Glutes without Quads – 5 Exercises to Train the Glutes Hard with Minimal Quads

Building your Glutes without activating your quads… it doesn’t have to be as complicated as you probably think it does.

In the end, all that needs to be changed is your exercise selection and execution – that’s it!

Do any of these sound like you:

• Do you want to build your glutes but don’t want your quads to grow anymore?
• Do you have an injury that doesn’t allow you to squat?
• Struggling to feel your glutes when training?

If yes, then it really is just your exercise selection and execution that needs to be changed in order for you to achieve your goals.

For Glutes, primarily we want to train hip extension, thrusting/bridging and also knee dominant patterns like a squat or lunge. But knee dominant patterns can obviously also be very much quads biased, depending on your execution.

It all comes down to your goals

If you need to limit your quads and/or give your knees a break but still want to grow your Glutes you need to do this:

• Focus on hinges like Romanian Deadlifts – this is zero quads and all posterior chain
• Use a Kas Glute Bridge – Unlike a hip thrust, the Kas Glute bridge is a smaller range of motion which biases the Glutes and limits the quads involvement from the decrease range of motion
• Use lunges still (knee dominant movements) but choose Glute biased execution like a reverse lunge – This will allow you to more easily bias the Glutes
• Keep your shins more vertical – This decreases the quads stretch because you’re not pushing over the toe
• Use exercises like Cable Kickbacks – Again, more hip extension but pure Glutes not quads

I love training quads for my clients and we all need to keep it in our training programming but we all have different goals and needs. 

So, if you want to limit quads, focus on the movements above!

It’s really that simple.

You got this, 

Coach Mark Carroll