“I have been in the industry 25+ years and I have lost count how many times i heard: “I have a flat/saggy buttocks and I need to tone them but don’t want to bulk up so I will not do squats and will use pilates/yoga instead”. To which my answer has routinely been: “To reach the bulking up stage first you need to reach the toned stage (you don’t go magically from flat/flabby to bodybuilder-style ‘bulk’ with fa ew sessions at the gym, skipping the ‘toned’ stage). And you you will never reach either the ‘toned’ stage without squats, pelvic thrusts, hip extensions and similar exercises.” Read below the full explanation and analysis.”
Can you grow glutes without weights? And can you grow glutes without gaining weight?
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
Glute training and weight gain: frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Why are my glutes not growing?
How to stop glutes from growing
Can you grow glutes without weights?
How to grow glutes without gaining weight
Have a skin tightening/cellulite treatment with London’s cellulite experts
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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.
Do lots of intensive resistance exercise on the glutes two to 2-3 times a week, for several weeks or months
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) mimics your work at the gym but work in a bit different way. So it’s best to combine both gym and HIFEM for best results.
Now, will just using HIFEM help you tone without bulking up? No. Not really.
With gym work the advice is: exercise hard and frequently to reach a “toned” level and then reduce exercise frequency to maintain tone but not bulk up
With HIFEM the advice also is: have lots of sessions to reach a “toned” level and then reduce HIFEM treatment frequency to maintain tone but not bulk up
The ideal thing is to do both, e.g. HIFEM once to twice per week and gym once to twice per week to tone quickly. When you reach your ideal tone, continue with either just gym, just HIFEM or both, but much less frequently.
Perhaps you can switch to walking, running or swimming to exercise your heart instead. Or work with resistance training on other muscle groups.
Just make sure you do not fall for the “you only need four sessions”, as erroneously claimed by crafty marketers and aim for 6-12 or - for serious muscle laxity - up to 20 sessions.
And never pay more than £250 per session. Up to £250 (in Central London) is worth it and it is a good price for using the original - and still the best - HIFEM machine in the world (Emsculpt). But anything more than that does not make sense, especially given that you will typically have to do 6-12 sessions for good results.
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 technologies are deep-acting, high-power radiofrequency and deep-acting, high-power ultrasound cavitation.
Light or superficial RF or cavitation 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.
Glute training and weight gain: frequently asked questions (FAQs)
We hope everything/it/all is now clear regarding glute training and weight gain.
Below are some straight, quick answers to the most common questions related to this subject, to clarify finer points and add more detail.
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.
How to grow glutes without gaining weight
You can grow your butt size either by eating more and putting on weight - some of which will grow your butt. And also by building up your glute muscles with exercise.
Obviously, the weight gain method may not end up the way you imagined it (i.e. fat in all the right places), while the exercise method may be too slow and too ineffective for some women who cannot put on muscle easily.
Perhaps a combination of putting on some weight to increase the size of the buttocks plus lots of glute muscle exercises will result in a larger but still lifted look, with some deep tissue radiofrequency to further contribute towards lifting.
Have a treatment in London with the cellulite experts
At LipoTherapeia we have specialised 100% in skin tightening and cellulite reduction for more than two decades and 20,000+ sessions.
This is all we study and practise every day and have researched and tried hands-on all the important skin tightening equipment and their manufacturers.
As strong, deep acting radiofrequency and deep-acting, high-power ultrasound cavitation are the technologies of choice for skin tightening and cellulite reduction, we have invested in the best RF/ultrasound technologies in the world.
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