This weekend in the gym I tried something new. I never really took the hip abductor and adductor machines very seriously, but I was waiting on the leg extension and decided to have a go and the good girl (hip adductor) superset with the bad girl (hip abductor). I have to tell you, I really felt a heavy burn in the glutes from the bad girls and in the inner thighs from the good girls. I liked the burn so much I wound up doing 5×20 superset and doing it again the next day.
Good Girl / Bad Girl: Not just for girls.
Make the eye contact, but keep your mean mug game strong.
As I did the reps and felt the soreness I realized just what I was working. I was hitting the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. Thinking this through I realized what an excellent workout this was. Doing squats and lunges you are hitting the huge muscle groups like the gluteus maximus and, yeah, that is exactly what you want. However, your ability to stabilize your squat, thus spend more time under tension, and overload the muscle more is buried deep in the secondary support muscles like the gluteus medius and minimus.
By working the support muscles, you are creating more stabilization for everything from simple walking to heavy squatting. Further, from an aesthetic standpoint, hitting the bad girls hard and to failure will give your butt more lift helping you avoid the dreaded dad ass. On the other side, hitting the good girls hard will result in harded, more well defined thighs on the medial side as well as a strengthening in the adductor longus, brevis and magnus which will also assist you with lunges and squats.
Some of you may recall my post from a while back where I discussed the importance of training your glutes. I
They may be small, but they are important. Neglect them to your own detriment.
f not, it is here: https://teamwbfitness.com/2017/12/26/putting-the-ass-in-massive-volume/ Your ass is your largest muscle group and if you are going to build it strong you need to do everything you can to target all of the muscles in the group. Yes, this means lots of squats, lunches and hip thrusters. However, it also means getting creative and using machines like the butt blaster and, yes, doing your good girl / bad girls.
So today I am going to give you a full glute workout. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
WB Fitness’s Ass-Tastic Workout
1) Unilateral Stiff-Leg Deadlifts 3×20 (per side)
2) Split squats 3×20 (per side)
3) Side Band Walk 20 steps to the side and 20 back x 3
4) Hip Thrusters 3×20
5) Butt Blaster (if you don’t have butt blaster in your gym you can do leg press kickbacks) 3×20
6) Superset of Hip Abductor / Hip Adductor) 3×20
7) Dumbbell Lunge 3×20 each side
8) Back Squats 3×20
You may notice something different about this particular workout. You will be doing all of your isolation work first and then your compound glute lift, the dumbbell lunge, will be after followed by the big compound lift, the squat. The squat usually goes at the top of the workout because you are working all of your muscles in a big way. However, going with the idea from a few days ago, what I want here is for you to pre-exhaust all the muscles in the glutes group. This pre-exhaustion will, of course, mean you will have to go lighter than you normally would in order to get your 3 sets of 20, but that is ok. By the end of your squats, you should be totally finished and fatigued. For my part, I think I am going to throw a superset of good girl / bad girls into my leg workouts either before squats or at the end with the butt blaster as a burn out.
Pre-exhaustion is a great thing for these muscle burns with regard to both size and strength gains. Mohamed Ali, when asked how many sit-ups a day he does, said “I don’t count my sit-ups; I only start counting when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count.” This is absolutely the right idea. We really want to break these muscles down so going into our biggest lifts after already being fatigued will shock the body and is an ideal way to totally annihilate the muscles.
In all seriousness, I really do want to get the idea across that working these smaller support muscles will make a huge difference. Everyone works the visible muscles. The pecs and quads and glutes and bis and tris and traps and abs, this is why we are in the gym in the first place. But it is at your own peril that you avoid the smaller support muscles. These are the muscles that create stabilization in all our movements and for our own health, well-being and overall fitness level we need to make sure we have a balanced body where we do not neglect any of our muscles.
As a side note, there are 70 days until memorial day left. Did you guys do anything to get to where you want to be? I know where I want to be. I want to be on a beach and I want to feel damn good about myself when I am there. Did you set any short/long term goals? Did you stick to them? Did you see any progress? I hit a short term goal of dropping under 200 pounds while adding size to my chest, arms, thighs and shoulders. Growing muscle while losing weight is the name of the game. This short term goal is a week later than I wanted, but I got there. My progress is going well, but somewhat slower than I hoped so this week I did a major revamp of my diet. Wherever you are in your journey, never fall into a rut. Constantly asses where you are and where you want to be and constantly make changes to get to your goals. Keep up that grind guys, bathing suit weather is just around the corner.
Just so you guys have a little extra fuel in the tank, here is a bit of inspiration from the man himself:
