Before anybody says anything, no, this is not better for hypertrophy (and this is about hypertrophy) because it “works the stabilizer muscles”. That literally makes things worse for hypertrophy because it adds other limiters to the movement other than the target muscle hitting failure. Increasing coordination demands by reducing stability, unnecessarily taxing other muscles that are not the target muscle, and using loading that produces a shitty resistance profile are all going to take away from the stimulus that the target muscle (in this case, the upper glutes) experience by reducing motor unit recruitment, mechanical tension, ease of execution, ease of progressive overload etc. Also, “Stabilizer muscles” aren’t these obscure muscles that only get worked when things are unstable. They’re the “normal muscles” that are just acting in a stability capacity rather than being the primary mover, which they would be in a different movement. And the very small muscles throughout the body, that will never be primary movers, aren’t big enough to make a difference in appearance when developed anyway, but get worked sufficiently with “stable” movements anyway. What people think is happening when they’re “training stabilizer muscles” is actually just improving coordination/technique, which happens by doing a specific movement over time and getting better at doing it. It’s also not necessarily more “fUnCtIoNaL” as function is task-specific. This would probably improve coordination and general proprioception, but there are other exercises that would do that as well but with a far better hypertrophy benefit.

The only time I would ever recommend these is if there were no other options at all; however, if you have access to free-weights to do these, then there are better options. ~$1/day to join my online training groups designed for beginner to advanced lifters where we implement research-backed training principles to ensure progress. Real-time programming done by me + access to me for questions and video review Sub the YouTube channel! Code: “EVAN” for @youngla @gorillamind @villagehiddeniniron