Just Doing More Glute Movements Isn’t Enough
The good news is that if you’re in your first ~1-2 years of lifting, you’re in the “newbie gains” phase and it can be pretty easy to build muscle and see quick progress in your lifts and physique.
The bad news is that once you have a few years of lifting under your belt, it becomes a little more difficult to continue easily building muscle and see progress – you’ll likely need a little more intention, diligence when working out, in addition to a good training plan (like ours).
When it comes to growing glorious glutes, try to keep in mind that the body can’t just grow “something” out of a whole lot of “nothing.”
Meaning it’s gonna be reallyyy hard to see glute gains if you’re dieting or eating less calories right now.
In order for muscles and/or body parts to grow and get bigger, we generally need to either be eating at maintenance needs, or in a slight surplus beyond maintenance needs.
Keep reading for nutrition tips on how to grow a bigger booty!
Step 1: Determine Calorie Needs
Maintenance Calories = how many calories you can eat in a day without seeing any changes to your body weight or body composition.
An easy way to get a rough estimate and starting point on what your maintenance needs might be is to plug your information into a TDEE Calculator.
Keep in mind that fifty zillion factors go into someone’s maintenance calorie needs, so the number that a generic calculator spits out may or may not be true for you.
But as mentioned above, it can give you a starting point to then more easily test and check and see what’s true for you and your body.
Step 2: Track & Weigh
Don’t know or unsure of your maintenance calories?
- Download the Chronometer app and then weigh, measure, and record everything you eat in a day
- Weigh yourself and monitor your bodyweight 5-7x/week, record in a weight trend app like HappyScale or Libra
- If weight trend isn’t changing, increase by ~100 calories every 2 weeks.
- Continue increasing every 2 weeks until scale average is consistently trending up
- Reversely, if your weight is trending up from the start, decrease by ~100 calories each week until scale stabilizes
- Now you know your maintenance!
Step 3: Dial In Nutrition
Goal: you’ll want to either be eating at maintenance, or in a slightly calorie surplus beyond maintenance.
*It would be the most ideal to eat in a slight surplus while lifting and training hard to ensure you’re maximizing your glute gains.
Let’s quantify a “surplus” as eating something like ~100-300 calories beyond maintenance.
Note: In the fitness industry, it used to be common to see people do these big giant surpluses or bulking endeavors where they’d gain 15-30 lbs, then diet down.
Turns out “more” was actually NOT better and that when we quickly gain a lot of weight, even when training hard and following a good workout plan, that we’re more at risk of gaining excess body fat – vs if we gained weight more slowly and gradually over time.
Think Goldilocks and the 3 Bears: we want to give the body adequate “Legos” and building blocks to create and grow new tissue – but we don’t want tons and tons of excess supplies coming in each day, either.
Tips on Macro Goals
A few notes here on what your macronutrient breakdown and daily nutrition should hopefully look like:
- Protein: Aim for 0.7-1.0 grams of protein per lb bodyweight. Ex: 150 lb person aims for 105-150g protein per day. Try to get in 3-5 big servings of protein per day
- Carbs: are going to support better gym performance, recovery from workouts, and muscle building. Make sure to prioritize carbs before/after your workouts
- Pre-Workout: make sure you’re eating getting in a protein and carb heavy meal or snack 60-120 min before the gym
- Calorie Increases if Eating in Surplus: Once you consistently hit your protein goals and calorie goals, calorie increases should come from mostly carbohydrates
What If I Don’t Want to Eat in a Calorie Surplus?
Want to stay eating at maintenance?
- You can probably expect to see some slight body composition improvements
- This means your tush might become more firm and flattering in appearance, vs necessarily getting a ton bigger in size like it would give you were in a surplus beyond maintenance needs
Are you currently dieting?
- Regular glute-focused training might help you preserve losing tons of booty muscle mass as you’re losing weight and/or body fat
- This will also largely depend on your genetics though. Booty and leg size is often the first to go when dieting for many people (:
