This Side-Butt Workout Will Strengthen Those Forgotten Glute Muscles

When it involves your glutes, it’s easy to focus on the largest muscle—your glute max. But the smaller players deserve attention too, making a side-butt workout a clutch, convenient approach to round out your training.

Quick anatomy lesson: Your side butt, because the name suggests, is the world that forms the outer a part of your glutes. It includes two muscles: the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. Together, these players work to stabilize your pelvis; additionally they help bring your legs out to the side, Amanda Ting, DPT, CSCSa private trainer at Mark Fisher Fitness in NYC, tells SELF. This is a motion generally known as hip abduction, which is why these muscles—together with a front hip muscle called the tensor fasciae latae—are sometimes called hip abductors.

That pelvic stability role is very essential whenever you’re doing anything that has you standing or moving only one leg at a time, like lunging, walking, running, and climbing stairs. As Ting explains it, whenever you’re doing single-leg motions like these, you would like your side butt to fireplace up to maintain your hips level and forestall them from dipping to 1 side. If your hip drops, it could possibly place plenty of pressure in your knees, ankles, and lower back, since other muscles must jump in to step as much as the plate in case your medius and minimus aren’t up for the duty. And that may increase your probabilities of injury to those areas as a result of that overstress.

Unfortunately, lots of us have weak side butts. That’s partly because we are inclined to spend plenty of our days moving forward and backward and never a lot going side to side. And tons of oldsters spend an enormous chunk of their schedules sitting down, which might tighten the hip flexors, weaken the glutes, and easily get in the best way of us using our butt muscles more.

Luckily, you’ll be able to combat all this by making a while for these small but mighty muscles in your routine. Ting created for SELF the five-move side-butt workout that hones in on this essential, often-underworked muscle group. A circuit-style sequence, it’s chock-full of exercises that focus on your glute medius and minimus within the two primary ways they’re designed to work: through hip abduction and with single-leg pelvic stability.

Moves just like the banded clamshell have you ever moving your leg away from the middle of your body, which mechanically engages your hip abductors, while exercises just like the single-leg deadlift are one-legged motions that zero in on the pelvic stability, since your glute medius and minimus have to ignite to be able to keep your hips level and regular. And the fireplace hydrant, lateral band walks, and curtsy lunge are two-fers, working your side butt through of those functions.

You’ve got just a few different options for slotting this circuit into your routine. You can do it before stepping into big lower-body focused heavier lifts. Or, should you’re strapped for time and doing a more general workout, you’ll be able to pick and select two to a few of those exercises to fit into your usual warm-up, Ting says.