The single-leg hip thrust is a valuable exercise if you’re looking to grow your glutes. It’s traditionally done with bodyweight alone, or loaded with a dumbbell or barbell. However find it too unstable to lift sufficient load, or at least nowhere near what they can hip thrust bilaterally.
When any exercise becomes too unstable, it can reduce output from the targeted muscle and “rob” it of tension. Instead, we want to maximize mechanical tension in order to grow your glutes.
If you’re highly proficient on one leg then this shouldn’t be a problem and you should get a lot out of traditional single-leg hip thrusts with a barbell. But for the majority you’d be short-changing yourself of glute gains.
A landmine offers an element of stability to a lot of exercises, largely because of its attachment to the floor. By using a landmine for a single-leg hip thrust we create some stability and better glute output. This can be evidenced by those that have so far experimented with it and are able to handle considerable loads – I recently saw a female trainer comfortably handle 180lbs on the bar!
Many are finding the landmine hip thrust to be a great way to apply some progressive overload to their glute workouts, while enjoying the numerous benefits of including more single-leg exercises in the training.
Landmine Hip Thrust Ultimate Instructional Video
Key tips:
Let’s assume that you already barbell hip thrust and we can skip over the basics.
- You’ll need a landmine unit, bar and most likely a foam pad or squat bar pad. Choose a bench or step with a height that works well for you and your regular bilateral hip thrusts.
- Once you’ve loaded the bar rest your back up agains the bench and set your feet in position. As a general rule of thumb place your feet in such a way that at the top of the landmine hip thrust your shins are perpendicular to the floor. That being said this can vary a little, so feel free to position where you feel’s good.
- You have the option to place a squat bar pad on the end of the olympic bar. This tends to work okay as long as it doesn’t slip off, since it won’t fasten up properly due to the thickness of the bar. Instead, personally I prefer to use an Airex foam pad across the hip. Place this on and roll the end of the bar on top.
- The bar should roll on in a position where you’re as close to the plates on the bar as possible. It should sit on your hip comfortably. If you don’t get this right you’ll have a pretty angry pubic bone afterwards.
- Raise one leg off the floor, brace your abs, tuck you chin, and drive through your heel to raise your hips.
- Focus on getting full hip extension while posteriorly tilting your pelvis – cock-up!
- Lower the landmine back to the start position, then rinse and repeat for desired reps.
- You’re better off performing all of your sets on one leg before switching over to the other.
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