Glute Toning Tips

By Liz Neporent

It's tough to isolate your butt muscles because nearly every butt exercise also involves the front and/or rear thigh muscles. However, you can maximize the emphasis on your maximus with a few simple technique tricks. For instance, when you do any glute move in a standing position, keep your weight shifted slightly back onto your heels, especially as you press back up into the straight-leg position. The more weight you shift onto your toes, the more your front of thigh muscles (quadriceps) become involved. When you stand up or press up during any of the exercises, make a conscious decision to squeeze your cheeks; this ensures your glutes are really working and not just going along for the ride. Always move slowly and with control to give the muscle rather than momentum a chance to do its thing. And, for some extra oomph, you can hold the most challenging part of each movement for two slow counts before moving into to the next rep.

The moves in this butt routine were chosen because they do such a good job of toning the entire glute muscle, even the deep, hard-to-hit muscle fibers. When you first try them do 1-2 sets of each, 8-15 reps per set. Don't use any weight; your body weight will provide enough resistance to make them challenging. When it's no big deal to do two sets of 15 reps of a move, you can either hold a five pound dumbbell in each hand, increase the number of sets to three or try the "challenge yourself" version.

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