Updated September 15, 2025 02:22PM
5 Essential Exercises to Strengthen Your Glutes
So simple. So effective.
(Photo: Getty Images)
It’s about time strong glutes experience a resurgence in pop culture. These powerful posterior hip muscles have always been crucial to everyday actions you likely take for granted, namely standing up, climbing stairs, running, and practicing yoga, not to mention simply standing upright. With fashion finally catching up with function, you’ll experience these benefits of strong glutes when you practice these glute-strengthening exercises. Sneak them into your existing yoga practice or include them in your gym workout.
5 Glute-Strengthening Exercises in Yoga
These tweaks help isolate the challenge in your posterior muscles and create strong glutes. Start by practicing each pose once and then build up to a second or third set. If you’re short on time, slip these variations into your existing practice or do one of the exercises when you have a spare minute.
1. Try Broken Toe in Bird Dog Pose
Balancing Table Pose or Bird Dog is a common warm-up in yoga classes for a reason—it builds body awareness, balance, and strength in the upper body, back body and core in ways that prepare you for the poses that follow. But with so much going on, it’s easy to overlook the glute strengthening you could experience there.
How to: Keep both hands on the mat to take balance out of the equation. Then lift your leg by engaging your glutes rather than arching your back. Keep that engagement by tucking the toes on your other foot and shifting your hips back toward your heel. This encourages your low back to round slightly instead of arching.
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Stay here or lower yourself onto your forearms to intensify the challenge. Although your extended leg won’t lift as high as it otherwise would, every inch it does lift will isolate your glutes.
2. Sit Back in Chair Pose
The simplest way to make your practice more strengthening is to linger longer in Chair Pose (Utkatasana). This pose doesn’t land on many student’s list of faves, although there’s absolutely no question about its ability to build strength. Although most of us feel the burn in our quads, one simple shift in your alignment can send the work to your glutes instead so you can access its butt-building benefits.
How to: In Chair, shift your weight back toward your heels to load the muscles of the back body rather than the front body. Then shift your hips back even more, as if you’re literally hovering your sit bones just above the seat of a hypothetical chair. Feel your glutes ignite.
3. Replace Upward-Facing Dog with Locust Legs
Locust Pose (Salabhasana) is perhaps the single most underappreciated yoga backbend. It doesn’t look glamorous, but you simply can’t lift the weight of your legs in Locust without engaging your back body, including your glutes. In fact, you can sneak extra glute work into every single Sun Salutation by replacing Upward-Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana) with Locust Legs.
How to: Keep your upper body on the mat to ensure you focus all your attention on your lower body. Curl your pubic bone toward your navel to lengthen your low back and encourage your back muscles to do less of the work. Then reach through your toes and turn your inner thighs toward the ceiling to prevent your hip rotators from taking over. Lift your legs off the mat and feel the back of your pelvis fire up. Don’t forget to breathe.
4. Three-Legged Dog with Square Hips
As your primary hip extensor, glute max is in prime position to literally do the heavy lifting of raising one leg in Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana). But as you lift your leg, you’re likely to turn your hips slightly. Doing so engages the muscles of the lateral hip of your lifted leg and the external rotators of your supporting leg instead of your Glute Max. Count the number of times you do that in your average vinyasa class and you’ll appreciate how many glute-building opportunities could be passing you by.
How to: Next time you lift one leg from Down Dog, focus on keeping your pelvis square to the mat. Imagine lifting from your sit bone straight toward the ceiling. Just like in balancing table, your leg won’t lift as high, but every inch it does will build better buns.
5. Lean Forward in High Lunge
Ever wonder why sprinters have such strong glutes? The sprint start encapsulates two keys to getting your glutes to fire at maximum strength: starting from a flexed hip and supporting your body weight. With one small adjustment to your alignment in High Lunge, you can experience the same.
How to: Instead of reaching upward through your arms and fingertips, tilt your torso forward over your front leg and ground strongly through your front heel. You’ll feel your glutes switch on in your flexed front hip as you suspend your body weight against gravity.
As bonus extra glute-strengthening exercises, rely on the glutes as a powerhouse for a slow-motion yoga version of a sprint start. From leaning High Lunge, continue to drive down through the heel of your front foot as you lift your back leg and sweep it forward, squeezing the glutes of your standing leg to help lift your knee toward your chest. Transition back to starting position as smoothly as you can and repeat, moving slowly and intentionally, to keep the glute work going.
