This program is going to demand a LOT from you...it’s an advanced program and not something to be attempted lightly. It involves tough training and some strict nutritional manipulation to really get the most out of it.
And now that I’ve scared the heck out of you ;), know that the results you can get from it are downright EXPLOSIVE. And believe me when I tell you, you will EARN those results with a lot of sweat and effort!
The program this is based on is called "Muscle Explosion - 28 Days to Maximum Mass" and it’s THE most powerful "fast-results" muscle-building program I ever put together. For this book, I’ve adapted to work on just your GLUTES.
Since we’re just targeting the glutes, this version is going to be an adapted version of the main Muscle Explosion program (which encompasses training for your entire body). If you’d like to read the full rundown on how it all fits together, I definitely encourage you to check out that book in its entirety.
This is going to be a three week program with the first week setting up the very TOUGH second week, with the third week targeted at helping you recover from the second week :).
The first week of this program for building muscle is, surprisingly enough, all about DIETING. Yeah, I fully realize how strange that sounds!
What this dieting week does is set up what I like to call a "Slingshot Effect." You might know it as "yo-yo dieting" or rebound weight gain.
What we’re doing is strategically dieting for a week to set up and FORCE that big rebound the following week!
And during that rebound week, you’re going to absolutely HAMMER your glutes with hard, heavy training designed to overload your glutes with MASSIVE training volume to ensure that rebound is almost all MUSCLE (more on that below).
Since you’re an advanced trainer, I’m going to assume you have a good working knowledge of nutrition here and skip over the basics of nutrition.
During this first week of dieting, you have two main choices...a more "normal" low-fat, low-calorie approach or a low-carb, low- calorie approach. If you’ve never done low-carb dieting before, I would recommend going with the more "normal" approach as a full rundown of how to do low-carb eating is beyond the scope of this section.
If you HAVE done low-carb eating before and you’re comfortable with it, I definitely recommend using it here. Eating low-carb is going to stabilize your insulin levels which will not only help you burn fat during this week, it’ll also make your body more sensitive to the effects of insulin the following week (when we overload on training and food). It’s going to help you get more out of the program, to be completely honest.
So in terms of caloric intake, during this week, we’re aiming for around 1200 to 1600 calories per day, depending on your current bodyweight (lower end if your weight is lower and higher end if your weight is higher).
You’ll also want to be taking a good multivitamin and/or "greens" supplement in order to maintain your vitamin and mineral intake during this time when you’re eating less food.
You’ll do this low-calorie eating for SIX days straight and you’ll be training the glutes directly THREE times that week. On the seventh day, my nutritional recommendation is an "only fruit" day.
The only fruit day is a nutritional trick I like to use for encouraging/tricking the body to build more muscle.
If you’ve ever heard of the term "carb loading," this is a similar concept, only it’s done with protein. With carb loading, you eliminate carbs from the diet then very rapidly load back up on them. Your body stores more carbs (as glycogen) than it had before. It’s a technique often used by endurance trainers to carry more fuel in their body.
This tricks uses the same deal with protein...you eliminate it from the diet for one day (which is enough time to deplete the free amino acid pool in your body) then the next day, we reload it in large quantities.
Here’s the thing...when you combine this fruit and protein loading with the carb depletion and reloading (when you do a low-carb diet the previous week), you actually COMBINE these two loads, which dramatically increases potential results!
You’re creating a double nutritional void, which your body is programmed to fill and fill rapidly the moment it’s able to.
And THAT is when you’ll hit the most productive glute-building phase you’ve ever seen...
The fruit day is very simple to execute...just eat fruit and nothing but fruit all day. No veggies, no breads, grains, fats, etc. Just FRUIT. And just so you know up front, this fruit day also has a great cleansing effect on the digestive system, prepping it for the increased eating you’re going to be doing in the next week.
If you’d like to read more detail about this technique, I go into in greater detail in the Nutrition section.
I’m going to keep this week of training very simple and straightforward. You’ll do three glute training sessions, consisting of whatever three workouts you’d like to do, taken directly from this Advanced manual or from the main book.
The Structural Glute Prep program is my recommended choice for this week as it will help set the stage for the muscle growth you’re looking to achieve in the next week. You can definitely feel free to use whichever other programs you like, though. Just make sure and hit the glutes at least 3 times, training on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, giving you two days off before hitting the second week of training.
You can also include training for your other body parts as well, however you like to include it (I would recommend it on the two non- glute training days during the week, Tuesday and Thursday). Then take the whole weekend off from training (trust me on this) - no training on day 6 or day 7 (the fruit day).
Yes, it’s an ominous sounding name...and by the time you’re finished, you’re probably going to think the name doesn’t sound nearly ominous enough...
Basically, you’re going to be training just ONE glute exercise for 5 workouts in a row. You’re going to be training this single exercise with relatively HEAVY weight and EXTREMELY high volume.
To really maximize gains, the training is going to tell the body it needs to get good at ONE SINGLE MOVEMENT. Nothing else. When faced with this type of very specific stimulus, the human body is capable of extraordinary adaptation. Your body will become it’s function and that function will be coping with that single glute-building exercise you’re doing for 5 straight workouts.
The basis of this phase is a technique I’ve come up with that I call Compound Exercise Overload. The first time you do this program, I HIGHLY recommend you pick an exercise from one of the three most product glute exercise types...squats, split squats or deadlifts.
It can be just about any of the variations of these exercises, though I would recommend staying away from exercises that challenge your balance or stability, like One-Legged Squats for example. Your stabilizing muscles will fatigue well before the glutes do and will really limit your results.
Stay away from exercises that require more skill to perform - you want to pick an exercise where you can just focus on PUSHING
and not on detailed technique points.
It should also be an exercise with which you are very familiar...an exercise you KNOW works your glutes very strongly and effectively, AND have excellent form with. You’re going to be doing a LOT of reps with it and any form errors will be magnified.
And here’s a helpful tip...take 1000 mg of Vitamin C about 45 minutes before these workouts. This will help minimize the amount of muscle soreness you’ll be dealing with (and it WILL happen). Do this before EVERY training session this week!
The basic concept of this technique is that you’re going to take a single compound exercise (like the squat, split squat or deadlift variation) and do ONLY that single exercise for the ENTIRE WORKOUT.
And that’s not even the brutal part...
The brutal part is...you are only allowed 30 seconds of rest between sets.
This is one of the toughest workouts you can do (when you do it right) but you WILL be well-rewarded with results.
This program really becomes about basic survival for your glutes.
Your body will have a tremendous emergency response to cope with this onslaught of training volume. We’re going to go BEYOND typical soreness and muscular exhaustion with this training - your body will almost literally become a MACHINE at the specific exercise you’re doing.
And, at the risk of being crude, it will build you a big ass like a Clydesdale horse ;)
Here’s a VERY IMPORTANT GUIDELINE - Try your best to do NOTHING else that is physically demanding during this week, if you can help it at all. We don’t want to confuse the body with ANY other stimulus than what you’re giving it with the training. This will really help streamline the recovery process. That means NO cardio, no abdominal training, no other bodypart worked in any way, shape or form. I would even avoid heavy manual labor, if you have the option.
Compound Exercise Overload works to increase strength in several ways:
1. It focuses your nervous system on a single specific exercise, i.e. "greasing the groove" at a specific rep range. No competing training stimuli here, just very specific focus - it’s one of the reasons Olympic lifters only use a few lifts in their training. It’s also one of the reasons they can lift such extraordinary amounts of weight! |
2. It allows you to have a LOT of practice lifting heavy weight - this helps you to perfect your form and become more efficient with your lifting technique. Again, it’s a matter of training the nervous system to deal with low reps and powerful movements. |
3. The high volume of training creates an emergency situation in your body which forces rapid adaptation by your body (both in muscle and connective tissue). |
4. The high volume also forces a tremendous amount of blood into the glutes, which helps drive nutrients into the glutes, which helps them recover and grow! |
Combine these four factors and you’ve got one POWERFUL workout. |
First, select an exercise to work with - in this case for glutes, a squat, split squat or deadlift variation. If you do deadlifts, you MUST know what you’re doing and have very good form when doing them. As I mentioned above, any form errors will be magnified due to the high volume. If you’re more comfortable with squats or split squats, use one of those instead.
This training style is best done at a time when your gym is not very crowded. You’re basically going to be hogging a single exercise area for the entire workout. This isn’t a big deal with deadlifts as you’re just using a barbell. It might be a trickier with the squat rack for doing squats.
Do a warm-up before getting started - whatever you prefer to do for a warm-up is fine. I like to do some general movements then a few light sets of the specific exercise I’m going to be working - nothing that will tax the body for what’s to come.
With this technique, I encourage you to use a stopwatch, regular watch or other form of timer. If your gym has a clock with an easily readable "second" hand, that will be fine, too. Otherwise, you’re going to have to count your 30 seconds of rest in your head, which is not as accurate (plus that 30 seconds will tend to turn into a LOT longer as you go through the workout and it’s critical to keep it constant).
The timer I use has big numbers - I just set the time for the TOTAL workout time, e.g. if it’s 20 minutes, I’ll set it for 20 minutes. During the workout itself, I just mentally note the time when I finish the set and count the time from there. For example, if I finish a set and there is 16:45 left on my timer, I have until 16:15 on the timer for rest.
On the first day, you’re going to start with a weight you could normally do for about 6 reps or so. You’re going to start your timer AFTER you finish your first set (if you’re not using a timer, note the time on the clock so you know when you’re done).
Get set on the exercise and perform ONLY 3 REPS with that weight, even though you CAN do about six. DO NOT go anywhere near failure on this first set. Even on successive sets, we’re NOT taking any of them to absolute failure. The key here is training volume, not training to failure.
When you’ve done your 3 reps, rest 30 seconds. Now do 3 more reps. Rest 30 seconds. You are going to repeat these 3 rep sets with those 30 seconds of rest until you are unable to get 3 reps with that weight anymore. This could take anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes (maybe more, maybe less), depending on the exercise and the amount of weight you’re using.
Here’s the key...
If you’re on rep #2 and it feels like you would have to really push to get that third rep, STOP!
The idea here is NOT to push yourself to the max on each set but to stop short of it and train the body based on volume. So if you’re on rep 2 and you think you could get 3 but it would be a struggle, that’s the end of the line for THAT weight. ALWAYS keep the "do or die" rep in you. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL.
When you hit this point, remove 10 lbs from each side of the bar - 20 lbs total (if you started with 225, you now have 205 on the bar). If you’re doing a dumbbell exercise, drop the weight by 5 lbs on each dumbbell.
Start again doing 3 rep sets and continue with the 30 second rest period. Reduce the weight whenever you can’t complete 3 reps during a set.
Be sure to stick with 3 reps on each set - no more, no less. Your body hits a rep-range groove and will acclimate to it very quickly. It keeps your nervous system efficient because it basically gets tuned to those 3 rep sets.
The reason we’re using 3 reps as the "magic" number is that it IS a magic number. It’s not so many reps that you build up significant metabolic waste products. It’s a low enough number of reps that you can use a lot of weight and it’ll build strength very effectively. But it’s not double or singles, which would make you do TOO much weight, leading to more rapid burnout. After much experimentation, I’ve found 3 to actually BE a magic number for this type of training.
Basically, your body will become a MACHINE at whatever exercise you’re doing.
On the final set, when your allotted workout time is up, rest for TWO FULL MINUTES (aren’t I generous :) then go back to the exercise and crank out as many reps as you can with the same weight you just ended with. You’ll find that can probably get 5 to 8 reps on that last burnout set, just because of the increased rest period.
This training uses neuromuscular specificity to allow you to teach your body the absolute MOST efficient way to perform a single exercise. Your body will learn to fire the exact sequence of muscle fibers it needs to do the exercise most efficiently, making VERY fast strength gains possible. The extreme specificity also develops the exact muscles needed to perform that exercise in the most efficient pattern. These two reasons make the quick strength gains possible!
DO NOT use different variations of the same exercise (e.g. if you’re doing Dumbbell Split Squats, don’t switch to Bulgarian Split Squats halfway through). It’s important to use the EXACT SAME exercise for every single set of the whole 5 days of workouts for maximum adaptive response.
Do your best with the 30 second rest, too. This rest period will naturally increase during the times when you’re making weight changes but even then, try to keep it as close as possible. Just do your best to stick with the 30 seconds.
GOOD TIP: When doing this training with a barbell exercise, like squat or deadlift variations, I like to load the bar with small plates as I load it for my starting weight. For example, if you’re starting with 225 lbs on the squat, don’t just throw two 45 lb plates on either side. You’ll be pulling a pair of those 45’s off pretty quick and that is a pain in the butt - plus, it takes up valuable training time and energy! |
Instead, put two 45 lb plates on either side, then a 25 lb plate, then two 10 lb plates. It’s the same weight but when you can no longer hit 225 lbs for 3 reps, all you need to do is pull a small 10 lb plate off either side. This is MUCH easier than pulling 45’s off either side then loading 35’s back on. |
Be VERY sure to keep track of your starting weight and ending weight (and the length of time you were able to do on each) so you know what your numbers are and can improve on them the next time you do this technique. It’s always nice to chart your progress but in this case we do it because we want to literally FORCE the issue with adaptation. By steadily increasing weight, you will force your body to get stronger.
As far as stretching goes, ONLY stretch the glutes AFTER the final set of the workout NOT during the workout. We want to keep as much blood in the area as possible. Even waste products like lactic acid stimulate muscle-growth (lactic acid in particular stimulates Growth Hormone secretion). This technique will pump a lot of blood into your muscles and keep it there...stretch out HARD after the workout for best results.
When you’re doing this technique with a squat variation, start getting into position at the 20 second mark, even though you have 30 seconds of rest. It takes about 10 seconds to get into position under the bar. If you start getting into position at 30, you’ll be taking 40 seconds rest.
When you’re doing this technique with a deadlift variation and using a mixed grip (one hand over, one hand under), it’s a good idea to switch around your grip on alternating sets to help keep your body balanced, e.g. if you grip overhand with your left hand and underhand with the right on one set, grip overhand with your right hand and underhand with your left on the next set.
If you find, as you’re going through the training, that you have to stop and rest longer than 30 seconds, that’s completely fine! I’ve done that myself. Basically, when you find you’re having to reduce weights too quickly or if lactic acid is making the exercises unbearable to do (it happens), stop the timer then take 2 minutes or more of complete rest (no changing weights) and see how it helps you to recover.
The key thing here is to stop the timer so that you’re not taking up training time with your rest. This should allow you to keep going - just do it whenever you feel you have to.
This training is, as I mentioned, going to be done over the course of a week, covering 5 workouts. If you find this is too advanced for you and you still want to try the program, you can also do 3 workouts instead. This will give you a bit more recovery.
The first training session will be 20 minutes long. Select a weight you can do 6 reps with and do the sets of 3, as explained above. The second session will be 25 minutes long. Increase the weight from what you used on the first session. Your nervous system will be more tuned to the exercise and you should be able to use a bit more weight even though the rest of your system may not be fully recovered.
The third session will be 30 minutes long. Again, increase the weight a bit from the second session. The fourth session will be 35 minutes - see if you can still increase the weight a bit more.
The fifth session, will be 40 minutes long. Now for the fun part...you’re going to back to your original starting weight from the FIRST
session. You’ll most likely find you get go WAY longer with that same weight as you did compared to the first session.
To give you an idea, I used this technique with front squats, starting at 185 lbs for the first day of training. I got 4 sets of 3 reps at that weight before having to reduce the weight. On the LAST day of training, when I went back to that same weight, I literally did ELEVEN TIMES the number of sets...44 sets over the 40 minute session. I didn’t even get to the point where I had to drop weight.
This is an INSANE increase in strength/endurance and it’s a great example of what you can accomplish with this training. You are literally compressing MONTHS of training into just one week...and you get the results that go with it!
The Main 5 Workout Schedule
The Alternate 3 Workout Schedule
Now that you’ve just conquered that extremely tough week of training, take a few days off and congratulate yourself! As your body recovers from this, you’re going to see BIG gains in glute size and strength.
The next week of training is all about optimizing your recovery from that onslaught of training volume and helping your glutes grow. The first few days back in the gym the next week are going to be rough...I’ll be honest with you. Your nervous system is shot and your muscles may be even weaker than when you started. This is all to be expected and is totally normal.
It’s also why this week, we’re focusing on training designed to aid in your recovery. This will be straightforward training, with a big focus on movements with a strong STRETCH component. Your glutes are in the process of recovering and growing and we want to give them ROOM to grow.
During this week of training, you should hit the glutes directly in three workouts. You can work in training for your other bodyparts after the glute training or on off days from glute training.
You’ll pick THREE exercises and do TWO sets of each for 5 to 7 reps...two of the exercises will be "strong stretch" exercises (such Two Bench Lunges or One Leg Bench Squats) and one will be an isolation exercise that focuses on a strong contraction (such as Barbell Glute Extensions).
Simple, right?
Here’s the key...at the BOTTOM of each rep of the "strong stretch" exercises, hold the stretch for at least FIVE SECONDS. It’s not going to be easy, but count it out and make sure you sink down into that stretch to really make room for those glutes to grow.
On the isolation exercise, hold the TOP contracted position of each rep for 5 seconds and squeeze the glutes HARD.
That’s just SIX total sets for the glutes and you’re done with your glute training for the day. Here’s what it looks like:
It may not seem like much, especially after the second week of overload training, but your body NEEDS this lighter load to help recover from that second week. As your glutes recover, you will see BIG increases in size and strength.
This program is definitely an ADVANCED program...the results you get from it will be directly proportional to the effort you put into the training (especially that second brutal week!).
You can go through it once more, immediately after finishing Week 3, if you like. I would suggest using a different glute exercise for that second week of training, so you don’t overload that exact same movement pattern and risk overuse injuries.
You can also go from Week 3 and do a few weeks of more "normal" glute training (like any of the 10 or 20 minute programs from the main book) before doing another round of this one.
It’s VERY tough and VERY effective!