reckonerBarbell hip thrust
Shoulders on a bench, bar across the hips, drive up until your body makes a straight line from knee to shoulder. It loads the end of hip extension, which is the part of the range a squat has the least to say about.
Tuck the chin, squeeze glutes at the top.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Glutes
- Kit
- Barbell, bench
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the bench and get under the bar
Bench edge at roughly the bottom of your shoulder blades, so it sits across your back and not under your neck. Sit on the floor with your back against it and roll the bar over your legs until it sits in the crease of your hips. Use a pad.
Set the feet
Heels about shoulder width and far enough out from you that your shins finish vertical at the top of the rep rather than at the bottom. Most people set them too close, which turns the movement into a quad exercise with a bar on it.
Chin down, ribs down
Tuck the chin and look at a point between your knees. Pull the ribs down before anything moves. That is what stops the lower back doing the last part of the rep.
Drive the hips up and squeeze
Push through the heels until your body is a straight line from knee to shoulder. Squeeze the glutes at the top, which is the cue on your wrist, and hold it for a beat.
Lower under control
Come back down until the plates are near the floor. Do not bounce the bar off the ground to start the next rep.
What goes wrong
Finishing the rep with the lower back
If the ribs flare and the lower back arches at the top, the hips never got there and the spine made up the difference. The rep ends where your hips stop, not where the bar stops. Chin down and ribs down for the whole set.
Believing the top of the lift is the hard part
Nineteen resistance-trained men were measured through the lift at 70 per cent of their best single. The peak hip extension demand arrived early, about 14 per cent of the way up, and by full extension it had fallen by roughly two thirds1. The lockout is where the movement finishes, not where it is hardest, so the bottom is what to load for.
Dropping the squat because this one wins on activation
Thirteen trained women produced far more glute activity on the hip thrust than on the back squat, on both the upper and the lower part of the muscle2. Then thirty-four untrained adults trained one or the other for nine weeks, and their glutes grew by a similar amount either way, while the squat group also gained in the quads and adductors3. Activation is not growth.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 80 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 5 at 80 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 80 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 80 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 at 80 kg | Load up 80 kg → 85 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 85 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 85 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 5 at 85 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Is the hip thrust better than the squat for glutes?
Over nine weeks of actual training it was not. Both groups grew their glutes by a similar amount and the squat group grew their quads and adductors as well3. The hip thrust wins the activation measurement by a distance2, and that did not turn into more muscle. It is a good way to load hip extension and a poor replacement for a squat.
How high should the bench be?
High enough that its edge sits at the bottom of your shoulder blades when your hips are at the top. Too low and you run out of range before your hips do, too high and your shoulders slide up it every rep. A standard flat bench suits most people.
Will Reckoner give me this with a hip restriction?
No. Declare a hip restriction in setup and this movement comes out of your plan, and that is the only restriction the library records against it.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Brazil and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2021. A comprehensive biomechanical analysis of the barbell hip thrust nineteen resistance-trained men lifting at 70 per cent of one repetition maximum, peak hip extensor moment arriving at 14 per cent of the lifting phase and having fallen by roughly two thirds by full extension
- Contreras and colleagues, Journal of Applied Biomechanics, 2015. A Comparison of Gluteus Maximus, Biceps Femoris, and Vastus Lateralis Electromyographic Activity in the Back Squat and Barbell Hip Thrust Exercises thirteen trained women at estimated ten repetition maximum, the hip thrust producing significantly greater mean upper gluteus maximus activity than the back squat at 69.5 against 29.4 per cent and lower gluteus maximus at 86.8 against 45.4 per cent, with vastus lateralis not significantly different
- Plotkin and colleagues, Frontiers in Physiology, 2023. Hip thrust and back squat training elicit similar gluteus muscle hypertrophy and transfer similarly to the deadlift thirty-four untrained adults training one lift or the other for nine weeks, gluteal cross-sectional area increasing similarly in both groups while the squat group also gained quadriceps and adductor size