By VAHVA Fitness on April 17, 2019

Glute and hip exercises to not only build mobility but to also increase the size and athleticism of your hips and buttocks!

Training your legs and hips properly goes far beyond than just doing simple squats and deadlifts although both are phenomenal exercises.

Generally speaking, most men train their upper bodies very thoroughly but when it comes to their lower body, everything has been simplified to the max. 

Women on the other hand are much smarter in regards to the lower body and utilize a wide variety of different exercises to fully develop the legs and hips, especially the glutes.

Whether you are a man or a woman and care about athleticism, health, posture or your sex appeal, it's crucial to fully develop the hips and especially your glutes. Glutes are the powerhouse of your lower body.

Your arms can move in all directions in multiple different angles – your legs cannot move as freely as your arms but they still have the ability to move quite freely in space. 

Although the standard exercises such as the back squat and deadlifts are great, they train the lower body in a very one-dimensional way and leave many natural joint articulations left uncovered. 

The result? Stiff legs and hips that can barely move in any directions and as a result aren't very athletic at all.

The strength and power you can get from big lifts like the squat is a very small part of your overall athleticism and alone will not be enough.

Forget the 2D strength - start building 3-dimensional performance. 

Hip Articulations for Athletic Performance

Lying Front Leg Raise

When you first start, it's good to do supported variations of the exercises. This way you will have less moving parts involved in the form and can focus better on the targeted muscles.

In this exercise, you are developing the glutes, especially the lateral parts. You will also gain a very nice ability to open up your hips (increased range of motion). 

Avoid rotating the hips and core and you will notice that this subtle movement of your hip will kill your glutes in no time.

Lying Side Leg Raise

You have probably seen this exercise in many aerobic and pilates workouts. They love to do this exercise for glutes because it does work. 

You are developing the abduction of your hips with this movement and if you do it correctly without crunching your obliques, you should develop the lateral glutes very nicely. 

This exercise can help you with lateral movement in sports, martial arts and dance. 

Alternating Leg Circles

This exercise is AMAZING for the mobility of your hips.

You will develop the hip flexors (muscles that flex the hip) and inner thighs (adductors). In addition, your core is developed due to a high core engagement and stabilization. 

Alternating Knee Raises

Alternating knee raise develops mainly the hip flexors but your core also needs to work surprisingly hard. These knee raises will particularly target the deep abdominal muscles (transverse abdominis). 

This one looks easy but it gets challenging very quickly. 

Supported Bent Over Leg Raise

Supported bent over legs raise is probably the toughest glute exercise you will find here.

If you do it properly with the methodology of Athlete 20XX, you should experience an insane amount of burn in your glutes and lateral glutes. 

The important cue is to keep the core stable and avoid rotating the core - you want to solely move the leg in order to focus on the glutes.

Supported Donkey Kick

Supported donkey kick targets the gluteus maximus and hamstrings. Basically this is the same movement (hip extension) as the deadlift but in a reverse fashion. 

The important cue is to keep the lower back flat and avoid arching it during movement. You want to target the glutes - not the lower back. 

Explosive Front Leg Raise

This is the only exercise from Phase 3 of Athlete 20XX that we share here. Here we are raising the knee up in an explosive fashion to develop the hip flexors of the moving leg.

The purpose here is not to just develop the moving leg but also the supporting leg, hips and core. Since the arms and the leg are moving rapidly up and down, the supporting leg, hips and core need to stabilize the movement extremely hard.

Stabilization such as this is crucial for agility, speed and even power. In fact, if your hips and core aren't stable during moving, it's very hard to be athletic at all.

Everyone Does Everything Wrong, At First 

Many of these exercises may look easy at first but a lot of strong men have been in grueling pain once they finally started to do these exercises in the proper way.

In one of our previous articles we talked about how the fitness world has gone MAD and no longer understands that training is more an art than pure science. 

What this means is that the exercise form is relative and completely tied to the standards of the teacher.

The better the teacher = the better the standards for the perfect form. 

Unless the person learns the right form with the proper instructions, the person almost always performs the exercise with the lowest standards possible.

Why? Because these standards take years if not decades to develop. That is the secret of a teacher and why we have been learning from different teachers as well - they allow you to cut the learning curve in a dramatic fashion.

This is why it was also important to make the instruction videos of Athlete 20XX very thorough and also include muscle diagrams to show where the exercise is supposed to be felt.

Only by learning the proper form you can reap the most benefits and thus save time.

Stay strong.

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