Dr. Bret Contreras: How to Build Bigger Glutes & Legs

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today's guest is Dr. Bret Contreras. Bret has a PhD in sports science, a master's degree in exercise science, and is a certified strength and conditioning coach. Bret is known popularly as the glute guy, and that's because he spent the last 30 years of his career focusing on the science and application of maximizing muscle growth and strength development in the lower body and specifically the glute or butt muscles. We'll talk about that a lot today. You'll learn a tremendous amount about how to optimize training for the glutes, but we'll talk about much more than that. You're going to learn a lot about anatomy, physiology, biomechanics and other things as they apply to practical recommendations. Bret does a phenomenal job and has over his career of weaving these things into conversations, not so that you learn unneeded or unnecessary mathematic principles, but so that you can really maximize your understanding of why certain exercises do certain things and others do not. This is going to allow you to leave this conversation, whether you're coaching people or just here for your own personal needs, having a much better understanding of how to choose the exact right exercise based upon what you're trying to get and what you're not trying to get.
So, Bret has spent a lot of career on people who are training that want specific development in a particular part of the lower body and not in others. You'll learn a lot about how to do that. You'll also learn about how to make sure that that exercise is doing the right thing for you personally that you're wanting it to do. So, you're going to have a lot of fun. You'll take a lot away from this. I hope you can extend these learnings, again, from just females to men as well, from just the lower body to the upper body as well. And so, overall, you can enhance the precision, accuracy and effectiveness of your training and fitness routines, specifically regarding developing strength and muscle size in the lower body. That all said, please enjoy my conversation today with Dr. Bret Contreras. Dr. Bret Contreras, thank you so much for being here.

**Bret Contreras** (2:12)
Thank you for having me.

**Andy Galpin** (2:14)
The world knows you, for the most part, as the glute guy, and we will certainly talk about the glutes today, but I know you as the guy who used to write extensive articles on the science of strength training, mechanics. I don't know how many of those things you wrote, and I read many years ago before social media existed, but it's very funny for me to hear people talk about you, and then my perception of you is like, this is the science guy. This is not the glute guy. This is the deep, passionate love for science guys. So I don't know where our conversation is going to go today, but I certainly know we will definitely talk about the glutes and how to train and why and all those things like that, but I'm personally a little bit more interested in kind of the other science stuff. So that is a little bit of my lead in. I don't know how you view all that stuff, but that's my perception of Dr. Bret Contreras.

**Bret Contreras** (3:04)
Appreciate that.

**Andy Galpin** (3:05)
To get us started, we're gonna play the hits, right? We'll talk about the glutes and all that, but what I was really hoping to go into very first is you made a post fairly recently that I thought was really insightful, and actually I've changed how I do stuff now, permanently because of a single post that you made, and that was referring to the difference in how to train women versus men. Now, my answer, which I've changed my tune on typically is because I've trained a lot of female athletes, is there's not that many things that are different, but you actually gave some incredible insights into things that are different and how you do differently. And someone who's trained, I don't know, 80% of your clients over your career have been female? More? I don't know what's a fair number there.

**Bret Contreras** (3:53)
Probably 90

**Andy Galpin** (3:54)
90 plus percent. What are off the top of your head some of the major differences in coaching females? And I'll give you context for you. We're talking about strength training or strength training like rated activities, not endurance running and like all things like that. So kind of within this will house. How do you think about this?