John travelled the world to learn the best training and nutrition principles and trained alongside top pro bodybuilders at Gold's Gym California. He was a student of Arthur Jones, inventor of Nautilus and Medx Fitness machines, and the pioneer of hi-intensity training. John developed the HIT3 Training System, which transformed his physique to win countless bodybuilding competitions at just 18 years of age! He was also the first bodybuilder to utilize Faradic Electric Muscle Stimulation in his training and intermittent fasting during his competition prep. John’s SHREDDED Nutrition Diet helped him build one of the most shredded physiques of all time. His diet program incorporates fasting and nutrient timing to help athletes build lean muscle while losing body fat.
A lot of women want that posterior backside with shapely glutes that allows her to wear jeans or a bikini, making her feel fit and sexy. The shape of a woman’s glutes changes with age, as does the rest of the body. In particular, as women get older, their buttocks experience marked atrophy, and in essence become flatter, fatter and wider. The roundness and definition disappears. Most women don’t understand why their buttocks lose their youthful shape and appearance as they get older. This situation is accentuated in women who don’t exercise at all, exercise improperly, or don’t weight train. The muscle tone and shape loss can in part also be attributed to hormonal changes and specifically the decrease in testosterone levels. Regardless of the reasoning for posterior decline, the good news is that it’s possible to reshape the total backside area with proper and effective weight training as I advocate for in my HIT3 workout methods.
Glute Genetics
Interestingly, the link between genes and body shape is positively correlated, including the shape of the backside. Some women are born with wider hips and flat buttocks. Others are predisposed with narrower hips and perkier, rounder glutes. Whether you have narrow hips or wide hips, this affects the aesthetic look of your glutes. Wider hips typically give you a wider, flatter butt; narrow hips naturally allow for a slender backside. Of significance is the degree of the inherited distribution of fat deposits, which also plays a factor in the shape of a woman’s buttocks.
Some fitness experts will convince you that the shape of your buttocks is impossible to change and is far outside your control. I disagree with this notion as I believe that most “workout experts” don’t understand how to instill aesthetic change in women with different body types. Regardless of what shape of buttocks you were born with, there are many improvements you can make with proper exercise and effort.
Although genes may determine up to 80 percent of one’s body shape, these shape-determining genes can be influenced by hard work and dedication. One can’t override a genetic predisposition; however, one can build muscle mass and reshape the buttocks to a significant degree. Diminished muscle mass and menopause is another inevitable setback. Rest assured, the HIT3 principles will slow the rate of atrophy, alleviate associated anxieties, and allow you to win the genetic war that forces one to believe certain body shapes are largely preordained.
Achievable Results
To achieve shapely, aesthetically pleasing glutes, we need to understand five fundamentals:
The Anatomy of the Glute Area: There are more than 7.8 billion people on this earth, with females accounting for slightly more than half of the total population. That means that there are roughly 3.9 billion differently shaped sets of glutes. However, what is common is that they all have the same functional muscle structures, so the muscles all work the same way and can therefore be improved on all women! There’s absolutely no reason why any woman can’t improve her backside!
Hereditary Fat Distribution and Body Fat Percentage: Regardless if you were born with perfect female features that include having round glutes, medium-sized hips, a flat stomach, small waist, shapely thighs and athletic-looking hamstrings, if you have too much body fat, those genetic features will be camouflaged. Alternatively, if you were born with flat glutes, wide hips, a bulging stomach, a thick waist, unshapely thighs and minimal hamstrings yet were lean with a low body fat percentage, your body would look far better than a genetically gifted overweight woman, as I described above. The “bottom line” is that in order to have a shapely, pleasing backside, you have to have minimal body fat. What is minimal body fat? For women, this means not exceeding 12 percent. This percentage will ensure that you have a lean base to start from in your quest to develop glorious glutes. When developing a program for a woman, the first consideration is reducing body fat to a minimum. This is achieved through proper nutrition. My Shredded Nutrition Diet easily allows a woman to lose 1 to 2 pounds of fat each week. When we start a glute-reshaping program and the glutes and surrounding muscles begin to take shape and the overall body fat dissipates, the result is quite dramatic.
Total Approach: When I develop a glute exercise program for a woman, I don’t simply formulate a program to solely target the two main glute muscles, the gluteus maximus and gluteus medius. I also take into account the adjoining muscle structures that tie into the glutes. These structures include the lower lumbar, the hips, the pierformis, the hamstrings, the adductors, the abductors, and the quadriceps. Without incorporating and improving the surrounding musculature, you can’t achieve the aesthetic balance to create a beautiful backside.
Ineffective Exercise: The glute, hamstrings, upper thigh and lower lumbar muscles are the strongest muscles in our body. They can’t properly be engaged with repetitive nonresistant exercises such as leg kickbacks or side leg lifts using bands. Aerobics is another form of exercise that is very ineffective in developing any appreciable shape and size of the glute area. Doing hours of steady-state cardio will also do very little to stimulate growth in the muscles on your backside. In fact, you hardly ever see any aerobic workout goers with extremely well-developed hamstrings, glutes or hips. The glutes and surrounding muscles must be worked no differently than biceps, back or shoulder muscles, with targeted exercises where weight resistance can be increased as the muscles become stronger. When glutes, hamstrings and hips are developed properly, the finished look makes an aesthetic statement, no different than a lean male with muscular arms wearing a form-fitting T-shirt.
Effective Exercise: An effective glute program should comprise exercises that directly target each area of the glute and tie in the surrounding muscles. Each muscle must be trained in a high-intensity (HIT3) fashion with enough resistance to cause muscular contraction and stimulate hypertrophy. Regardless of how hard a woman or man trains her or his glutes, hamstrings or hips, the fact of the matter is only one in a billion will overdevelop these areas. It’s simply not possible physiologically to overdevelop the glute muscles or the tie-in lower back and hip muscles. The only time you’ll see enlarged, overdeveloped-looking glutes is when someone has developed good glute size and then for whatever reason ends up gaining weight. Fat cells that are hereditarily found in that area get larger, and the entire glute, upper thigh area and hips become thick and heavy looking. That’s not the result of exercise; that’s the result of gaining fat over top of an otherwise aesthetically pleasing backside.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of 3 of this series!
For more info on John Cardillo, check out his website at johnrobertcardillo.com or right here at Muscle Insider at John Cardillo.
