How to Do RDLs for Glutes (The More You Hinge, The More Glute)

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The More You Hinge, The More Glute: How to Actually Do RDLs for Your Glutes

You don't have to be fucking a rocket scientist or like do any of these crazy exercise to build your glutes, and RDLs work just fine for that if you do them right.

The problem is that most people do an RDL and feel it entirely in their lower back or entirely in their hamstrings, and then they assume the exercise doesn't work for glutes, when really the exercise was being performed as a hamstring movement the whole time.

So before the cue, here's the chain you need to see.

Your hip can do two things in this lift. It can flex, which means your torso and your thigh close toward each other, and it can extend, which means they open back up. The glute is the primary muscle that opens that angle back up, and the hamstring assists with it while also controlling the knee.

The amount of glute you get out of a hinge depends on how much hip flexion you create on the way down, because a muscle that never gets to a long position under load never gets much of a stretch stimulus on the way back up, and that stretch is basically the whole mechanism behind the exercise. The more your hip travels on the way down, the more glute you recruit coming back up.

The difference between RDL and stiff leg deadlift versus a conventional deadlift is basically the position of your legs, and within that family, the amount of knee bend you allow changes which muscle takes the brunt of it.

If you keep your knees nearly locked out, your hamstrings are being stretched from both ends at once, at the hip and at the knee, so the tension piles into the hamstring and the hip never gets to travel very far back.

If you allow a soft knee bend, maybe fifteen or twenty degrees, and you let your hips push backward behind your heels, the hip angle closes way further, and the glute is the muscle sitting at the end of that range.

Same bar, same weight, different muscle doing the work.

So if you're doing the RDL, you have to make sure that when you're going down, you're focusing on pretending there's like a wall behind you and you wanna try to put your butt into it while you lower that and fully extend the glutes. That wall image stops you from thinking about the bar going down and makes you think about your hips going back instead, and those are two different movements even though they look similar from the side.

When you think bar down, you bend at the spine and the bar travels vertically while your hips barely move.

When you think hips back into the wall, the bar travels down as a consequence of the hips moving, and your lower back stays out of it.

The upper body has one job here, which is to stay rigid so that the hinge happens at the hip instead of getting spread across your spine. Your goal is to try to keep your upper body completely straight, including your neck.

That neck part matters more than people think, because the moment you crane your head up to watch yourself in the mirror, you extend the upper spine, and the ribcage flares, and the pelvis often follows by tipping in a way that shortens the range at the hip. So you lose glute range just to look at your glutes. Pick a spot on the floor maybe six feet in front of you and let your eyes travel down as your hips travel back.

How far you go is the last piece to nail down, and it matters just as much as everything above. Go as far as you can while your lower back stays flat and your hips are still moving backward, and stop the second your back starts rounding, because past that point the extra range is coming from your spine and not from your hip.