The Best Upper Glute Exercises to Tone and Strengthen

I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to make time for strength training. It’s always felt repetitive and boring to me. However, there are actually a lot of reasons why we should make time for it. In addition to giving you those toned muscles you might want, strength training is majorly important for preventing injuries, helping us complete our daily adulting tasks (like climbing stairs and lifting boxes), and improving at the activities we love. A key but often neglected area to strength train is our upper glutes. I’ve personally found upper glute exercises to be a total gamechanger for my running.

Indeed, our upper glutes play a crucial role in running, walking, and many other movements. However, the rise of the sedentary lifestyle means that we rarely exercise them enough. This can lead to problems like Dead Butt Syndrome, where our glutes become underutilized and don’t fire properly when we need them. The good news is that we can bring our glutes back to life by incorporating strength training into our routine. Even a little bit makes a big difference.

In this post, I’ll go over the best exercises to tone your gluteus medius, otherwise known as your upper glutes. I’ll also discuss why your upper glutes are so important. I hope by the end you feel inspired to incorporate some of these exercises into your routine. After all, there’s nothing like feeling strong to make you much more confident about adulting.

Where Are Your Upper Glutes?

Your upper glutes are called your gluteus medius (or sometimes your glute medius). They’re on the upper backside of your hip at the top of your glutes. Another way to think of them is they’re at the top of your pelvis where your back turns into your glutes. Below your gluteus medius is your gluteus maximus. Your gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in your glutes and what basically makes up most of your cheek.

Why Upper Glute Exercises Are Important

Both your gluteus medius and gluteus maximus are super important for many elements of daily living. For example, strong glutes are key for walking, squatting, and standing up, let alone running or performing at our best in our athletic activities. However, your gluteus medius muscle plays a unique and important role in your body’s movements. 

Specifically, it helps stabilize your hips and pelvis. Without our gluteus medius, we’d fall over if we tried to stand on one leg, kick a ball, or lunge. It also plays a crucial role in letting our hips rotate so we can turn and move from side to side.

Weak glutes, including a weak gluteus medius, can have lots of negative downstream effects on our body. For example, we might experience lower back pain, knee pain, or lower body injuries because other muscles have to take up the slack from underutilized butt muscles. Because strong upper glutes are so important for many various activities and because we have a lot of muscle mass in our glutes, the smaller muscles in our back, knees, legs, and feet have a hard time compensating. This is what can lead to pain, injuries, and/or worse athletic performance.

Consequently, working on muscle activation and muscle growth through upper glute exercises is a great way to prevent injuries and help you move with more ease and less pain. And, as a bonus, a strong gluteus medius can help give you that perky booty look.

Upper Glute Exercises

I’ve included some of the best glute exercises below that specifically work your upper glute muscle group. You don’t need to do all these exercises to get a great workout. Consider integrating a few of these at a time into a 10-minute upper glute workout or add other lower-body exercises for a more complete, longer lower-body workout

Hip Thrust Upper Glute Exercises

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: Start with your back on the ground and knees bent. Curling your lower body off the ground, squeeze your glutes at the top of your bridge before returning slowly to the starting position. To progress this, you can loop a resistance band under your feet and across your lower thighs (as in the picture). The added resistance from the resistance bands increases the strength needed for this exercise. Another progression is to do one-legged glute bridges with one leg bent at 90 degrees and lifted off the ground while you curl up using solely the other leg for power.

Fire Hydrant

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: This is a great exercise for working both your glute meds and hips. Starting on all fours, lift your left knee to the side like you’re a dog trying to pee on a fire hydrant (hence the name). Squeeze your glutes at the top of the motion and slowly return to start. Repeat 10 times with the left leg before moving to the right.

Bulgarian Split Squats

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: Stand about two feet in front of a workout bench, chair, or coffee table with your feet hip distance apart. Place your right foot behind you with your ankle joint aligned with the edge of the surface you’re using. Bend your left knee, keeping your knee in line with your toes until your knee is at about a 90 degree angle (or as deep as you can go without losing good form). Power up with your left leg. Throughout the exercise, keep your back straight, core engaged, chest high, and eyes forward. Repeat 10 times on the left foot before switching to the right foot. You can start with body weight. To progress this, add weights in both hands.

Clam Shells

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: Clam shells are pretty similar to fire hydrants in term of their movements. They also both work the hip joint, inner thighs, and upper glutes. To start, lie on your side, knees together. If you are lying on your right side, lift your left knee up, keeping your heels together. Squeeze your glutes at the top of the movement before returning to start. To progress this movement, you can use a resistance band. Loop the resistance band around your mid to lower thighs before starting the movement.

Donkey Kick

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: Start on all fours. Kick your right leg behind you as if you’re stamping on the ceiling. Return to the starting position. Repeat all 10 reps on one side before moving to the other. To progress, you can add a resistance band. Place the center of the resistance band around your right foot and place the ends under each hand.

Romanian Deadlift

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: For this exercise, you can use weights, a bar, or even start with bodyweight only. This exercise uses a lot of big muscles in your body, so you may be surprised that you can use pretty heavy weights with this one. Always start with a lighter weight though, and then move up if the exercise feels easy and comfortable. Start standing, holding the weights if using. Keep your glutes engaged and your back straight (don’t curve inward) as you lower the weights along your legs and shins (keep the weights an inch or so from actually hitting your legs). When the weights get to your mid shins, use your hips and glutes to power yourself up.

Lateral Lunge

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: Start in a standing position. Take a big step to the left with your left leg. Make sure you’re stepping in a straight line. As you step to the left, sink into a lunge position with your left knee bent, knee tracking over your toes, and your right leg straight. Push off with your left leg to return to the starting position. Repeat all 10 reps on the left side before doing the right side. To progress this, you can add a looped resistance band around your lower thighs or use ankle weights.

Side Leg Lifts

• Sets: 3
• Reps: 10
• Instructions: Side leg lifts, also called lateral leg raises, are one of the best upper butt exercises. They’re also a great exercise for hip stability and your inner thighs. Start lying on your side. You can place your head in your hands or lie your head on your arm. Keeping your glutes engaged, lift your top leg until it’s at about a 45 degree angle with your body, return to start. You may find angling your legs slightly in front of your body helps you with balance for this one. Repeat 10 times on one side before moving to the other. To progress, you can start in a side plank position (like below) and lift one leg off the other. To progress even more, add a resistance band.

Crab Walk

• Sets: 3
• Reps: Take 10-20 steps to one side, followed by 10-20 steps to the other side.
• Instructions: Place a looped resistance band around your mid shins (the lower the band, the harder the exercise will be). Come into a squat position and, staying in a squatting position, do a crab walk walking side to side. Try not to pop up or sway your body too much. Keep your shoulders level and maintain that squatting position.

How to Incorporate Upper Glute Exercises Into Your Routine

If you have time, I highly recommend incorporating two days of lower body strength training into your workout routine each week. Even as little as 10 minutes per session can make a big difference. However, a 30-minute routine incorporating the specific exercises above and exercises that work other parts of your lower body will give you a bigger bang for your buck. Either way, the best way to strengthen your upper glute area is by being consistent in the long-term with your upper glute exercises. If that means incorporating shorter workouts or working out during commercial breaks, that’s great!

Make sure to do your upper glute exercises on non-consecutive days. It’s important to incorporate rest days between exercises that focus on specific areas of the body so that you don’t overstress those upper glute muscles.

Other Important Lifestyle Factors

Additionally, to build muscle it’s important to get enough calories and protein in your diet. A 10-minute strength training routine will often burn less than 100 calories. However, if you are adding in consistent strength training and longer workouts, you may find you need to add more calories to your diet to keep up. Try focusing on high quality calories that give you lots of nutrients, including protein.

Protein recommendations vary depending on a wide variety of factors. You should speak to a medical professional or nutritionist before making any changes to your diet. However, in general, studies tend to show that consuming 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is helpful for many people to increase their muscle mass over time.

​Moreover, if you are experiencing persistent pain or weakeness, do not work out! Instead, speak to a physical therapist or other medical professional. Physical therapy has made an incredible difference for my health and helped me deal with lower body injuries more effectively.

Final Thoughts on Upper Glute Exercises

Your upper glutes are so important and yet we don’t often think about them. Plus, our sedentary lifestyles mean that they can become so underutilized, they stop working properly, leading to conditions like Dead Butt Syndrome. The good news is that even a little bit of targeted strength training can make a big difference. I’ve compiled some of the best upper glute exercises in this post. I hope you try them! If you do, let me know what you think in the comments!

Remember, however, that I’m not a physical therapist or doctor. Before starting a new exercise program, speak to a professional.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider liking, subscribing, or sharing with others. It’s always a huge help! And if you’re interested in related content, check out my posts on resistance band exercises, 10-minute workouts for beginners, upper-body exercises without dumbbells, how to start a running routine, and how to train for a marathon.