Squats: body weight only or with one dumbell held to your chest, 2 held at shoulder height or use a barbell across your shoulders - if you want to do body weight only you can try variations of squats by doing deep sumo squats (be careful of knees), squat pulses (don’t come all the way up) or squat side steps (you can use a resistance band to increase intensity)
Deadlifts
Glute Bridge
Lunges (bodyweight or weighted)
Whatever you do, if it hurts then stop, wait until you feel better and try again. Some exercises just don’t suit some people. You don’t want to injure yourself!
There’s lots of youtube videos that you could use if you’re doing this at home - I like Joe Wicks personally.
The other thing I’d like to add is that, these kind of exercises will build the glute muscles but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get the “bubble butt” shape that you miss. It might just be that you need to accept that your current shape is “you” at your current weight / body composition and putting weight back on might be the only way of getting your bum back, I guess its then a personal choice that you have to make.
Don’t forget how much you have been through and how much you have acheived recently, give yourself some slack, show yourself some love and maybe love your new shape for a while?
There’s a lady I’ve followed for years, her youtube and social media is called Redefining Strength. I’ve gotten a lot of my workouts from her. She talks about the importance of glute activation to make sure they’re firing before you start your work outs.
She has a 50, 40, 30, 20, 10 work out for glutes that I love. Do all these with a resistance band, start light, do 50 of all below, then 40 and so on. Try and gradually increase the band to a heavier one.
Band seated clams.
Band hip thrusters.
Squat pulses.
Band Y reverse hypers.
She’s really good and I like that she talks through the mechanics of why an exercise is good. I like understanding why things are the way they are, it makes it easier for me to do it. She has ankle strengthening exercises too which I find really helpful when I actually do them.
I hope you can get back to doing some exercises that make your body feel better.
I have tried every exercise that you can think of but I have had to accept that I will never have a rounded shapely bottom unfortunately. 36k boobs makes up for it a little bit though
In 2001/2 my now wife was a size 22/24, getting married in 2003 she was determined to be slimmer, she got down to an impressive( in weight loss terms) size 10.
However you cannot say where your body losses weight and to what extent( an extreme observation was her labia got significantly smaller ) so I wouldn’t worry or try to “fix” things just accept it?
Normal squats with body weight help, but to really get a big butt you will need weights. Romanian deadlifts, barbell hip thrusts and barbell are some of your best friends;)
