Until cable kicks entered the modern bodybuilding lexicon, “glute training” was never a thing. Both boys and girls only trained “legs”. Hamstrings, legs, quads, calves—hips to feet—everything. At some point we combined an image that separated the hamstrings from the quads and from the calves on different days, but for the most part this cycle was “legs”. Once a week, sometimes twice (one day a square, another day) – but never specific.
After a day, someone made a decision great booty was fashionable and the next thing you know, women are training their breasts as independent objects. Three times a week! When the health department was adopted, they trained them even more! I had women at my gym in Mexico doing leg exercises every day. They cycled every day, six days a week – on Sundays. Make their hearts happy…
The first exercise to incorporate leg training deviations that make the glutes an integral part of the body—like the chest, back, and even legs—was the cable kick. Any gym owner will tell you that the number one stolen piece of equipment in the early 2000s was the ankle cuff. We bought them in bulk.
Now, a fellow hardcore bodybuilder everywhere looks at cable kicks and laughs and calls it a girl workout. of course if a bodybuilder intends to focus on his abshe does this to make them compete. The idea is to paint some details and expose it with extreme diet. He does it with walking lunges, reverse lunges, static lunges in the Smith machine, sumo lunges… He doesn’t do cable kicks. is his girlfriend.
But… you have to remember that there is no such thing as a useless exercise. The way you perform the exercise is what makes the exercise useless, not the exercise itself.
These days women who exercise legs three times a week as well as Sumo squats, static lunges on the Smith machine, reverse lunges and anything and everything else they can think of – including cable kicks – to fill in the elements of the exercises for such an insane amount of training. So, while cable kicks may have been the first female-oriented exercise to directly target the glutes, all the rest of what’s commonly considered “bodybuilding moves” have also found a fertile home among the growing population of women who exercise their butts. And that’s a good thing. I’m all for improving the landscape. The question is whether your energy would be better spent doing something other than retrieving the cable if your target is a round bubble box?
Are cable glute curls effective for building bigger glutes?
The mechanics of performing a cable kick determine its usefulness. It’s all about how you do it. The problem is that telling you to hang on to the low wire, stand square to the machine, hang onto the cross bar, and rotate on your side to lift your heel up and finally lock it into a full contraction at the top of the movement – no one can tell you what the total activation of the calf is and how you know your movement is correct. It takes years to learn how to feel, and even then there’s no guarantee you’ll do it the “right” way. The correct path is ultimately what you’ve developed over years and years of doing this movement. You will eventually develop a mind/muscle connection and movement is felt correctly. At least that should happen.
I’m not saying that a coach or training partner can’t help you with this, but the cable shot is a very individual exercise and requires a lot of focus to keep the movement in the park. And the result? Mixed. No big booty Wellness girl from Brazil will tell you that she built her bones with standard cable kicks. This is just a fact. Of course, there are variations on what might constitute a cable kick, but the standard continuous cable kick is what is commonly practiced in major health clubs and fitness centers around the world.
The debate here revolves around its effectiveness. The average athlete doesn’t have three hours to train their legs on a Wednesday afternoon. Most people usually go to the gym for about an hour every day. During that time, the goal should be to recruit and use as many muscle fibers as you can in the least amount of time while inducing an adaptive response. And for beginners, that’s a tall order because they don’t really have hands-on experience with the equipment and the actual movement itself. You tend to spend a lot of time figuring out what to do and how to do it.
Therefore, I would steer the novice away from a technically difficult exercise (if done correctly) as a cable kick. It’s not that simple.
You’ll get more bang for your buck by doing heavy compound movements with good form – squats, smith machine squats, front squats, hack squats, sumo, leg presses with different leg placements, lunges, static lunges, reverse lunges. If you want to sculpt the highly desirable large round booty, you need a large block of marble to work with. Once you start fine-tuning what you’ve built, you can start thinking about adding technical moves. Chances are, if you do it right, you won’t need to.
