How to Use a Stair Stepper For Your Glutes

Have you ever wondered, does a stair stepper work for your glutes? If you have been looking for a new glutes workout that you can try, you may have considered numerous different options – and finding the one that works best for you naturally can feel hard.

Fortunately, we’ve outlined some of the key things you need to know about optimising your stair stepper workout for glutes today to help you find the ideal solutions for your workout goals.

Does a Stair Stepper Work Your Glutes?

A stair stepper is a highly effective aerobic workout that focuses heavily on your lower body’s muscles, such as your thighs, calves and glutes. Stair steppers might be the ideal solution if you’ve been looking for a workout option that can effectively tone your glutes.

In addition, it’s worth considering that a stair stepper is also an intense and sweaty aerobic exercise, helping you burn many calories quickly. In fact, even a moderate-intensity stair stepper workout can burn around 500 calories per hour, further supporting your efforts to strengthen and tone up the glutes.

Therefore, a stair stepper might be ideal for your glutes if you have been looking for a new workout option to tone up your behind. However, there is a significant catch here: you’ll need to ensure that your glutes are actually engaged during the activity.

Using the wrong stair stepper technique can leave your glutes only partially engaged with the workout, which will significantly slow down your progress with toning and shaping your glutes.

How Do you Engage Glutes on a Stair Stepper?

Learning how to engage your glutes on a stair stepper isn’t necessarily obvious since it requires a few very specific changes to your usual stair stepper routine. Don’t worry – we’ve outlined how to use a stair stepper right for your glutes as follows to help.

Is It Important to Engage Glutes on a Stair Stepper? 

Engaging your glutes on a stair stepper is vitally important. While the stair stepper provides a full lower-body workout and toning session, it’s vitally important to note that this exercise is first and foremost focused on your quads and lower legs. 

If you want to tone your glutes more quickly, you will need to ensure that you engage your glutes during the stair stepper workout. This provides a simple method to bolster your toning efforts without necessarily requiring any additional effort or time.

Tips to Engage Glutes on a Stair Stepper

In order to use a stair stepper for glutes effectively, we recommend engaging your glutes with each step. This can feel a little awkward initially; I’d first recommend engaging your glutes while standing still to get a feel for the action.

Clench your glute muscles together and hold this pose for a few seconds before releasing it. Repeat this several times over to begin getting a feel for the action. Then, practice clenching your glutes while walking; squeeze your glutes together each time your foot hits the ground flat.

Though it feels odd, this simple practice method will make engaging your glutes on a stair stepper much easier. And the beauty of this is you cannot achieve this on other gym equipment like the elliptical.

Of course, you’re not actively walking on a stair stepper; however, you can employ a similar strategy to engage and tone your glute muscles. Each time you lift your foot and place it down on the stair stepper’s pedals, engage your glutes, then release this as you push your body up to increase the amount of work your glutes are doing. 

Stair Stepper for Glutes

To further increase your stair stepper for glutes engagement, you should also increase the resistance. This requires more power to use the stair stepper effectively, which is why it can substantially help boost your toning efforts.

We also recommend trying to power your movements through your glutes, rather than your calves, to see the maximum benefit. If you’re only ever pushing off with your calf muscles without engaging your glutes, you may have to wait a while to see great results from your toning efforts.

Is The Stair Stepper Good for Glutes?

The stair stepper is a great workout for your glutes. Finding the optimal glutes workout is understandably hard, which may have led you to try using a stair stepper to engage then. Getting the best results from this workout requires a little thought, as you’ll need to actively engage your glutes on a stair stepper for good results.

Does Stair Stepper Build Glutes?

The stair stepper does not build the glutes, but it will sculpt and tone them through repetitive use. The Gluteus Maximus is a muscle commonly known as the glutes on the back of the hip. This muscle acts on the hip joint, which rotates, extends, adducts, and abducts the leg. You wouldn’t climb stairs or walk on level ground without this muscle. You can find our other blog where we go into this in more detail here.

We’ve outlined some of the key things you need to know today about how to engage your glutes on a stair stepper to ensure you’re getting the most from your workouts going forward.