9 Bodyweight Glute Exercises That Tone Your Booty

Glutes are an important muscle of the body both for functionality and for looks. With many people wanting to grow their glutes bigger and/or stronger, here are the best exercise options.

The best exercises to train and grow your glutes at home are: Squats, Deadlifts, Glute bridges, Good mornings and lunges. Those exercises can be done with or without extra weight. To add resistance to these exercises it’s possible to use a heavy backpack, barbells or dumbbells. 

Below you can see how to train your glutes and what the best exercises for at home are to get your goals. 

How Can You Train Glutes?

To train and grow your triceps it’s important to know what the gluten are and what they do. The gluteus maximum are the muscles that make up your bum. I’m pretty sure everyone knows where to find them. Their function is extending your hips and lifting your legs to the side.

So to train your glutes, you have to bend the hips as far as they can and then extend them until your body is straight. Of course how far you bend your hips depends on the exercise. To be clear, bending the hips means you’re bringing your upper body closer to your knees. Repeat that many times with enough resistance and your glutes will become bigger and/or stronger. 

It’s actually the biggest muscle in the body so you’re going to need quite a bit of resistance to get a good training impulse. That means using heavy (for you) weights or heavy resistance bands. Of course how much weight you need is different for everyone but it’s surely going to be more than you need for your biceps. 

If you want to train your glutes for size, you should work them out at least three times a week. Since they’re a large muscle, it can take a while for them to recover properly. So three times is going to be enough for most people but if you feel you need more, add another day after a while. 

Without equipment, it can be difficult to get a very heavy resistance. So if you can’t use a barbell or something that’s heavy for you, using sets with high repetitions (around 15-20) is going to be a good target for muscle growth. If you can add some sets with heavy loads, getting 5-8 reps is good to get your strength up. Try to get around 15-20 working sets a week. Working sets means you don’t count your warmup sets. The working sets should be done with a weight that’s challenging. At the end of each set, you should have about 2-3 repetitions left in the tank. 

Especially in the beginning, go for quality over resistance. Start with a light weight and just do all the sets you need for the day. Add a little resistance every workout. Focus on getting good form and really activating your glutes.

Exercises To Grow Glutes At Home Without Equipment

The glutes are used for many movement you do daily, which is why they’re the biggest in the body. That means it’s actually quite easy to do exercises that target the glutes at home without any equipment. 

Al the exercises below can be done without any equipment but if you need a bit more, pack a sturdy backpack with some heavy stuff. Either wearing the backpack on your back or holding it in your hands can add resistance without needing any gym specific weights. If you have some home gym equipment or go to a commercial gym, you can also use barbells or dumbbells for the same exercises. 

Above are the five best exercise options that can grow your glutes and you can do at home easily. There are some variations of each exercise as well. You can cycle through those variations to keep your workouts interesting. 

To get the best results it’s a good idea to do a combination of the exercises listed below. 

Squats

The king of all exercises; the squat. It’s a great full body exercise that targets most muscles in your lower body but also involves your back. It makes your body work like one unit. You bend at the knees and at the hips so both your glutes and legs have to work hard to do this exercise. 

You can do this with a barbell on your back but many people don’t need all that much resistance especially when starting out. Doing a squat with good form means bending at the ankles, knees and hips while keeping your upper body rigid. Make sure to drive the force mostly through your heels and drive through the hip extension for the best glute activation. Focus on squeezing the glutes while going up through the movement and especially the last bit when locking out. 

Bodyweight squats for many repetitions (20+ per set) work quite well at building mass in the lower body for beginners. However, once you can do 3+ sets easily with bodyweight, it’s time to add some weight. A backpack is great for adding weight to bodyweight squats. Just wearing it on your back or hugging the bag both work well. 

Deadlifts

If squats are the king of exercises, deadlifts are the queen. Pick something heavy off the floor and stand up. That’s about it. Done properly, this means that your whole posterior chain (muscles on the back of your body) will be worked out and your legs and glutes especially. 

All you need is something heavy to pick off the floor. Something that’s easy to hold is the best option. You can up the weight pretty quickly with deadlifts since all the muscles involved in the movement are quite large. 

Deadlifts are usually mostly used as a strength building exercise. That’s because most people use heavy weights on a barbell to do them. With heavy weights, deadlifts are very draining so keeping the amount of sets and repetitions low is a good idea to prevent injury and overtraining. With bodyweight or a relatively light bag, this isn’t really a concern although I would still do them at lower repetitions than bodyweight squats. About 10-12 repetitions per set is good. 

Good morning

Good mornings look quite a lot like deadlifts but isolate your glutes and hamstrings even more. Instead of bending slightly at the knees, you keep your knees almost straight. Almost all of the movement comes from the hip hinge. That means the glutes, hamstrings and lower back are targeted pretty hard. 

Good mornings can be hard on the lower back when done wrong. So start light with low repetitions.

Glute bridge

The glute bridge is one of those exercises that isolates your glutes as much as anything on this list. There are a few variations of the glute bridge with some more challenging than others but all targeting the glutes as the name suggests. 

To do a glute bridge, you lay on your back on the floor (a yoga mat makes it much more comfortable.) Put your feet flat on the floor just behind your bum. Then push your hips up through your heels. You should feel a good contraction in your glutes. 

The standard bridge will become quite easy after a few workouts. Once that’s the case you have two choices; use a heavy weight and put it on your hips so you’ve got resistance or start using one leg at a time. Of course you can combine the two options for an even more challenging exercise. 

Lunges

Finally, there are lunges. There are tons of different types of lunges and many of them are great for your glutes as well. Lunges are pretty simple although you need a little bit of balance to do them properly and consistently. 

To do lunges, stand up straight, and take a big step forward. Now drop your body until the knee of your rear body is almost on the floor but avoid touching. You want your front shin to be about perpendicular to the floor and not have your knee far over your toes. Push up through the heels of your front leg to get the best glute activation. 

Once you grasp the basic lunge, you can start varying where you put your feet. A little off to the side or to the back makes the exercise feel different. 

Split squat

Split squats look a lot like lunges but they are slightly different. The movements are very similar but with the lunge, a foot moves every repetition while with split squat your feet stay in the same place for the duration of the whole set. 

The same things are still valid to target your glutes: put your feet out far enough and drive the force through the heel of your front foot. 

Clamshells

While the exercises above target mostly the large gluteus maximus, you don’t want to forget about the glute medius which is a smaller muscle that’s on the top side of your bum. The easiest way to train that muscle is with clamshells.

If this is the first time you train this muscle separately, you’ll surely be sore the next day.

Resistance bands

All the exercises that are listed above can be done with bodyweight, a heavy backpack, dumbbells or barbells. And also with resistance bands. Since the same exercises can be done with resistance bands i won’t list them again here.

There are two resistance band exercises that are great for glutes I want to list separately here:

Donkey kick

Donkey kicks are a great exercise that largely exercise your glutes but is also good for posture. You stand on all fours with the band fixed in place by your hands and one foot in the band. Then extend one leg back. This should produce a good contraction in your glutes. After you finished your set, change legs.

Monster walk

The next resistance band exercise that’s great for glutes is the monster walk. It means you wrap a short resistance bands around your knees. get into a half squat position by bending your knees. From there, keep your knees at the same with and take steps sideways. make sure to step sideways in both directions to use both sides equally.

Example Glute Home Workout

Here is an example of a workout you could do at home to grow your glutes. I dont know you or your capabilities so this is a one week schedule that’s good for beginners who are already active. If it’s too much for you, reduce the amount of sets by 1. So instead of doing three sets of squats, you do two but keep the same amount of repetitions. After one or two weeks, you should be able to do the workouts below.

If this is too easy, i’d recommend adding some resistance through a backpack with weight in it. Start with an amount of weight where you can still perform all the sets and repetitions. If you have resistance bands, you can add one or two of the band exercises above to your routine.

	Workout 1	Workout 2	Workout 3
Bodyweight squat	3×15		3×20
Deadlift		3×12
Good morning	3×10		3×12
Split squat	3×10 per side	3×12 per side	3×15 per side
Glute bridge	3×12	3×15	4×12
Clamshell	3×10 per side