reckonerGlute bridge
On your back, feet flat, drive the hips up. It needs a floor and nothing else, which makes it the hip extension most likely to be available when nothing else is, and it is a better exercise than its reputation as a warm-up suggests.
Drive through the heels, squeeze glutes.
- Pattern
- Hip isolation
- Trains
- Glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Lie down and set the feet
On your back, knees bent, feet flat and about hip width. Heels close enough that you can lift your toes and still push, far enough that your hamstrings are not the first thing to complain.
Pull the ribs down before you move
Flatten the ribs toward your hips so your lower back is not already arched at the start. Everything you gain in height from an arch is height your hips did not make.
Drive through the heels
Push the hips up until your body is a straight line from knee to shoulder. That is the cue on your wrist and it is the top of the rep, whether or not you could physically go higher.
Squeeze, then come down slowly
Hold the top for a beat with the glutes tight. Lower under control until your hips touch, then go again. The way down is half the set.
What goes wrong
Arching the lower back to get higher
The height of your hips is not what is being measured. If the rib cage flares at the top, the extra range came from your spine rather than your hip, and you have made the rep longer and easier at once.
Doing it fast because it feels like nothing
There is no load on it and not much range, so speed is the only way to make it feel like work, and speed is exactly what takes the glutes out of it. Slow down and hold the top. A bridge you can do quickly is a bridge you are not doing.
Filing it under warm-up and never loading the pattern
Ten men were measured through a barbell glute bridge and a barbell hip thrust with the same bar. The bridge produced significantly greater activity in both the upper and lower gluteus maximus, and the hip thrust produced more in the quads1. That was the loaded version and this one is not loaded, so take it as evidence about the pattern rather than about the set in front of you. The pattern deserves better than warm-up.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, 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 | 3 x 10 | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 | 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 14 | More reps 14 → 15 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 three 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 a glute bridge just a hip thrust on the floor?
It is the same hip extension over a shorter range, because the floor stops your hips lower than a bench does. Loaded with the same bar, the bridge produced more gluteus maximus activity than the hip thrust and less quad1. The hip thrust's real advantage is that a bench lets you load it far heavier, which is a different argument from activation.
How do I make it harder without any weight?
Move to the single-leg version or to the hold, both of which are separate movements in the library with pages of their own. One leg is the bigger jump of the two.
Can a block be built around this lift?
No. It is accessory work and Reckoner will not anchor a block on it. What it is for is the pattern and the position, and it carries no restrictions at all, so it stays in your plan when the loaded hip extensions come out.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Kennedy and colleagues, Sports Biomechanics, 2024. Electromyographic differences of the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, biceps femoris, and vastus lateralis between the barbell hip thrust and barbell glute bridge ten male participants, the barbell glute bridge producing significantly greater upper and lower gluteus maximus activity and the barbell hip thrust significantly greater vastus lateralis activity