Single Leg Glute Bridge

🎯 Glutes🏋️ Body onlyBeginnerIsolationHamstrings (2°)

How to do the single leg glute bridge

  1. Lay on the floor with your feet flat and knees bent.
  2. Raise one leg off of the ground, pulling the knee to your chest. This will be your starting position.
  3. Execute the movement by driving through the heel, extending your hip upward and raising your glutes off of the ground.
  4. Extend as far as possible, pause and then return to the starting position.

Muscles worked

The prime mover is the gluteus maximus, which is the strongest hip extensor you have and drives the pelvis forward at the top of the movement.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down.

Every exercise for:GlutesHamstrings

How this movement works

One joint moves, and it moves the load away from the body. With nothing recruited to assist, the target muscle reaches its own limit rather than the limit of the weakest link in a chain — which makes this useful for adding volume after the heavy compound work, not for opening a session.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

No equipment at all. The resistance is your own bodyweight, so you progress by changing leverage, range or tempo rather than by adding plates — and you can do it anywhere.

Every exercise using:Body only

These train the glutes too, using equipment this one does not:

Difficulty

Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.

Of the 24 glutes exercises in this database, 13 are listed at beginner level.

Related exercises

Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.