Lower your body as far as you can only come up about three-quarters of the way – or else the quads will be working instead of the glutes and hamstrings. Instead, position your feet high up and forward on an incline press machine or well in front of you on a Smith machine (with the bar that does up and down in a track). You obviously can’t do hack squats with free weights. This throws the effort back from your quadriceps toward the back of the leg – glutes, and hamstrings.

It is essentially a leg press movement where your feet are placed way out in front instead of underneath you. HACK SQUATS: – This is the primary exercise for specifically targeting the glutes and hamstrings – the absolute best one for a round butt. But the muscles tend to respond less to exercises in which “difficult” replaces the feeling of “heavy,” so it’s best to include both free weight and machine exercises in your routine. You gain from using these devices because you don’t have to balance weight and there is little chance of losing control during the movement. There are standing machines, incline machines, and vertical machines (where you lie on your back). MACHINE LEG PRESS: There are a variety of machines that let you do a leg press movement without having to control a free weight.

A variation of this is squatting while holding two dumbbells at arm’s length by your side. You balance a barbell across the back of your shoulders, squat down until your thighs are about parallel to the floor, and press back up.

Both the hip and knee joints are involved and, depending on exactly how this movement is done, almost all the major leg muscles can be involved.īARBELL SQUAT: This is the primary exercise for building the lower body. Well, that is the basic leg press movement done as a callisthenic exercise, using just your own bodyweight for resistance. LEG PRESSES: Everybody knows what a deep-knee bend is. The position of your feet largely determines whether you are primarily hitting the front or the back of the leg. There are all sorts of machines that let you do leg presses.

Exercise to turn a flat butt round