1. Pay Attention to Your Feet

If you do not maintain an arch in your foot, you will find your glutes fire sub-optimally.

Some will say this problem is “glute amnesia.” I like to refer to it as “lazy feet.” If you don’t maintain an arch when you’re working on otherwise great glute building exercises like deadlifts or squats, you fully activate the glute max.

Your gluteus maximus is the biggest, most powerful butt muscle you’ve got back there, and certainly one you want “turned on” during any exercise. 

TIP: In bare feet, find all four corners of the floor with your feet. While maintaining the arch you’ve created, try to pull the floor apart in your squat pattern, emphasizing the base of the big toe.

2. Stretch and Activate Your Hip Flexors Before Training

When you sit or wear heels all day, the hips can end up very rotated in response to the stress. In turn, the hip flexors get very tight and weak. Many of the best butt-building exercises, like squats and deadlifts, require a certain amount of hip flexor strength for you to successfully pull your hips into flexion. So a good deep hip flexor stretch, followed by some kind of challenge is ideal..

TIP: Try a half-kneeling hip flexor stretch and follow it up with a quick hurdle hold exercise.

Another easy way to activate your glutes before training is to include glute bridges as part of your warm-up. Right after the hurdle hold, stay laying on the floor and do a single-leg glute bridge, holding each at the top for 15 seconds. Two reps on each side and you should have your glutes firing. 

3. Train Half-Kneeling Positions 

If you’ve got chronically tight hamstrings, you cannot touch your toes, or your lower back is tight after runs, the posture of your hips could be off.

Half-kneeling positions help correct this issue in the long run, but they also require you to squeeze your glutes in order to stay balanced. You can row, press, chop, and push— all with one knee down. 

TIP: Try this half-kneeling lift exercise:

These half-kneeling lifts and chops you can replace in your programming for a few weeks in place of the same ab exercises you’ve been doing for months. This trains your core in a new (and probably more effective way) which will further support your posture and glute activation. 

4. Maintain Good Posture All Day (Including During Your Lifts)

“Good posture” is very relative and very individual. It reflects strengths, weaknesses, fatigue, stress, and confidence level, so the best posture cue is really just to create as much space between your joints as possible.

When you do so, your joints are in the most optimal positions for you to be successful at whatever exercise you’re doing. Within the context of our hips and glute training, we want to make sure our lower back isn’t excessively arched, so our posture should focus on posteriorly tilting the pelvis. This 

TIP: While standing with feet hip-width apart, make sure your tailbone is pointing down towards to the floor and grind your heels into the floor as you elongate through the crown of your head. Apply this to all of your resisted movements.

5. Balance Your Strengths

If posture reflects strengths and weaknesses, you can positively affect it by getting your muscles into better balance and, for most people, that means training the posterior line a bit more (calves, hamstrings, glutes, back—all of these muscles are connected along the posterior chain). They usually need a little more attention than their anterior counterparts to keep the body in balance.

TIP: Add more Romanian Deadlifts to target the hamstrings, even if you already have regular concentric deadlifts in your program.

6. Don’t Forget The Side Glutes

There are actually three glutes muscles. In addition to the glute max, there are two smaller glutes, the gluteus medius and gluteus minimus, that reside on the side of our hips just below the pelvis. The glute med lays on top of the glute min, and they perform the same main functions: hip abduction (bringing your leg out to the side), and hip internal rotation (rotating your femur inward). Activating these muscles will support your overall posture in addition to.

A great way to activate these muscles is to do a mini resistance band walk as part of your warm-up. Grab a mini band and take 10-20 steps, while bracing your core, in each direction. Here’s a video with all you need to know about performing band walks in the most effective manner.