Butt & Thigh Exercise Tips

Your hip and legs work together to stabilize and balance your body during movement and produce force during many athletic activities. Your buttocks and legs work with other hip muscles to extend the hip and leg in movements such as walking, leaping and kicking. They work with the torso and shoulders to perform various movements, such as jumping up to spike a volleyball and lifting a heavy box up from a squat position. To strengthen your buttocks and legs, you must integrate them with the entire body, not isolate the individual muscles.

Integrate, Not Isolate

Most exercise techniques at the gym isolate muscles groups rather than integrate them with the entire body such as it is supposed to do in sports and daily activities. The isolation environment is ideal for those whose goal is to gain large muscles mass, such as that of bodybuilders. Since most people who exercise would like to increase athletic performance, burn fat and improve strength and flexibility, training your whole body is a better method than isolation.
Instead of training your hips and legs one muscle group at a time, such as hamstring curls and leg extensions, do squats, lunges and step-ups, which work all hip and leg muscles as well as strengthening abs and spine. You will also burn more calories, improve total body strength and have more fun than sitting on a machine.

Supersets

Supersetting in exercise refers to performing two or more movement patterns―often in opposition of each other, such as pushing and pulling―back-to-back with little or no rest in between sets. This method can help you save time and burn more calories than just doing one exercise set at a time.
For example, you can do a squatting exercise followed immediately by one or two upper-body exercises such as push-ups and pull-ups. Or you can do another lower-body strength exercise followed by an agility and speed exercise such as jump roping or ladder drills with an agility ladder.

Planes of Motion

Your hip joint (acetabulofemoral joint) allows you to move in three planes of motion―sagittal (front to back), frontal (side to side), transverse (rotations). In some exercises, such as lunges and step-ups, you can do move in all planes of motion, which adds variety and different challenges. Training in multiple planes of motion can help you perform better in some sports such as a baseball outfielder or baseman, gymnastics, martial arts, volleyball and basketball.