Best Butt Workout for Women – The Best Exercises to Sculpt Your Butt

Bring shape and size to your derriere with our very best butt workout for women.

Nowadays, when you follow a women’s fitness account on Instagram, you’re inundated with pictures of girls with incredible peachy butts.

You might get instant envy, thinking they’re born with it, and there’s no way you’ll be able to achieve a butt like that.

We’re here to tell you that, with the right know how, a whole lot of dedication and the best butt workout for women, you can sculpt your own enviable booty.

When we say the best butt workout for women, we’re not talking squats and leg press. While they do help and are definitely worth including in your lower body training sessions, they’re not the secret to crafting that perfect peach.

Using the very best butt exercises for women, we’re going to isolate all the key muscles in the butt to home in on any areas of weakness and use smart training techniques to promote size and shape.

Check out the best butt workout for women, transform your booty and be amazed by the results. Or, to get a full four weeks worth of workouts, check out our 4 Week Bigger Booty Workout Plan right here! 

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Butt workout for women: The structure

In the modern world, we spend a whole lot of time sitting down and neglecting some vital muscles in your lower back and butt. The more you’re sat on them, and not losing them, the more they go to sleep or ‘turn off’. 

To start our butt workout for girls, you need to wake those muscles back up with a little activation, otherwise it’ll take a while for them to kick in and you won’t be able to perform at your best. It’s basically like a little warm up specifically designed to turn those muscles back on, so you can use them to their best during your workout. 

You may feel tempted to skip this section and crack on with the workout, but it’s key you get those muscles fired up before you start, as it’ll make a huge difference to your peach progress.

To do this you’re going to need a loop resistance band.

Place the resistance band just about your knees and perform three rounds of glute activation by doing these movements:

·         8 x Banded hip bridges – Lie on your back and place your feet flat on the ground. Pushing against the band and keeping your knees in a strong position, raise your hips until your body is completely straight. Return your hips to the ground to end the rep

·         8 x Monster walks each side – Bend your legs so you’re in a half squat. Face one way and step your right leg out to the side, before stepping the other leg in to return to a normal squat width. Repeat this eight times before side-stepping back with the other leg eight times

·         8 x Banded clams each side – Lie on one side with both legs bent, with ankles and knees together. Keep the bottom leg on the floor and your ankles together, and raise your top knee up as far as you can. Complete eight reps before turning over and doing the same on the other side.

To find out more about glute activation before you try out the best butt exercises for women, you can check out our full guide right here. 

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The Best Butt Workout for Women

Ready to get started? We’ve used the science of progressive overload to guide this workout, which will help to promote intensity, which will work your muscles in a way that promotes growth and size. By using our best butt exercises for women along with high volume reps, you’ll be in the best possible position to grow your muscle. 

4 x 12 Hip thrusts

3 x 8 (el) split squats

3 x 10 (el) Cable kick backs

2 x 30 (el) Banded side leg raises

3 x 8 (el) Walking lunges

Now you know what the workout looks like, it’s time to take a look at the movements. We’ve written out guides to all of our best butt exercises for women that we’ve used in this workout. Check out the step-by-step guides to make sure your form is strong and safe. 

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The Best Butt Exercises for Women

Hip thrusts

This is the closest thing you’ll get to a complete isolation exercise for your glutes. On top of that, it allows you to get some serious weight pushed through your glutes, which is just what you need to promote the progressive overload we mentioned before. Because of its amazing results, it’s been made famous in recent years as the secret to unlocking some real size and shape in your butt.

Hip thrusts work every element of your glutes, highlighting weaknesses and developing muscle that can’t be reached through squats and lunges alone.

Furthermore, because it isolates this area, it can be a game changer for adding weight to this area. For example, if you had a weakness in your lower back, that means you won’t be able to put the intensity on your glutes as you’ll be lifting a lighter weight than your glutes can realistically take in your squat. 

The humble hip thrust really does do it all. No wonder it’s one of out best butt exercises for women. 

1. Sit on the floor alongside a bench with your upper back resting against the bench

2. Roll a bar over your legs so it’s sitting in the crease of your hips. Use a matt or a barbell pad to protect your hip bones from bruises

3. Bring your feet in so your knees are bent, and your feet are flat on the floor

4. Keeping your chin ticked in, and you back completely straight, push up through the hips to raise the bar off the floor

5. Push up until your body is almost completely flat and parallel with the floor

6. Once again, remember to keep your back straight and your chin tucked, lower your hips slowly until they’re a couple of inches from the floor, before repeating the movement

If you’re starting out with hip thrusts, you might want to invest in a good hip thrust pad. It can save you from a lot of pain and hip bruises when you’re doing your butt workouts for girls. Our top pick is from Rogue. We found it handy that it not only offered protection, but stabilisation too. Click here if you want to check it out. 

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Split Squats/Bulgarian lunges

This is another way to home in on those glutes, and highlight any weaknesses you may be unaware of. As you’ll be working one leg at a time, whilst balancing, it’s a great way to target those stabilizing core muscles, as well as achieve a real burn through your glutes.

Tip: Rather than holding yourself completely upright in your split squat, hinge your torso forward from the hip, keeping your back flat. This will put more strain through the glutes, rather than the legs. Only do this whilst holding dumbbells, as it could be dangerous if you’re holding a barbell on your shoulders.

If you’re starting out with split squats, we really recommend you keep it light to begin with. After doing hip thrusts, you’ll feel the burn on this straight away and it’s a good idea to make sure your form is tight and strong! 

1. Hold a dumbbell in each hand and stand alongside a bench, facing away from it

2. Raise one foot behind you and place it on the bench

3. Jump the front foot forward so you feel stable and can perform a lunge without your front knee tracking over your toes

4. Once you feel stable, bend your front knee, dipping the back one so your front thigh is parallel to the floor

5. Focusing on firing through the glute, straighten your front leg to return to the start position

Cable kick backs

The cable machine is your new best friend when it comes to building a booty. They provide constant resistance that challenges your body at every point of a movement – no rest for a wicked peachy butt.

By adding these into our butt workout for women, we’re focussing on building muscle in the top of your glutes. This is essential to creating that coveted, rounded shape.

While this is one of the best butt exercises for women, it’s pretty likely you’ll need to be in a gym to do it, so it’s not the best choice if you’re working from a home gym. But a good replacement is a banded donkey kick back if you don’t have access to a gym. 

1. Lower your cable machine to the bottom setting and add a food strap attachment

2. Strap it around your ankle and select a challenging weight

3. Step backwards a little to allow room for the movement

4. Bend forward and hold on to the machine for stability, bending at the hip and keeping the back flat and straight

5. Bend you free leg slightly to increase stability, and take the cabled leg off the floor slightly

6. Also bend the knee of your weight leg, then push it back and up in a sweeping motion until your ankle is level with your hip and your leg is straight out behind you

7. Reverse the sweeping motion until your weighted ankle comes beside your standing leg

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Banded side leg raises

Although there are no weights involved in this movement, instead you’re going to be used a resistance band that will give you a burn unlike any other. Trust us, it’s a game changer. As this is a side raise, it’s responsible for filling out that hip dip and creating a truly rounded, fuller peach.

With the resistance band around your legs, you’ll find this is harder than it looks, especially when you consider how many reps you have to do.

We’ve gone for high reps with this one. Don’t hate us, but this kind of high volume training is key to creating hypertrophy, or muscle size of strength. If you want that booty faster and bigger, this is the way to do it.

Don’t sweat it if you have to break it down into smaller reps, or if you can’t do the full number of reps on the first workout – you can always build up to it. 

1. Place your resistance band around your lower thigh, just above the knee

2. Lie on your side with both legs straight

3. Bend the leg on the floor so the thigh is in the same place, but you have a 90-degree angle at the knee

4. Keeping your top leg straight, raise it directly upwards to about 45-60 degrees

5. Slowly lower it down to the floor and repeat

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Walking lunges

By this point in the best butt workout for women, we’re really drilling into those glutes and it’s likely you’ll really be feeling it, so pick a couple of light, yet challenging dumbbells to finish the session strong.

This is another one of the best butt exercises for women, as it works a range of muscles in the glute, lower back and legs overall. This makes it great for growing a strong and stable lower body, as well as a killer booty. 

You’re gonna need a little bit of space for this one so don’t be afraid to take up the floor for the final few steps of your butt workout.

1. Take a dumbbell in each hand

2. Stand with your feet together and stride out with your right foot

3. Ensure you’ve stepped forward one and a half strides and out to the side half a stride. This is the optimal distance for a lunge

4. Bend your front knee and dip your back knee so it’s about an inch from the floor

5. Push up again by firing through your glute and step your back foot in to meet the front

6. Step out with the opposite foot to begin the next rep

[Related Article: Kettlebell Workouts for Women]

How often should you do your butt workout for girls? 

If you’re trying to grow a booty, you may be tempted to hit your best butt workout for women every time you go to the gym. Don’t.

We’d recommend only training your booty or lower body twice a week, otherwise the muscle could become too fatigued and it will be detrimental to your progress. Instead, ensure you get plenty of rest between workouts to allow your muscles time to heal and more importantly – grow.

To find out more about recovering after a workout, check out this article, it’s super important to make sure you’ve got everything you need to promote muscle development, or you won’t benefit from all that hard work you put in a the gym. 

Aside from using the best butt workout for women, you need to get your nutrition on point too. To grow muscle you need energy and protein, that means eating plenty of carbohydrates and high protein foods.

If you’re under-eating you won’t grow muscle, you’ll be tired and you won’t see the results you’re looking for.

To get started, check out our IIFYM guide right here, or if you want to find out more about macronutrients, check out our explain-all article too.