The fitness industry tends to dish out different advice to different genders: men are encouraged to build up their chest and biceps and women are promoted leg and ‘booty’ workouts.
In short, men don’t give enough attention to their butt. But the glutes are the largest and strongest muscles in your body. So guys really should be performing more exercises and workouts to strengthen and tone up this area.
Why? Because gluttoning up your glutes can increase your flexibility and mobility, as well as make simple tasks like lifting heavy weights, running, sitting with correct posture and climbing the stairs easier.
So, what exercises can you perform to give you a more devastating derrière?
Enter, Salt Bae. The world-famous butcher is known just as much these days for his intense workouts, stupidly low body fat percentage, and an overall commitment to be as physically fit as possible. The salt-sprinkling maestro recently posted a workout to his Instagram story – following a trip to London which saw him charter a private jet – which shows how you can build up strength in your glutes using nothing more than a set of resistance bands.
For context, resistance bands are an incredibly underrated piece of equipment, and are a perfect substitute for dumbbells and other weights, if you don’t have access to them. Their versatility means they can be used pretty much anywhere, including at home, so there are no excuses for building up that ‘thicc’ old tush.
Watch Salt Bae’s glute workout in the video below
In his videos, Salt Bae can be seen performing a variety of leg-orientated movements, with virtually all of them seeing him place a couple of resistance bands around his ankles. Placing bands here will provide incredible amounts of tension to your legs, as they’ll have to work harder to combat the extra resistance. These bands come in different levels of resistance; from loose all the way through to incredibly tight, so it’s worth experimenting with a complete set to see which ones work best for you (before building up your strength and buying harder ones).
Salt Bae’s gluten workout consists of the following movements:
- Squat with banded pull: With bands around your ankles and holding another band (attached to a ground-level point), lean back slightly and squat down. For an effective squat, tuck your pelvis in and imagine yourself sitting down on a chair. You don’t want to bend the knee first, but rather sit back into the squat and have the knee bend follow. When returning to a standing position, pull the band in your hands with you, to give your back and core a bit of a workout too.
- Resistance band leg lifts: With one or two resistance bands placed just above your ankles and your feet hip-width apart, lift one leg out to the side. This will not only test your balance, since you’re relying on the other leg to keep you stable, but it will target the smaller muscles in your glutes, along with your quads (or thighs) as you’ll need to squeeze these too in order to combat the resistance. Salt Bae performs all of his reps without the lifted leg touching the floor, but if you’re new to the movement, you can return your foot to the floor before performing each rep.
- Resistance band lunges: Lunges, even without the assistance of bands or weights, are a great exercise to target various muscles in your legs, including the glutes. Strapping some resistance bands around your thighs only increases the amount of tension placed on these muscles: both on the lunge down (you’ll feel more stress in the trailing leg) and the return movement (which torches the muscles in the leading leg).
These are just some examples of the glute and leg workouts you can perform with resistance bands. We’d recommend researching some other movements to create a complete workout, in particular anything that involves a hip extension.
As Canberra-based fitness coach Ben Griffin says, when we’re performing these type of movements, the more the knee is bent, the more the glutes are activated: “When we bend the knees, we shorten the hamstrings, impacting their ability to assist with hip extension, essentially making the exercise more glute dominant, e.g. glutes bridges and hip thrusts.”
Perform glute and leg workouts at least once a week (ideally more) and you’ll have a super strong set of rounded buttocks in no time. There’s no need to go full Kim Kardashian and do 1,000 squats a day…
Speaking of which; Salt Bae seems to be the internet’s new king of glute workouts, with Kim Kardashian having not posted a workout photo in quite some time.