This Lower-Body Exercise Is Better Than Squats at Making You Faster

A seven-week strength training program of hip thrusts is more effective at improving sprint times than a program of squats, a new study This Glute Workout Will Ignite Your Power Sports suggests.
Hip thrusts target your hip extension muscles, the same ones that fire up during the first strides of sprint acceleration.
To add hip thrusts into your cross-training, start with lighter weight and higher reps to make sure your form is correct.

The Benefits of Kettlebells build strength can play a role, too. If you’ve been hoping to improve your sprint performance by doing a ton of back squats, it may be time to change up your exercise rotation, a study This Glute Workout Will Ignite Your Power Sports suggests.

Researchers in Spain recruited 24 adolescent female soccer players to perform a 7-week progressive training program to determine whether back squats or hip thrusts were more effective for 20-meter sprints.

They found that the hip thrust group showed greater improvement in their sprint performance, especially during the start of a sprint.

The obvious limitation here is that the tests were done on a thinly sliced demographic of teenage girls who regularly play soccer and had no experience lifting weights. But it’s likely that the results would hold even for other ages and genders, since the conclusions were all about muscles and motion.

It all comes down to a term in strength training called the “dynamic correspondence model,” which refers to the transference between an exercise and a concrete movement, said lead researcher Jaime González-Garcia of Camilo José University in Madrid.

He told Runner’s World that this is relevant, because it means if you train specific musculature, it also improves the movements associated with those muscles. That’s why the researchers hypothesized that back squat exercises would result in greater benefits in vertical jump performance, while hip thrust exercises would transfer to sprints.

It all comes down to the different muscles each exercise works. Hip thrusts target your hip extension muscles—particularly the glutes. These are the same muscles that fire up during the first strides of sprint acceleration, particularly the initial 10 steps.

In contrast, the back squat works your quads, calves, and hamstrings to a greater degree than your hip flexors. These are the same muscles that you need to help power a vertical jump.

“The main takeaway of this study is that it reaffirms the principle of specificity, which states that training adaptations are largely specific to the type of exercise performed,” said Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., C.S.C.S., assistant professor in exercise science at CUNY Lehman College and author of Health & Injuries.

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Although Schoenfeld was not involved in the recent study, he collaborated on a similar, previous study done on adolescent males that came to similar conclusions. He told Runner’s World that in this latest research, the hip thrust and back squat elicited beneficial effects on different athletic outcomes.

That means including these exercises will depend on your goals, he said, adding that if general athletic fitness is your aim, then employing a combination of movements is usually the best approach.

But if you’re just looking to improve your sprint times, González-Garcia said it was only the group trained in hip thrusts that tended to produce improvements in performance.

And what if you’re a hip thrust newbie?

“The move takes some time to learn properly,” said Schoenfeld. “I’d suggest that individuals use a somewhat higher rep range, like 10 to 15, with relatively lighter loads to get enough practice and ensure proper form. It would also be beneficial to perform the exercise at least a couple days a week in the early phases of training, so more practice is obtained to solidify good form.”