2955: Training Glutes and Abs From Home (No Gym Required)

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MindPump. MindPump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded health, fitness, and entertainment podcast in history. This is MindPump. Today's episode, we talk about how to build your glutes and abs at home. No gym required. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Ketone IQ. Look, if you want the benefits of being on a ketogenic diet, so the sharper mind, the calmer energy, good energy that's consistent, not stimulant-based like caffeine, but rather something that makes you feel lifted and sharper. That's what happens on a ketogenic diet. But the problem is, it means you've got to eat no carbohydrates. You've got to eat zero carbohydrates to make that happen. Well, Ketone IQ are exogenous ketones. Literally, it's a little, looks like a little shot bottle almost. You drink it, and then within 15 to 30 minutes, your brain is running on ketones as if you're on a ketogenic diet. So you get the benefits of a ketogenic diet, the sharpness, without having to cut out the carbs. It's a great product. I use it before every podcast. Go check them out. Get 30% off. Go to ketone.com slash mindpump. On that link, you'll get 30% off plus a free gift with your second shipment. Also, we have a brand new workout program, MAPS Abs and Butt. It's a full-body program, but the emphasis is on abs and butt. It's 40% off right now, and we're going to throw in a free MAPS program, Muscle Mommy or Muscle Mommy 15, and two free guides. Go to mapsabsandbutt.com. Use the code LAUNCH for the 40% off discount, the free program, and the free guides. Here comes the show. You've been told you need a gym full of all kinds of machines to develop your abs and your glutes. Look, that's just not true. You can build round glutes and a strong midsection at home with almost nothing. You train them the right way. That's right. That's the whole episode. That's what we're going to talk about today. Let's go. You know, that's a common, I don't want to say excuse, but I'll say kind of roadblock that someone will have when it comes to getting on with their fitness, trying to accomplish a fitness goal, is that they don't have a gym membership or they don't have access to lots of exercise equipment. You don't need lots of equipment at all to get a phenomenal physique, and I really want to talk about that because, it's a false roadblock. It's not a true one. Well, it doesn't matter if you had a gym or not. There's a certain point that we're going to start as far as like load and stress on the body, and then we're going to progress over time, and so much of that can be accomplished at your home anyways. Right. I've been able to take a client really, really far before I ever felt like, hey, you need to go invest in this weight or this thing. It's like we could do so much. It's like, oh, I'm going to make a lot of money off of this. I'm going to make a lot of money off of this. Yeah, you know, one of the challenges around that, Adam, is when people look up home workouts or equipment-free workouts, they get a lot of these kind of HIIT-style, cardio-style workouts. And so what I'm here to say is you could do traditional muscle-building strength training with very minimal equipment. So it's not just the jumping around doing crazy stuff, HIIT workouts. We're talking about the kind of workouts that actually build the glutes that you're looking for. that actually develop muscle. You don't need tons of equipment. You just need good programming. In other words, you need to know how to strength train properly with minimal equipment to make it happen. Yeah, adjust the tempo, adjust some other acute variables. So it's like, you know, you're still going to get the strength component in there and you're going to get the rest periods. And you can emulate a really good weight training type of program with body weight even. Oh, I think that's because the at-home workout for many decades were the Jane Fox workouts. I mean, VHS, it all started there. Yeah, and a lot of those were really built off of, you know, calorie burning, keep you moving type of workouts. And they're trying to entertain you too, yeah. Yeah, so I think that's part of the reason why, is I think that we still attach home workouts with this like, you know, stand in front of a TV and watch a routine and keep it moving and sweat and burn. And not a lot of people know how to, to Justin, to Justin's point with isometrics, or, you know, doing body weight movements and slowing down the tempo and finding ways to really. Gosh, just a pair of dumbbells. Just a pair of dumbbells. You can go so far. Very far. That's right. A lot of people will equate the equipment to results, like how much equipment I have or how much access I have to equipment. But it doesn't work that way. What equals results when it comes to building, shaping, sculpting the body is progressive. Overload. It's effort and progressive overload. It's good workout programming. It's not the equipment. And you can do that. Again, a pair of dumbbells will get someone very, very far to getting the kind of results I'm looking for. Well, such a good episode to refer back to. I think, I think it was, we did, it was titled the nine ways to progressively overload, which I think is such a good episode because most people assume that progressive overload means I just got to add weight, add more weight, add more weight. And so then they go, oh, I only have this much dumbbells or I only have this much weight at home. Therefore I can't progress. And there's so many other ways that we can progress the body. So it'll continue to get challenged. It'll continue to build. And so I think a lot of that has to do with just not understanding all the different ways that you can work out in order to progressively overload the body. Yeah. So, so one of them obviously is add more weight. We don't want to overlook that. Uh, getting stronger is a great way to build muscle. It's also slowing down the reps. It can be added. It can be adding repetitions. It can be pausing, uh, it could be changing the angle of the exercise to increase the tension or to make it more difficult. Um, now one thing that you won't, or you don't want to do is get caught up in the endless reps routine, uh, the hundred reps, the 50 reps, the burn, burn, burn. This moves what you're doing from strength training to endurance training, which is okay if that's what you want, if you want lots of stamina endurance, and that's the way you should probably train, but if you want to see your body get rounder, if you want to see your muscles develop, uh, then it's the, uh, traditional rep ranges, which, you know, they can be as high as 25, uh, but higher than that, and you start to get caught in the endurance cycle. Well, we're really challenging it. Yeah. With weight would be ideal. However, I mean, they do have options for that as well. They have those block dumbbells where you can actually like, you know, dial in another five pounds. And so the, you know, there's more reasonable options out there now, uh, for at home where it's just like, it's minimal, but, uh, very effective for. Or just scaling your way up through progressive overloading. I mean, I think you guys are being really gentle the way you're saying this right now. If you want to build a butt, you've got to lift heavy ass weight or you have to really, you have to stress by and you have to rest. I've never seen anybody build an amazing butt doing circuit training and lots of kickbacks. And you know, the, these movements that you see on these videos that are endurance stamina building type of moments that make your butt burn. Don't build the butt. In fact, I find myself with clients that have this as a goal. I've got to over-communicate the rest period. In fact, I'd rather you rest five minutes, seven minutes, then it cut it short to a minute, which is what most people do because they get they're sitting at home or no rest. They're getting ready to do the next exercise and they go, oh, I'm okay to do the next one. And they go right into it versus sitting there, letting the body fully recoup, fully rest, and then putting maximal effort into the next set. Yeah. Not to go too deep into that, but it's the rest periods that make strength training, strength training. So you do your set. It's intense. It's hard. It's heavy. You rest. And it's not necessarily because you need the rest. You rest because we're training a particular energy system that creates muscle growth. And that system depletes very quickly. Now, if you keep pushing and doing high reps, you start to become aerobic and you start to train for stamina. So you have to train the energy system that's connected to muscle growth. And so that looks like your traditional strength training where you do a heavy set. You rest for two to three to four minutes. And then you repeat it. Yeah. I'm glad that this has changed over the course that we've been personal trainers. When we first started 25 plus years ago, um, we were still coming out of the eighties and early nineties of, you know, super skinny and afraid of muscle. And I feel like that narrative has finally changed. And most women that want to build a physique, understand they need to build, they need to build a body. They need to build the muscle. That's what gives the shapes. That's what gives the curves. The thing though, I think with AMS, up is, uh, focusing on trying to do both those things at the same time, where it's like, if you want the small tight waist focusing on building the butt will make that part easier. Right? So if we focus on getting strong, building the glutes, this will help speed the metabolism up. This will help making and shrinking the waste much easier versus eating in a way that is going to shrink. The waste makes it really difficult to try and build the butt. So it's like eat in a way that we're going to build the butt, build the metabolism and then shrinking the waste and keeping the butt is much easier. Not to mention a strong body is a resilient body. Uh, it burns more calories on its own. It gives you more, uh, margin with everyday life. Um, you feel good muscles, protective strength sticks around. This is another good one. Like strength. When you build strength, you don't need to maintain it with training as often as other attributes. So it's really cool. Right? It's this type of, uh, it's this, uh, you know, this goal that you can accomplish that sticks around and it makes your body want to burn body fat. So it's a really, really good goal to have when you want to look. good you don't want to have to work out all the time and you want some flexibility with your diet it just takes more intention you know to structure like at home if you have that right plan and you have focus for that you can actually be much more efficient uh in that proximity you're not going to be fighting people over machines you're not going to have interruptions and really the basics is what moves you the furthest and sometimes we get distracted in the gym because there's all these varieties of things which is fun but at the same time it's usually it's those main foundational lifts that carry the furthest this is always an interesting one for me to talk about because uh i came from the place originally when we first started talking about um this on the podcast as the guy who felt like i had to be in the gym yeah like the gym workout and it wasn't for the reasons that we're talking about with weights or anything that per se is just even like just the motivation to be there i felt so strongly about that and then i remember after it happened and being kind of forced to be at home more often and then building my home gym and fell in love with it you guys were always advocates for it and then realized like how much more consistent i was we've talked about this many times that a subpar program done consistently is better than a superior program done inconsistently and so you know if you have great programming and you have access to equipment at your house even if it's minimal equipment uh the likelihood of your consistency goes up tremendously and that has a ton of value uh to be able to do that and then it also gives you the freedom uh which i feel like you know obviously a lot of women that are listening to this episode that want to build a bot may also have a family and kids or a husband or other responsibilities that they have going on and you now have this freedom and flexibility to do a couple exercises from the program go back to what you were doing inside the home come back and do it again which that for me and katrina both i've seen has made it way easier for our consistency and you're not you're not sacrificing results doing that in fact there's a lot to say about it possibly being superior to work out that way where you break the day up in maybe two or three small micro workouts where you go in there and you just get a couple sets of an exercise and then you come back and so i'm a huge fan of working out from home for these reasons now and i'm somebody who's changed i've changed my beliefs on this in the last 10 plus years we've been doing this podcast you've heard me go from one side of the other and i think that's because now i've had one and i've seen the impact it's made for both me and my wife staying fit a lot easier now i do want to say there's a range when it comes to strength training of rep ranges that build muscle there is a range now if they go too high yeah you know you go up to 60 70 80 reps now you've turned it into an endurance exercise but there's a pretty wide range i mean the reps can be as low as one they can be as high as 30 and all of them build muscle there was a study in the journal of applied physiology that tested this they actually tested and we know this as coaches but they tested heavy load versus light load the determining factor as to whether or not the person built muscle between the groups was the effort were they both taking close to failure so if you're listening you're not familiar with that term what that means is you're lifting a weight until you can maybe do one more rep okay so you stop right about there so you go until you almost fail okay you get close to failure so studies show they can compare failure to like stopping just short of failure there's no difference we recommend people stop about one or two reps before failing it tends to be uh more effective with the lower injury risk so that's it it's the intensity that makes the big difference uh when it comes to muscle well and there's a real easy way and we've talked about this many times on the podcast i can make a 315 pound squat on my back feel really heavy i can also make a 135 pound squat on my back feel really heavy by slowing that to and to your point bringing it to that intensity level bringing it to where it feels like that heavy weight you take one of those reps and you slow it way down or pause and squeeze uh in the middle of that set and wow now you have a weight that's a fraction of what the weight i could lift and i can make it feel make my body feel that way which will signal to the body to still build and grow and so this idea that you need hundreds and hundreds of extra pounds laying around in order to do that is a myth and there are many ways that we can create that intensity without just more load yeah now when it comes to building the glutes uh two exercises shine but there are others that get close so uh and they've done studies on this and of course we've trained people so we've seen it uh firsthand but uh in frontiers and physiology they actually tested exercises for glute growth and the ones that grew glutes did it reliably hip thrusts near the top barbell squats or squats with dumbbells even near the top especially when they're really deep those are great exercises but then you have things like rdls which are also super effective at developing the glutes if you do though and you can do all of those with dumbbells by the way you could do all those movements i just said with good intensity with dumbbells and your butt will grow all right so let's talk about these exercises so here's what you would do you would pick a handful of these big movements that you can actually load at home so things like hip thrust split stance squats dumbbell romanian deadlifts single leg work compound lifts are the best so compound lifts are the ones where you're using more than one joint uh these are what are considered the heavy lifts uh they're hard they're not comfortable but they do produce uh the the most muscle growth the next thing you want to do is you want to train them really hard you want to get close to failure and you want to make it harder over time you want to add weight or repetitions or you yourself through concentration make it very difficult when it comes to the abs also train them in this way so there's also myths around ab training where it's like high reps high reps high reps abs build just like the glutes just like the biceps just like any of the muscle any other muscle train them heavy and then finally train everything with a full range of motion a full range of motion is you're doing the whole rep you're not cutting it short you're not doing choppy uh little repetitions it's a full range of motion it's heavy it's hard and the goals get stronger it's crazy what what you decide to do and how you do it makes such a huge difference you know was it was it arnold that was famous for saying that he could come in and do one exercise and make it more effective than like most people's entire one-hour workout or whatever and i remember when i used to first to hear that be oh that's just hyperbole that's not true that can't be true or whatever but it is true like you i watch people in the gym many times doing exercises uh to build their butt and in 45 minutes they could be spinning doing all these crazy exercises in a circuit and they're sweating and they're doing the jump boxes and plyos and the side kicks and the plank things and they're doing all this stuff and there's kickbacks on the stair master and spend all this time and it's obvious to me what they're trying to accomplish right and it's like that person just spent 45 50 plus minutes doing all these movements trying to build this butt and if i could get a hold of them and literally do three sets of some of these exercises you're talking about better where we rest for three minutes in between go hard and go hard and heavy that that person will accomplish 10 times the amount of building their butt than all that other stuff they did and i can't stress this enough because it's so common that you still see this if you have sound mechanics and you can maximize your muscle recruitment process uh just that alone and so that's just like that's intention so if i'm going in and i know exactly what i want to accomplish out of this one lift specifically and then load it effectively uh yeah you can do uh you know one exercise better than than 10 other you know people can do it so here would be the recipe you would pick four or five movements that you can load uh two to four hard sets each so do them really hard add reps then load then make them harder do this over time four days a week would be a good routine two days a week where you're focusing on the glutes two days a week where you're focusing on the abs throwing a little bit of exercises in for the rest of the body you don't want to avoid the rest of the body but if your goal is glutes and abs that's the emphasis and that's it full range of motion close to failure be consistent for three months while feeding yourself properly you'll see some changes do you have like a generic amount of time um that you go before you start to add it so you like add reps add load right it's like i i typically like a client to go two or three weeks with that and then we go add again two or three weeks add again like that do you have a recommendation or what you did consistently with like clients yeah i think in the beginning uh it was i would add load every time we could so long as their form was consistent um and sometimes what i would do is when they were stronger and i thought i could add load i would slow the reps down before i would add load just to keep it safe so let's let's put this together right so what would you need equipment-wise a pair of adjustable dumbbells you could do so much with that a bench would be a great thing to add as well and you're pretty much set it'd be a four-day week routine lower body glute uh focus twice uh abs a couple times a week throw in an exercise here or there for back and shoulders and arms but most the emphasis is on glutes and abs if that's what you're focusing on well the key to this is what you did and i know you just kind of glossed over it but it's like uh is you're only doing a few things for the rest of the body if we're really trying to put emphasis on the abs developing and the glutes developing and one of the biggest mistakes when i see somebody trying to focus on a body part like that is they just slap a that on top of like an already kind of built program too much it's like oh i want to work on my butt so i spend this extra time on top of all the other stuff i was doing thinking that's okay like you have to understand that even though exercise is a good stress it still is a stress on the body and if you over apply stress on the body you don't allow it to adapt recover and build and so we've got to take some stress from somewhere else and so what that looks like is the rest of the muscles on your body that we're not focusing focusing on we're going to reduce we're not going to get rid of them completely we're not trying to go backwards on those muscles which is what people think right away it's like oh god mistake people oh if i'm not doing all this shoulder and chest work and back work does that mean i'm going to lose all that muscle no we're going to make sure we're hitting them enough in the week to make sure that we maintain that muscle which takes like one or two sets a week that's all it takes very very minimal we've talked about studies that prove that and how little you have to do so i'm going to do that and then the rest of my energy and focus is now put on the glutes and the abs and so it's going to have a lot more volume and that balance is so key to seeing the progress where you want to and not getting stuck in this recovery track so what we did is we wrote a program called maps abs and butt uh and like the name says the focus on abs and butt here's what we're going to do we're going to give you the first two workouts in that program for free right now so i have them written down here so your first workout is your glute focused workout it would be dumbbell goblet squats dumbbell romanian deadlifts backstep lunges reverse crunches and then a dumbbell overhead press you do three sets of each of those exercises the next workout is the abs and butt workout as well but it's more of an ab focus perfect sit-ups the vacuum pose leg raises then you do a dumbbell goblet squat and a pull-up and there you go there's a two workouts right there that kind of put the emphasis on the abs and the glutes while hitting other parts of the body you're going to get stronger initially initially you get stronger especially if your feet you have to feed yourself right by the way make sure you eat high protein don't try to do this while cutting calories that won't work try to feed yourself but if you're doing this right you've got good technique good form and you're putting good intensity in initially you're just going to get stronger for the first few weeks you're going to get stronger and you won't notice much in the mirror but the visual stuff starts to happen later as the strength continues to pile on you can do more reps you're just getting much stronger with your exercises then boom you can see the visual changes in the mirror yeah i'd say be patient just be patient because if we are getting stronger the aesthetics are to come i mean it's just they they follow it though so sometimes it takes a little while before you start to see the the physical change in the body but if we know that we're getting stronger in the gym we know shortly after what will follow are the aesthetics and the muscle that you will see and the scale takes like so the scale moves later so as you build muscle you'll probably be losing a little bit of body fat so the scale really won't move much even though someone may tell you you look different you look like you're working out or you might notice you look a little bit better you just have a little bit better body composition but as you build muscle that metabolic rate starts to spike later on is where you see the fat loss especially if you build properly then later on you can even cut your calories through that process we get a lot of these callers where they have minimal time or they're over training and we have them do like a really short workout just dumbbells 20 minutes a day type of deal we have yet to have anybody call in afterwards because we do follow-ups and not get phenomenal results oh yeah we have yet to have anybody call and be like yeah that worked out almost everybody calls and it goes that actually worked better than what i was doing before because that's how the body responds one of my these are one of my favorite workouts that i've done in my life because i've done a lot of workouts that i've done in my life because i've done a lot of workouts that i've done in my life clients to help out because they have a bit of a conflicting goal when somebody asks i want a flat stomach or abs and then i also want to build this booty it is one of the more challenging things to do and it's psychologically why that's difficult is you're asking your body to grow and in order for it to grow to build a butt you have to be in somewhat of a calorie surplus but at the same time too you don't want to put on all this crazy body fat and you know that you want to have a smaller tighter waist so if i can just get that client or we can get that client when someone comes in and says hey i'm going to do this workout i'm going to do this workout i'm going someone calls in and we help them out to focus on reverse dieting and building the butt what always ends up happening which is awesome is they end up building the butt and they also simultaneously find their waist shrinking at the same time because like you said is if we do it properly and we reverse diet slowly but we are reversed we are adding calories and we are focused on building and getting stronger and they're seeing that strength go up like that what ends up happening we start to build the muscle muscle ends up speeding the metabolism up this initially ends up leaning them out and they kind of do get both the best of both worlds if they trust that process but the psychological part that's so difficult is getting past that hurdle of i still want to have a flatter stomach or i want abs and then i also want a butt and so therefore i'm afraid to eat in this calorie surplus once we get past that psychological hurdle and get them to focus on that and don't worry we'll get to that part it ends up all coming together for them yeah the other part that i noticed too with like the psychological piece of like it this workout isn't really worth it like i'm just not gonna get into it because i'm not at the gym i'm not working out and really getting after it i don't know if i could accomplish as much and it's worth my time and you know it really is all about the structure and it's about the plan and it's about sticking with it and seeing those strength gains by systematically going through and dialing it in and you can do this at home really effectively so maps abs and butt has a gym version in it so if you want to go to a gym you got that version but it also has an at-home dumbbell only version the program comes with videos so you see all the exercises being demonstrated to you uh it's three phases it's a about it's about nine weeks long this whole program so you follow the whole program through each phase each phase is a little bit different than the previous phase everything's laid out sets reps videos everything and then because it's a brand new program it's forty percent off so we're gonna offer it at forty percent off retail plus we're gonna throw in a free uh another free workout program called muscle mommy or muscle mommy 15. this is great follow-up right so follow maps abs and butt and you build through abs and butt you can actually do a cut in muscle mommy or muscle mommy 15. it's the one it's a wonderful one two combo we're also including a build your butt diet guide so the diet parts the other part we didn't talk a lot about diet on this episode but i'm gonna tell you right now if you're not feeding yourself enough you're not eating enough protein it's gonna be very difficult to see any results we included a diet guide with this and a supplement guide people always ask us questions about supplements truthfully they don't play a huge role but people want information on good supplements and so we put that guide out there as well all of that is included for free with the 40 off it's at mapsabsandbutt.com and the code is launched for the discount and a little free stuff thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mindpumpmedia.com the rgb super bundle includes maps anabolic maps performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by sal adam and justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos the rgb super bundle is like having sal adam and justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price the rgb super bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com if you enjoy this show please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on itunes and by introducing mindpump to your friends and family we thank you for your support and until next time this is mindpump