Until cable glute kickbacks wove their way into the modern bodybuilding lexicon, “glute training” was never a thing. Both guys and girls just trained “legs.” Glutes, hamstring, quads, calves—hip to toe—the whole thing. At some point we integrated a delineation that separated hamstrings from quads and from calves on different days, but, for the most part it was “legs,” period. Once a week, sometimes twice (quads one day, hams the next)—but never glute specific.
Then one day someone decided a big giant booty was fashionable and the next thing you know, women are training their glutes as a standalone item. Three times a week! Once the Wellness division was adopted they trained them even more! I had women in my gym in Mexico who trained legs every day. Every day, six days a week—Sundays they went cycling. Bless their hearts…
The first exercise that was recruited to put together the leg training deviation that would make glutes a separate body part—just like chest, back, and even legs—was the cable kickback. Any gym owner will tell you, the number one most stolen piece of equipment in the early 2000’s was the ankle cuff. We used to buy them in bulk.
Now, the ubiquitous hardcore bodybuilder dude will look at cable kickbacks and chuckle, calling it a girl exercise. Certainly, if a bodybuilder is going to put some training focus on his glutes, he’s doing it to get them striated for competition. The idea is to etch in some detail and expose it with strenuous dieting. He’s going to do that with walking lunges, reverse lunges, static lunge in the Smith machine, Sumo squats… He’s not doing cable kickbacks. His girlfriend is.
But…you have to remember, there is no such thing as a useless exercise. The manner in which the exercise is performed is what renders the exercise useless, not the exercise itself.
These days the ladies training legs three plus times a week are also doing Sumo squats, static lunges in the Smith machine, reverse lunges and everything and anything else they can think of – including cable kickbacks—to fill in the workout elements of such an insane training volume. So, while cable kickbacks may have been the first girl-centric exercise aimed straight at the glutes, all the rest of what is typically considered “bodybuilding movements” have also found a fertile home among the growing population of women obsessed with their butts. And that’s a good thing. I’m all for improving the scenery. The question is, is your energy better spent doing something else other than cable kickbacks if your aim is a big round bubble butt?
Are Cable Glute Kickbacks Effective for Building Bigger Glutes?
The mechanics of the execution of a cable kickback is what will determine its usefulness. It’s all in how you perform it. The problem is, other than telling you to clip into the low cable, stand square to the machine, grab on to the cross bar and pivot at your hip in order to raise your heel upward and ultimately lock it into a full contraction at the top of the movement—no one can tell you what the total glute activation feels like, nor how you know your movement is correct. Such feel takes years to learn, and even then there’s no guarantee you’re doing it the “right” way. The right way ultimately becomes what you have evolved that movement into over years and years of doing it. You will eventually develop a mind/ muscle connection and the movement will “feel” right. At least that’s what should happen.
I’m not saying a trainer or a training partner can’t help you with this, but a cable kickback is a pretty individual exercise and it requires a ton of attention to keep the movement in the grove. And the result? Mixed. No big booty Wellness girl from Brazil is going to tell you she built her glutes with standard cable kickbacks. That’s just a fact. Of course, there are variations of what could constitute a cable kickback, but the standard standing alternating cable kickback is what is routinely practiced in big box health clubs and fitness centers all over the world.
The debate here revolves around its efficiency. A typical gymgoer doesn’t have three hours to train legs on a Wednesday afternoon. Most people usually commit about an hour to the gym each day. During that time, the goal should be to recruit, and put to use, as many muscle fibers as you can in the least amount of time while still triggering an adaptive response. And for the beginner that’s a tall order because they really don’t have practical experience with the equipment, nor the actual movement itself. You tend to eat up a lot of time figuring out what to do and how to do it.
This is why I would steer the novice away from an exercise as technically difficult (if done correctly) as a cable kickback. It’s not so simple.
You will get a lot more bang for your training buck doing heavy strict compound movements with good form—squats, Smith machine squats, front squats, hack squats, Sumo squats, leg presses with varying foot placement, lunges, static lunges, reverse lunges. If you want to sculpt a big round highly desirable booty, you need a big block of marble to work with. Once you start fine tuning what you built, you can think about adding more technical moves. Chances are, if you’re doing it right, you won’t need them.