1. Do the right butt exercises🍑
Most guides on how to make your butt bigger recommend spending too much time on isolation exercises and machines, and far too little time on compound exercises.
This is wrongheaded.
The “secret” to building a bigger butt is to get as strong as possible on compound exercises that train your glutes, not puttering around with machines.
This means you should spend the majority of your time in the gym doing exercises like squats, deadlifts, hip thrusts, and lunges, and leaving exercises like cable pull throughs, back extensions, and donkey kicks until the end of your workout.
A good rule of thumb is that 80% of your time and energy should go into compound exercises for your glutes, and the remaining 20% you can give to isolation exercises and machines.
2. Get progressively stronger over time🍑
If you stop getting stronger, your butt will eventually stop getting bigger (this applies to every major muscle group in the body, by the way—not just your glutes).
That’s why you should also strive to add weight or reps to every exercise in every workout. This is known as progressive overload, and it’s one of the best ways to maximize the muscle-building effects of weightlifting.
And what’s the best way to get stronger?
Ditch the high-rep “pump” training and lift heavy.
And by “heavy,” I mean doing the majority of your butt exercises with weights in the range of 75-to-85% of your one-rep max (1RM), or in the range of 8-to-10 (~75%) to 4-to-6 (~85%) reps.
3. Eat enough to support glute growth🍑
In order to maximize glute growth you need to maintain a mild calorie surplus.
That is, you need to eat about 110% of your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) every day.
The reason for this is a calorie surplus optimizes your body’s “muscle-building machinery,” greatly enhancing your body’s ability to recover from and positively adapt to your training.
The one exception to this rule is if you’re brand new to proper weightlifting, in which case you can eat at maintenance and still grow your glutes (a phenomenon known as “newbie gains”). After about your first year of proper training, though, you’ll need to maintain a calorie surplus to keep gaining muscle.
That’s not all, though—you need to eat enough protein to allow your muscles to recover, repair, and grow effectively, too.
If you want to learn exactly how many calories you should eat to build a bigger butt, check out this article:
How Many Calories Should I Eat?