Does Yoga Make Your Buttocks Bigger? — Yoga Kali

✅ Fact Checked

1/3 Can yoga grow your butt?

Yoga surely increases muscle tone and definition, but when it comes to muscle size, opinions differ.

Some yogis claim that yoga can be as effective as any other strength training, including weight lifting. I’d take this information with a grain of salt since there’s no solid research to back these claims.

The American Council on Exercise defines strength training as exercising with increasingly heavier resistance in order to strengthen the muscles. Increasingly heavier resistance is the key phrase here.

In other words, you must continually overload your muscles and bones. During traditional weight training, your muscles adapt to the resistance and get stronger, so the weight becomes less of a challenge, and you have to add more weight to achieve the same results.

For advanced practitioners, muscle growth takes even longer. Since they’re already closer to their genetic peak, and unless they’re fitness professionals, they usually don’t have the time to dedicate to the muscle training that their bodies need to gain even more tone.

You could probably grow your bum size to some extend with yoga, especially if you’re a beginner with not much previous training experience. However, at some point, you’ll stop seeing any visible changes and will need to increase resistance to stimulate muscle growth.

In the case of yoga, you can promote muscle growth by holding your yoga poses for longer or add more reps, but it’s unsustainable in the long term, to say the least. It is best to supplement your yoga practice with weight lifting if your aim is to grow bigger buttocks. Alternatively, you can always throw some weights into your yoga practice for the additional burn.

2/3 What yoga poses are good for the butt?

Many yoga poses are great for challenging our glutes. If your goal is to grow your bum and make it look bigger, you need to focus on:

• strengthening the lower body instead of opening it up through stretching
• staying a bit more mindful about how you’re doing your asanas and what muscles you’re engaging.

We, humans, are lazy creatures, and we tend to disengage our glutes and rely on other muscles for support. Think how you’d normally do a Bridge pose, for example. Most of us will release the glutes in the pose rather than engage them.

Next time you’re doing Bridge, try to engage through your inner thighs and imagine that you’re trying to pull your heels back to your bum without them moving. You will feel your glutes and hamstrings starting to really work. This is the sensation to look for in other yoga poses.

Another example of how you can mindfully approach your glute training in yoga is Malasana or Yogi Squat. Rather than using your elbows to help your knees open up passively, tighten your glutes and feel the burn in your glute muscles and release in your groin.

Try adding these yoga poses to your yoga routine to engage your glutes and make your buttocks bigger:

• Warrior III with leg pulses – instead of holding a static pose, pulse your extended leg up to the sky while balancing and keeping your hips level
• Mountain to Warrior III flow – this is basically a deadlift movement that engages glutes and hamstrings in your standing leg. Add a resistance band or a dumbbell for increased burn and better results
• Goddess pose with abduction – hold the Goddess pose while pulsing your knees outward. It’s a very small movement but you’ll feel the burn in no time
• Plank leg lifts – hold the plank while alternating between lifting one or another. You can also go through a usual Vinyasa flow Plank – Chaturanga to Upward-Facing Dog while keeping one of the legs lifted.

3/3 The bottom line

Yoga will unlikely drastically change your bum size, but it can help you tone your glutes to give them a perkier and firmer look.

You will get better and faster results if you add resistance in the form of rubber bands or dumbbells into your yoga practice or supplement your yoga with any form of resistance training.