Exercise of the Week: B Stance Hip Thrusts

If you’re here it’s safe to assume that you’re already familiar and have likely mastered the basic barbell hip thrust.

The great thing about the glutes, our body’s largest muscle group, is they can handle a lot of training volume. Meaning, they can and should be trained multiple times a week.

You could certainly build large strong glutes with only the traditional hip thrust, however, variations like B-Stance, pause, 1.5 reps and banded thrusts are great to build into your training program to challenge the glutes and add some variety.

What is a Hip Thrust?

Hip Thrusts are a hip hinge movement that predominately recruits the glutes and hamstrings. The great thing about hip thrusts are that they are pretty simple to learn and can seem less intimidating that barbell squats or deadlifts. (As a bonus, they will can help make you stronger at your squats and deadlifts.)

What is a B-Stance Hip Thrust?

B Stance Hip Thrusts are a variation of the hip thrust that is almost a single leg exercise, but with a little help from the other supporting leg.

Since we are favoring one glute at time here, the working glute has to do more work than when the weight is shared equally among both glutes.

It’s totally normal if one side feels more difficult than the other. That’s actually another reason to incorporate B-Stance Hip Thrusts into your program — single leg work can help even out imbalances.

How to Set Up for B-Stance Hip Thrusts

You’ll want to set up for a hip thrust like normal (barbell across your hips with a pad, bench at lower shoulder blade height). The only thing you’ll change is slightly centering your “working” leg and put your other heel and put your other foot on the heel as shown in the video.

If you want even more in depth of an explanation, watch Bret Contreras’s video with more explanation is linked here.

Bonus Tips:

• Start out with half the weight of your regular hip thrust.
• Drive through the heel of your working leg.
• Raise the toes on your supporting leg and have it slightly in front of the other food.

Now go get thrusting!

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Have you tried these? Want help creating a workout program to incorporate them? Reach out to me at hellostrength1@gmail.com.