Kickbacks for Butt Exercise

Butt exercises do more than tighten and beautify your rear. Your buttock muscles serve several important functions, so it does your body good to build them up and keep them strong. Kickbacks do a bang-up job activating your butt muscles, and they require no special equipment or added weight. All you need is five spare minutes and a small square of empty floor space. That makes kickbacks convenient enough to perform on your living room rug, in a park or poolside.

  1. Butt Muscle Function

    • Your buttock and hip muscles -- including your gluteals, piriformis and tensor fascia latea muscles -- contribute to hip and pelvic stabilization, meaning they help keep your pelvis steady when you stand, balance on one foot and move through space. Boosting butt-muscle strength helps prevent problems related to posture, promotes proper gait, improves coordination and offers protection from a host of troublesome conditions, including pain and injury of the lower back, hip and knee.

    Research

    • Kickbacks rank high on the list of effective butt exercises tested by researchers from the La Crosse Exercise and Health Program at Wisconsin University. The American Council on Exercise summarized the results of that small study in the January/February 2006 edition of ACE Fitness Matters. According to the La Crosse study, the kickback -- or quadruped hip extension -- exercise did a better job activating the gluteal muscles than other popular butt exercises, including traditional two-legged squats. Lead researcher on the study, John Porcari, claims the kickback has tremendous buttock-building potential, even when you use nothing more than your own body weight.

    Basic Technique

    • To perform kickbacks, start on your hands and knees with your arms and thighs perpendicular to the floor. Check that your back is in a tabletop position, long and relatively straight. Tightening your abs slightly to brace your spine, keep your right leg bent at 90 degrees as you move the sole of your right foot toward the ceiling. Movement is from your right hip only. When you have raised the foot as high as possible without arching your lower back, stop. Contract your right buttock and hold the position for a count of one or two. You'll likely feel tension in your right hamstrings, as well as in your glutes. Slowly lower your leg to the start position and repeat the right-leg kickback eight to 12 times for a total of one to three sets. Switch to your left leg and repeat.

    Variations and Progressions

    • When the basic kickback is no longer a challenge, crank up the intensity by adding weight, placing the dumbbell behind the knee of your working leg. Alternatively, do kickbacks with the working leg fully extended behind you. As with the bent-knee version of the exercise, keep a close watch on your form. Don't allow your middle spine to sag toward the floor, which could result in low-back injury. If you feel pain or pinching in your back at any point, stop immediately to prevent injury.

    Tips and Reminders

    • Try to fit in two or three glute workouts a week on alternate days. To keep your butt workouts fresh and interesting, alternate between kickbacks and other glute exercises, such as one-legged squats. Precede your butt work with a suitable warmup, doing five to 10 minutes of general cardio activity and a dynamic glute stretch, such as high-knee grabs to the front. After performing kickbacks, do a gentle glute stretch to release tension from your buttocks and maintain or increase flexibility in your glutes. If you've injured your glute muscle in the past, speak to a doctor, physical therapist or personal trainer about the advisability of kickbacks.