. So you have somebody who, uh, is trying to eat pro, uh, more protein, whole foods and do that consistently. And then simultaneously you're also telling them you need to put them in some of a calorie surplus, uh, being consistent with that is tough and that, that becomes the next greatest challenge. But it is the great, if you're doing all the right movements and you know, you are, if you're listening to this and you're like, yep, hip thrust, check. Yep. I squat. Yeah. Lunge. I do these all, they do all these great movements. Watch all the videos. Brett can cherish is one of my favorite people on Instagram. Like you go, you check all the boxes, but then you still can't do it. I would say almost always it's the diet consistency. You know what it is, is that a lot of people don't know what high protein means. Like we're saying eat high protein. Yeah. We're seeing, we're also saying eating a calorie surplus. And I think some people are afraid of actually eating in a calorie surplus. So calorie surplus is a good 500 to more calories than what you're probably currently eating. So that's a decent additional meal. But let's talk about high protein. If you're a petite woman and you're listening to this and you weigh 130 pounds, here's how many grams of protein you need to eat per day to hit that kind of upper limit of where you'll maximize the effects of protein. 130 grams a day. You guys, 130 grams, that's 45 grams of protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I mean, how many ounces of meat is that? Every meal. You got to plan that out. Every meal. This is not a turkey sandwich. This is not three scrambled eggs for breakfast. Three scrambled eggs for breakfast is going to give you a grand total. What is that? 18 grams of protein? Yeah. You would have to eat six eggs or seven eggs to hit that, right? You have to have six ounces to eight ounces of chicken or fish or meat each meal. When you look at the average woman whose strength training, the average woman who works out often, when you look at the actual amount of total protein that they eat per day, what it typically looks like is anywhere between eight to 10 ounces total for the whole day, for the entire day. It's like three ounces per meal. No, no, no. You guys, it's a lot more than you think. And then to Adam's point, this isn't easy, you guys. This is not easy. Protein produces a ton of satiety. So you can eat a big bowl of rice. You can eat lots of other foods that don't seem to produce the same amount of satiety. And by the way, the studies and data on this is very clear. They don't. But when you eat eight ounces of meat for breakfast and your lunchtime comes around and you're not used to doing this, it's a little bit of a chore. It's going to feel like you're stuffing yourself. It's going to feel like you're force feeding yourself because it produces so much satiety, meaning that much, eight ounces of meat is going to hammer your appetite, which is good in many cases, but also makes it difficult when you're trying to do this on a consistent basis. And by the way, you might do this one day. So I've had clients do this. Just going to say consistency is so key to it too. You do a couple of days and you're like, no, I do that. And it's like, no, every day, I do that. Can you do that? Because what ends up happening is somebody does that a few days, but then a few days they fall behind on the calories. They fall behind on the protein. And it's like, and that's enough to not see the progress and the results. And so it's a consistency thing around the calorie surplus plus the protein. And it doesn't have to be this massive calorie surplus and you don't have to eat six to eight ounces every single meal. There's plenty of other strategies with shakes and with Greek yogurts. And so, but what I do appreciate what you're saying, because I would communicate the same way is that I would highlight that because when you say it like that, people go, oh my God, I know I don't eat that much. And so what it really does is highlight how much protein you need to be hitting. It doesn't mean you have to do it through six to eight ounces of meat and just three meals. You can have eight smaller meals. You can have a shake in there. You can have some high protein Greek yogurt. There's lots of great strategies to get to that, but it's the effort towards that many grams of protein consistently every day to do that is huge. It's got to be a priority and consider this, right? The body doesn't want to build muscle unless it thinks it has to. Okay. Unless it thinks now, why, why is that? Well, muscle is expensive tissue. So meaning when you have more muscle on your body, it requires, it means that your body requires more energy intake to maintain. And your body is the result of, uh, you know, many, many years of evolution, meaning it would rather be efficient. Our human bodies are designed to be efficient. How do we know this? If I put my leg in a cast for one week, I would lose significant muscle in my leg. Why? Because my body's like, we don't need the muscle. Get rid of it. This happens to the brain. This happens to the rest of the body as well. Like if I stop remembering a certain thing, for example, I'll give you guys an example. This is an easy one. I think we can relate to because we grew up during a time where we didn't have cell phones. I used to know everybody's phone number. I knew everybody's phone number. I know. No, I don't know your guys's phone. I talk to you guys every day. I cannot tell you what your phone number is because my brain prunes that off. I don't need to remember it. Same thing happens with a muscle. So you have to give your body a reason to build muscle. And then you have to feed the ability to build that muscle. And by the way, the reason is your training. And what kind of training tells your body we need bigger muscles? Heavy weight strength training, not cardio, not endurance training, not stamina training, not running or swimming or circuit training or orange theory classes or Barry's bootcamp classes or anything like that, or body pump classes or Pilates. None of that tells your body we need bigger muscles. Bigger muscles come from, hey, I'm lifting heavy stuff. I need bigger muscles to lift this heavy stuff. So get strong. That's the key right there. So you produce that constant signal, which is telling your body, this is the environment that we're living in. And then as we recover, this is where it's important too, to go through that same training mindset with your food. So to use that example you brought up before with the type of protein and the amount that you need to try to consume. This is not going to be something that's it's going to feel natural initially. It's something that you have to work and introduce to your body, just like you're consistently introducing the training stimulus and that signal. Both of those in combination is what's going to get you to the result. Stay consistent, stay patient, and trust the process. I feel like we have to communicate this so often with clients that are following one of our programs because there's been so much noise for so long in the marketing space, and especially in this area when we're talking about building the butt. And so it's really easy to start a program and you're like, I don't feel like this is moving enough or I don't see the results fast enough. And then you default to all the BS that you've been told for so long. Stay consistent, trust the process, be consistent. This is the key to this, and it doesn't, you're not going to grow three inches on your butt in one week. It takes time to do this. And so you have to consistently do this, be patient about it, and it will come, but you've got to trust that process. Yeah, so here's some ways that you know you're moving in the right direction. Now, first off, before I get to the best metric that you could possibly keep track of and measure in pursuit of a bigger butt, number one, there's a lot of exercises that train the glutes, the gluteus medius, maximus, minimus, right, the big glute complex. There's a lot of exercises that train them. Some of them are phenomenal at building. Others are okay for correctional exercise or stability or stamina, meaning all exercises have value, but only some exercises have value for building, okay? What are those exercises? Hip thrusts, phenomenal. Barbell squats, phenomenal. Deadlifts, phenomenal. Romanian deadlifts, phenomenal, right? Lunges, excellent. Bulgarians done properly, excellent. Those exercises are great at building big, powerful, round glutes, so do the right exercises. Now, programming is a different story or the other part of it. Programming is, when you look at a workout program, it's a collection of exercises, and there's a prescription for sets and reps, but that's not all, right? It's the order of exercises, it's the rest periods, and by the way, traditional strength training to build muscle has rest periods. Don't think you got to keep moving. In fact, if you don't do the rest periods, you won't build muscle. What makes strength training strength training is not the weights that's part of it, it's the rest period. So, strength training, real muscle building, butt building strength training has like two minute, three minute rest periods in between sets, but it's also the order of the exercises, the days, how they're put together, and the phases with the reps and the sets. All of that is what is known as programming, and good programming makes a huge difference versus bad programming when it comes to results. To add to that, specifically talking about people that want to build the butt, one of the biggest mistakes I'd see people do is they would just slap more of these exercises that you just labeled on already another program. So, they have a typical way of training, they want to focus on the butt, these are all the exercises that you're supposed to do, and so, they would just add all of that to the program. This actually makes the program worse, and so, there is an appropriate balance of volume and exercises in a program too, because it's more than just, hey, these are all the great exercises, hey, this is the order you do them all in, okay, yeah, this is sets, reps, rest, yeah, check, get all that stuff, but I can't tell you how many times, and I've seen this even in the competitive world. In fact, I still have this memory of a female trainer, client friend of mine who was a competitor, who I know that butt foot was her main focus of building in her off-season. We both got to the gym at the same time, and I remember saying hi, and we're talking, and she told me that's what she was training for the day, she was training legs and glutes and stuff, and then I don't remember what I was training, but we get there, and I get through my routine, and then this is the period of time in my training where I'm doing a good 45 minutes to an hour walk afterwards, and I'm up at one of those crow's nest type of cardio rooms where it's up high and you're going down, and I'm watching her, she's still training after I've done lifting, I've lifted my whole routine, I'm now walking, I've been walking for 30, 45 minutes, and she's still lifting, and I'm watching, and she's doing ice skaters and lunges and step ups, just every butt exercise you can think of, and I'm thinking, man, like even, this is a trainer who understands good exercise, but doesn't really understand proper programming, the proper amount of balance and volume, and just because you're doing all the right movements, if you're not doing it the right amount of volume and intensity with diet and all the things, then you end up just spinning your wheels. So volume is like the total work essentially to explain it loosely that you're doing, right? So it's the sets, it's the reps, it's the weight, all of that plays a role in volume. Your body can only handle so much volume. In fact, if you go above and beyond what is ideal amount of volume, you get less results. It's like a bell curve. There's a perfect amount that's going to build the most muscle when it comes to volume, less than that builds less, more than that builds less, and so there's somebody listening right now that's like super motivated, hardworking, they probably, I've got this great attitude around work, like I'll just make it happen, then they apply that attitude to their training, they just do too much. They do too much and it's really frustrating because they're doing so much work. Yeah, it's not a lack of effort. But yes, but they're not getting those great results. So here's one of the metrics that you know that you should pay attention to. This is the most important metric. Look, you want to build your butt. The most important metric to pay attention to if you know you're going in the right direction, besides measuring your butt, looking in the mirror, because people do that, is strength. I'm going to tell you something right now. If you get stronger consistently over the course of 90 days, 120 days, muscle is building. Period. End of story. Especially in those lifts that you're talking about. In those lifts. So if you're listening right now and you're like, I want to build a bigger butt, I'm going to tell you this is your goal. Here's your goal. Forget building a butt because this is how we're going to do it. I want to get stronger at the squat. I want to get stronger at the deadlift. I want to get stronger at the hip thrust. I want to get stronger at the Bulgarian split stand squat. I want to get stronger at the best butt building exercises, and I know if I consistently get stronger over time, the muscle will come. By the way, everybody's a fact. That's how it works. You can follow all the programs you want, all the exercises. If you're not getting stronger, you can pretty much guarantee you're not going to build much muscle or any at all. So your goal here is this. Get strong at the best butt building exercises. That's how I'm going to build the butt. Now here's the thing. I want to talk about diet again because we mentioned you got to go into bulk. You got to eat in a surplus. We have people listening right now who are like, look, I like that. That's cool. But I also want to get leaner. Okay. The number one and number two goal typically for women is get leaner or I want to be able to see my midsection. I want to have nice, you know, tight waist, but I also want to build a butt. And so what typically happens, I don't know about typically, oftentimes I would say it happens. Somebody says, okay, cool. I want to build my butt, but I also want to get a tight waist. I'm going to start by getting lean. Let me start by getting lean first and then I'll build afterwards. Backwards. That's backwards. Build first. Here's why building more muscle will make getting leaner so much easier. Everybody so much easier. Why? Because more muscle means you're going to burn more calories. More muscle means you have a faster metabolism. I'm going to tell a story. I'll communicate a story of one of my clients, but I've had many clients with similar stories, but I had this one woman that I trained years ago and she was doing so much work. I mean, she was running, she was strength training, her calories were low, and she was really struggling. She's like, you know, I'm lean, but I'm not as lean as I'd like to be, but I'd also like to build muscle. I'm doing all this exercise. Do I need to eat less and work out more? Like what's going on? So I looked at her routine. I literally, this is what I did. I cut out her running because that alone was too much. Plus it's not contributing to wanting to build a bigger butt. I took her strength training. I ordered things differently. She was lifting five to six days a week. I had her lift four days a week. Then I took her calories and I gradually bumped them up as she got stronger. So her calories to start with were about 1900 calories. By the end of this entire process, which was like a six month process, I had her eating North of 2900 calories. So there's a huge difference. Everybody said that's a thousand more calories that she was eating. Here's what happened at the end of that process. She built a lot of muscle, had a much rounder butt. And by the way, she didn't gain any body fat. In fact, she started getting leaner later. So as she got up to 2900 calories and she built that muscle and she looked amazing, it was very easy for her to get lean because now her metabolism was running on 2900 calories. She went down to 2400 calories. Boom. She had abs. She was lean. She didn't even go down as low as she used to go because she had a faster metabolism. So number one is build, then reveal. Build first, reveal second. All right. Here's the other thing. If you're trying to commit to a certain period of time to see this kind of progress, the minimum is a good nine weeks. Minimum. Don't give it three weeks. Don't give it four weeks, like 30 days. Give yourself nine weeks of a good training cycle that's focused on building the butt, on eating in a calorie surplus, on hitting your protein intake consistently. Nine weeks is typically about as long as it takes for you to see kind of visible difference in the like, whoa, a half an inch to an inch on my butt. My butt looks higher. It looks rounder. This is really working. This is the patient thing. This is where I said like it and your point, focus on strength. The muscle will follow. A hundred percent. First that feed the body, be patient, be consistent. Then the strength comes after the strength follows the muscle. So here's what we're going to do. Here's what we have here to make this easier because you're listening to the episode. You're hearing all this stuff. You're like, all right, how do I organize all this? What does this look like? Here's what we did. We have a program called maps abs in butt. So this is a workout strength training program. The focus of which is getting incredible abs and building an incredible butt. Now you do train other parts of the body, but the focus, most of the training focus is on those two, those two areas, build both, make them look both amazing. This is what we're going to do with this as well. After you're done with that program, which will take you about nine weeks, we've included for free. Another program that you can choose from one is called muscle mommy 15. The other one's called muscle mommy. One of them is a shorter, uh, less of a commitment type of a program, 15 minutes a day. So if you're like, Hey, I like a little more convenience. I could do that one. The other one is longer time spent in the gym. That's the traditional muscle mommy program. You can follow it up with one of those programs. So now you've got your nine weeks maps, abs, and butt follow it up, which we'll throw in for free muscle mommy, 15 or muscle mommy, both programs, which also focus on the glutes, but now has more of an emphasis on the rest of the body. We're also going to include a butt building diet guide. So we talked about the diet part. You're going to get a diet guide. That's going to help you eat in a calorie surplus to build muscle, not a lot of body fat to bulk, but to not bulk in a way that doesn't make you happy to build the butt. That's what the diet guide is. And then we included a supplement guide. So there are supplements that can help. I'll be very clear. Supplements are going to give you a 2% extra. I don't care what supplement companies tell you. They don't do these miraculous things, but they do do a little bit, especially if you take the right ones. So we've also included a supplement guide. And because of this episode, the program, plus the free program, plus the diet guide, plus the supplement guide, 40% off across the board, 40% off. Plus the other stuff is free. If you go to maps, abs, and butt, you can sign up right now. So it's maps, abs, and butt.com. Use the code launch. Launch is going to give you the 40% off plus all the free stuff. Also, if you like our podcast, you can come find us for more information on Instagram. It's mind pump media. We'll see you there. All right. I know you liked that episode. If you did check this one out. How strong should you be? Ever wonder if you're actually strong or at least compared to people like yourself? Today's episode, we're going to talk about that and we're going to help you determine how strong you should be. And also talk about the steps to getting strong as fast as possible. In fact, we're talking about the fastest way to get bigger and stronger all at the same time. Yes, it does actually. And I know that you wrote a really complex episode here, but I think Justin's metric has been the one I've been looking for.