You know the feeling. Lock out a heavy hip thrust and your glutes light up like nothing else in the gym. Rack a barbell squat and the burn spreads everywhere — quads, core, lower back — but your glutes? Barely a whisper compared to what hip thrusts just did.
That difference in sensation is so consistent, so obvious, that most people treat it as the verdict. The exercise that makes your glutes burn more must be the one that grows them more.
Do squats or hip thrusts actually build more glute muscle?
MRI scans at three gluteal sites showed squats and hip thrusts produce identical muscle growth after nine weeks of training — despite hip thrusts generating significantly higher muscle activation at every site. The real difference: squats also build quad and inner-thigh muscle, while hip thrusts grow glutes and almost nothing else.
— Plotkin et al. 2023 · Frontiers in Physiology · n=34
Both sides have real ammunition. Hip thrusts produce significantly higher glute muscle activation — measured with electrodes, confirmed at every gluteal site, statistically significant at all of them. More activation, more burn, more growth. The case sounds airtight.
Squats counter with sheer scope. A squat loads the glutes through a deep stretch under heavy weight while hammering quads, adductors, and the entire posterior chain. More total muscle, more bang for the training minute. That case sounds equally strong.
Here is what happened when researchers used MRI to measure what actually grew.
Glute growth was identical. At the upper, middle, and lower portions of the gluteus maximus, both exercises produced the same amount of new muscle tissue. The point estimates modestly favored hip thrusts at all three sites, but the differences were so small that measurement variance dwarfed them. Not close. Not trending. Dead even.
And every single participant in the study said they felt hip thrusts more in their glutes. The activation data confirmed it. The MRI did not care.
This is the finding that changes the debate: higher muscle activation did not predict more muscle growth. The exercise that makes your glutes burn more intensely produced exactly the same amount of glute tissue as the one that barely registers. Your body's loudest signal — the burn, the squeeze, the conviction that one exercise is doing more — predicted nothing about what was growing underneath.
So if both exercises grow glutes equally, why would you pick one over the other?
Because the difference is not in your glutes. It is in everything else. Squats added significantly more quad and inner-thigh muscle. Hip thrusts added essentially none. The choice was never better versus worse for glutes. It was always glute-specific versus glute-plus-thigh.
Hip thrusts are a scalpel. They go after your glutes and leave everything else alone. Squats are a broad blade — same glute growth, but your quads and inner thighs come along.
One detail makes this finding harder to wave off. The research was partly funded by Bret Contreras — the person who built a brand around hip thrusts being the glute exercise. His own money helped pay for a study that showed his flagship movement does not outperform squats for glute growth. When the person with the most to lose from a null result co-authors the null result, the finding lands differently.
The equivalence holds beyond a single trial. Across 12 studies and 318 participants both exercises produce moderate glute growth, and neither consistently outperforms the other.
The honest caveat: the participants were untrained and the study ran nine weeks. Whether the same equivalence holds for experienced lifters over longer timelines has not been directly tested — though pooled data from trained subgroups showed the gap narrowing, not widening.
The question most people type into Google — squats vs hip thrusts for glutes — assumes one winner. The answer is a tie on glutes and a split on thighs. Your real programming question was never which exercise grows glutes better. It was always which combination matches the body you are actually trying to build.