How can I tone my glutes without growing them?

Can you grow glutes without weights?

Our Beachy Legs articles are a practical way to share our experience in cellulite and skin tightening, from our London clinic with everyone in the world. Check all our articles here. And if you do live in London, you can book an assessment, consultation or treatment with us here.

• Do lots of resistance exercise and when your glutes start getting bigger, simply stop

• What happens to the glutes - and any other muscle - when we do resistance training?

• To tone your glute muscles you first have to make them larger - even a little bit

• Light weights are a waste of time to tone the glutes - or any other muscle

• Will electromagnetic muscle stimulation make my glutes or stomach just toned and not bulky?

• Don’t forget the skin - skin tightness and cellulite do not improve with exercise

• Why are my glutes not growing?

• How to stop glutes from growing

• Can you grow glutes without weights?

• Check our professional consultancy for a masterclass in radiofrequency, ultrasound cavitation, cellulite and skin tightening

Do lots of resistance exercise and when your glutes start getting bigger, simply stop

The gluteus maximus is a muscle which almost no man or woman can have enough of, simply because it makes the butt area look strong, beautifully curvy and sexy.

However, some people would prefer to have just a toned butt but not too toned or too big. How can one do that?

It’s simple.

1. Do lots of intensive resistance exercise on the glutes two to 2-3 times a week, for several weeks or months

2. When you reach the stage where your muscles are just toned but they start growing bigger, stop and switch to maintenance resistance training for that area, once every two weeks

That’s the fastest way to have tones but not big glutes.

What happens to the glutes - and any other muscle - when we do resistance training?

When you do weight training on the glutes (or any other muscle on your body) the first thing that happens is higher muscle fibre recruitment. You don’t immediately start building muscle, you start using more of what you already have.

Most inactive people only recruit 20-30% of their muscle fibres in everyday life. As you exercise, you recruit more and more muscle fibres, and this manifests as muscle tightening / toning.

Also, unused muscles are dehydrated muscles. As soon as you start exercising, muscles start retaining normal amounts of water, as opposed to being dehydrated, and look bigger.

Some people mistake this effect and think they can build a lot of muscles in a week and so if they continue they will look like a body builder. Of course, nature does not work that way. In the first few weeks you just have more less dehydrated muscles and you use more of your existing muscles. It takes weeks and months to build actual muscle.

Furthermore, as you repeatedly do resistance training, muscle fibres shorten a bit and this also manifests as tightening.

Finally, muscle fibre size and muscle fibre numbers increase, and some of this is also a prerequisite for muscle toning / tightening.

After several weeks (usually months) of intensive resistance exercise, your muscles start clearly growing in size, tone and strength. Those three (tone, size, strength) go together.

When you reach the required muscle size, simply stop the intensive exercise and do a session every two weeks just for maintenance.

To tone your glute muscles you first have to make them larger - even a little bit

Many people, especially women, do resistance exercise just to stop their muscles being “flabby”. They don’t care being muscly or “ripped”, which is absolutely fine.

The definition of a “flabby muscle” is a muscle without enough muscle fibre recruitment, enough muscle fibre size and enough muscle fibre number.

However, muscle fibre recruitment can only taker you so far - it is not enough to tone a weak, flabby muscle.

To tone a muscle you need to build more muscle, i.e. to create more and larger muscle fibres. This, in other words, is called “muscle building”.

So to tighten a flabby muscle you first need to grow it to a level where it stops appearing flabby, by first recruiting more fibres and then building more fibres and bigger fibres.

Then you can always switch to maintenance.

• Contrary to the nonsense propagated on the internet and by different trainers, there is no exercise on this planet that will grow your muscles bigger without first making them toned. That’s impossible.

• And vice versa, there is no exercise on this planet that will tone your muscles without making them bigger, even a little bit (before they start growing bigger than your liking, in which case you can stop).

A flabby muscle is a small muscle. To stop having a flabby buttock muscle one needs to do do some buttock body building. Yes, body building (😱) on the buttocks. Otherwise the buttocks will stay flabby forever.

Light weights are a waste of time to tone the glutes - or any other muscle

Many women think that “if I do light weights I will just tone, not grow bigger”.

However, nothing could be further from the truth.

If you do resistance exercise with light weights, to just add ‘tone’ but not to get ‘bulky’, you will not tone anything, ever. Or it will take a very long time (years) for your muscles to reach ‘toned’ level.

On the other hand, if you do heavy weights (always minding safety) you will reach ‘toned’ and ‘tight’ fast. And as soon as you reach the required level of tone and tightness, you can always switch to maintenance, to stop ‘toned’ and ‘tight’ becoming ‘big’.

Why get more toned muscles in 5 years by doing light weights and not get them toned in 6 months with strong weights?

Will electromagnetic muscle stimulation make my glutes or stomach just toned and not bulky?

Nope.

High intensity focused electromagnetic muscle stimulation (HIFEM), as well as electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), both mimic your work at the gym and do not offer anything else.

Don’t believe the marketing blurb - it’s all based on BS (sorry, but that’s the correct word). Each session provides a stimulus for muscle recruitment and consequently muscle building.

Again, contrary to marketing nonsense, one such 20’ session is equivalent roughly to one 20’ resistance exercise session (not 10 gym sessions) and without the neuromuscular coordination that a gym training session offers and which electrical stimulation obviously doesn’t offer.

Basically a HIFEM / EMS session offers roughly the same as a gym session, but at a cost of up to £750 per session.

If you already have a gym subscription (where you can exercise the whole body - not just the glutes - in many different ways) then the 20’ glute session is essentially free and takes 20’, while the muscle stimulation treatment costs up to £750 and also takes 20’.

And, of course, you never “only need four sessions”, as claimed. This is preposterous.

Just like with resistance training, you need 10-20 sessions to see results. People who only do four such treatments, see zero results. People who do 20 sessions do see some good results, and the results start becoming properly evident only by the 8th-10th session.

That’s the reality on the ground, away from all the silly marketing addressed to the naive and the gullible.

Now, if you manage to find such HIFEM/EMS treatments at £150-£200 per session (which would kinda justify those treatments to the lazy who hate the gym but who are also relatively affluent), and if you are happy to spend £1,500-£4,000 for 10-20 of those sessions, by all means do them.

But at the £750 per session advertised, you really must be oligarch-rich to justify such laziness and waste of money to yourself.

But hey, each to their own…

Don’t forget the skin - skin tightness and cellulite do not improve with exercise

Of course, neither the gym nor muscle stimulation treatments will affect your skin firmness much - again, contrary to marketing BS. And skin is also important for a toned butt, together with toned glutes. Neither skin firmness not glute tone are enough for a firm, toned, lifted butt.

And no amount of training on the glutes will affect cellulite on the butt area either.

To tighten your skin and reduce cellulite the most effective SAFE technology is deep-acting, high-power radiofrequency.

Light or superficial RF does not work and any other technology is either not effective and/or not safe.

Again, unless you are an oligarch, it makes sense to do lots work for your glute muscles for free at the gym and keep your budget of £1,500-£4,000 (that a reasonably prices course of HIFEM would cost you) for deep-acting, high-power radiofrequency to tone your skin and reduce cellulite. In this way you will get an overall lifted, “tight”, smooth look.

Why are my glutes not growing?

There are three reasons:

• You don’t do weights often enough and heavy enough, to provide a stimulus for growth. As mentioned above, light weights or weight training every few weeks don’t work. You need both intensity and regularity to build muscles.

• You don’t have enough protein or you eat too little. You cannot build muscles if you are on a starvation state and/or if you don’t take enough protein in (muscles are made of protein, not carbs).

• You are genetically slim with smaller bone diameter and smaller muscle structure. In this case you need to keep training 2-3 times a week with heavy weights for several months and make sure you take enough protein and don’t follow any extreme diets. In the end you will build bigger, more toned glutes, just be patient.

How to stop glutes from growing

As mentioned above, as soon as you are happy with the size/tone of your glutes, stop training them regularly and switch to maintenance once every two weeks.

Also, make sure you are not gaining weight, which may look like muscle growth, when in reality it may be fat growth.

Can you grow glutes without weights?

Glutes, or any other muscle, will grow faster and better with strong resistance exercise.

Such strong resistance exercise can be done with:

• Just the body weight and the exercise performed anywhere (e.g. one-legged squats)

• A weight placed on the body and the exercise performed at home (e.g. pelvic thrusts, donkey kicks)

• Resistance bands (can be performed anywhere)

• Resistance machines at the gym

In all cases, there must be a strong resistance that will exercise the muscle to exhaustion within 8-12 repetitions, repeated over 4-5 sets per exercise session, with each session exercise performed 2-3 times a week.

You cannot build muscle effectively with most forms of cardiovascular exercise/pilates/yoga/walking etc, as these exercises do not focus specifically on muscle building.

Check our professional consultancy for a masterclass in radiofrequency, ultrasound cavitation, cellulite and skin tightening

Do you want to deeply understand radiofrequency, ultrasound cavitation, cellulite and skin tightening? Attend a half-day, 1-day, 2-day or 3-day professional consultancy / one-to-one training and confidently offer your clients the safest, strongest and most effective treatment possible. Service available via Zoom or at our central London practice.