ROUNDER GLUTES: 5 Mistakes Keeping Your Butt Flat

Wondering how to get a round butt? For most men and women, round, firm glutes are seen as more attractive than having a flat, pancake butt. A nice-looking butt isn't just important for turning heads though. The glutes are a key muscle for athletic performance and keeping them strong can also go a long way to preventing back and hip pain. The problem is, most people approach their glute training the wrong way. 5 mistakes, in particular, that keep them from getting a bubble butt. Find out what they are, and how you could avoid them, so you can make your glutes rounder here. Includes the best exercises you could

do for round glutes.
Before diving into the mistakes preventing you from achieving a bubble butt, let's first understand the anatomy of the glutes. The glutes are composed of 3 muscles; the gluteus maximus, the gluteus medius, and the gluteus minimus. The gluteus maximus is much larger than the other 2 glutes muscles. It's actually the largest and heaviest muscle in the human body. It's also a strong predictor of sprint performance. Since this muscle makes up most of your butt and seems to be the most important region for boosting athletic performance, it only makes sense to make it the focus of your training. But most people fail to do this because of the following 5 mistakes.

The first mistake people make that lock them into a flat, pancake butt has to do with exercise selection. The primary function of the gluteus maximus is hip extension, the movement of driving your hips forward. Most "glute exercises" you'll find online either don't train hip extension at all and focus on the smaller glute muscles, or they'll train hip extension but not in a way that enables you to use heavier and heavier weights over time. The best glute exercises are instead the ones that focus on hip extension and enable you to use heavier weight overtime. Exercises like back squats, leg presses, bulgarian split squats, deadlifts, and hip thrusts. They're not fancy, but if you use the right form and get really strong with them over time, these will be the key to the glutes growth you're looking for.

The second mistake when most people try to make their glutes rounder is working the quads more than the glutes. In a leg press, if you were to place your feet higher up on the platform and stop each rep once your knees hit 90 degrees, this would enable your shins to stay vertical over the foot throughout and will also involve more hip extension, therefore emphasizing the glutes more than the quads. You can do these one leg at a time as well, and you can also apply this concept to lunges and Bulgarian split squats as well.

Alright so we talked about the quads taking over but in other glutes exercises, the lower back and hamstrings actually have a tendency to take over. Let's take a look at one of the best exercises for round glutes, the Romanian deadlift. To emphasize the glutes more, you want to use some knee bend. This incorporates more hip extension into the exercise. In addition to this, you should only go down as far as your mobility allows you to. This is the point at which the hips stop moving backward on the way down. So, try to look in the mirror and spot the point where your hips can't move back, and stop each rep at that point.

Alright so we already covered what some of the best glute exercises are, but the way you program them into your workouts is also very important when it comes to how to get a round butt. You want to include exercises that challenge the glutes in different ways. Bulgarian split squats, back squats, leg presses, and Romanian deadlifts challenge the glutes the most at the bottom position. At the top position however, there's no tension placed on the glutes. So we'd want to look for an exercise that challenges the muscle when it's fully shortened. Exercises like the hip thrust and the 45 degree hip extension both do just that. To apply this to your glute focused workouts, pick 1-2 exercises that challenge the glutes most at the bottom position, and then include 1 that challenges the glutes most at the top position.

Finally: although picking the right exercises and performing them correctly will set you up for success, some people (especially those who sit a lot) will still have a hard time activating and feeling their glutes working. One way of improving this is with activation exercises.