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

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1:36Adam Schafer:You just found the most downloaded health, fitness, and entertainment podcast in history. This is Mind Pump. 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.

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2:49Adam Schafer: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 if 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.

3:41Adam Schafer:you don't need uh lots of equipment at all to get a phenomenal physique and i really want to talk about that because um it's a it's a false roadblock yeah it's it's not a true one well it

3:53Sal Di Stefano:doesn't matter if you had a gym or not we there's a certain point that we're going to start uh 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. I've been able to get 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 at home with a pair of dumbbells or very minimal equipment as far as building a body that we want.

4:23Adam Schafer: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.

4:58Yeah, adjust the tempo, adjust some other acute variables. So it's like 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.

5:11Sal Di Stefano:Oh, I think that's because the at-home workout for many decades were the Jane Fonda videos.

5:20Adam Schafer:VHS, it all started there.

5:21Sal Di Stefano:Yeah, and a lot of those were really built off of calorie burning, keep you moving type of workouts. And they're trying to entertain you too. Yeah, so I think that's part of the reason why. I think that we still attach home workouts with this like 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'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

5:58Adam Schafer:dumbbells just a pair of dumbbells you can go so far right very far that's right a lot of people will equate uh the equipment uh 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 of the body is a 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, uh, we'll get someone very, very far, uh, to getting the kind of results that they're looking for.

6:33Sal Di Stefano: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.

7:09Adam Schafer:Yeah. So, so one of them obviously is add more weight. We don't want to overlook that. Getting stronger is a great way to build muscle. It's also slowing down the reps. It could be adding repetitions. It could be pausing. It could be changing the angle of the exercise to increase the tension or to make it more difficult. Now, one thing that you won't, or you don't want to do is get caught up in the endless reps routine. the 100 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 butt get rounder if you want to see your muscles develop uh then it's the uh traditional rep ranges which you know they could be as high as 25 uh but higher than that and you start to get caught in the endurance well really challenging it yeah with weight would be ideal however i mean they do have options for that as well.

8:04They 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 a very effective for just scaling your way up through progressive overloading.

8:20Sal Di Stefano: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. You've got it, or you have to really, you have to stress about it 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 moment 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 than to cut it short to a minute which is what most people do because they're sitting at home.

9:01Sal Di Stefano: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.

9:13Adam Schafer: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.

9:48Sal Di Stefano: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, So we were still coming out of the 80s and early 90s of 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 where they mess up is 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.

10:27Sal Di Stefano:So if we focus on getting strong, building the glutes, this will help speed the metabolism up. This will help making and shrinking the waist much easier versus eating in a way that is going to shrink the waist 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 waist and keeping the butt is much easier.

10:50Adam Schafer:Not to mention a strong body is a resilient body. It burns more calories on its own. It gives you more margin with everyday life. You feel good. Muscle's 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, it's this, 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.

11:27It just takes more intention to structure. At home, if you have that right plan and you have focus for that, you can actually be much more efficient 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

11:58Sal Di Stefano: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 like that per se is just even like just the motivation to be there i felt so strongly about that and then i remember after covid 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 So if you have great programming and you have access to equipment at your house, even if it's minimal equipment, the likelihood of your consistency goes up tremendously.

12:49Sal Di Stefano:And that has a ton of value to be able to do that. And then it also gives you the freedom, 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.

13:24Sal Di Stefano: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 to 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.

13:54Adam Schafer: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, 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.

14:29Adam Schafer:Were they both taken close to failure? So if you're listening, you're not familiar with that term. And 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 more effective with the lower injury risk. So that's it. It's the intensity that makes the big difference when it comes to muscle.

15:00Sal Di Stefano: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, 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 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.

15:39Sal Di Stefano: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.

15:49Adam Schafer:Yeah. Now, when it comes to building the glutes, two exercises shine, but there are others that get close. So, and they've done studies on this. And of course we've trained people, so we've seen it firsthand. But in frontiers in 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 that, and you can do all of those with dumbbells, by the way.

16:21Adam Schafer: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 thrusts, 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. These are what are considered the heavy lifts. They're hard, they're not comfortable, but they do produce the most muscle growth. The next thing you want to do is you want to train them really hard.

16:55Adam Schafer: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 little repetitions.

17:25Adam Schafer:It's a full range of motion. It's heavy. It's hard. And the goal is to get stronger.

17:30Sal Di Stefano: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 work or whatever. And I remember when I used to first to hear that, I'll call that's just hyperbole that's not true that can't be true or whatever but the it is true like you i watch people in the gym many times doing exercises uh to build their butt and i'm 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 sidekicks and the plank things and they're doing all this stuff and there's kickbacks on the stairmaster and spend all this time and it's obvious to me what they're trying to accomplish, right?

18:16Sal Di Stefano: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 ahold of them and literally do three sets of some of these exercises you're talking about, where we rest for three minutes in between and go hard and heavy, 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, just that alone, and so that's just like, that's intention.

18:54So 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, yeah, you can do one exercise better than 10 other people can do it.

19:07Adam Schafer:So here would be the recipe. You would pick four or five movements that you can load, 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. Throw in 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.

19:38Adam Schafer:You'll see some changes.