The book in one sentence: The most evidence-backed glute training program for women ever written, built on EMG research that overturned how the fitness industry thinks about squats, hip thrusts, and body recomposition.
- What Is Strong Curves About?
- Why Do Women’s Programs Fail at Glute Development?
- How Does the Strong Curves Program Actually Work?
- Does Strong Curves Address Body Recomposition and Weight Loss?
- Is Strong Curves Worth Reading?
- Books Like Strong Curves
What Is Strong Curves About?
Picture someone who has been in the gym for a year. Lunges, squats, leg press, maybe some deadlifts. She is consistent. She works hard. And at the end of twelve months, her glutes look essentially the same as when she started.
Strong Curves was written for that woman. The book, co-authored by Bret Contreras (a certified strength and conditioning specialist who spent years doing EMG research to measure which exercises actually activate the glutes) and Kellie Davis (who trained under his system and documents her own before/after throughout the book), offers a straightforward explanation for why conventional programs fail at lower-body development and a complete system to fix it.
The core claim sounds almost too simple: the hip thrust, not the squat, is the primary glute-building exercise. Contreras built that claim on electromyography data collected over years of real-world testing. The squat loads the glutes in a stretched, mechanically disadvantaged position. The hip thrust loads them at end-range extension, where they produce maximum force. That difference, it turns out, is the entire ballgame.
Published in 2013, the book is now over a decade old. The hip thrust is everywhere. Contreras’s research has been replicated and cited widely. If anything, mainstream fitness has caught up to what this book argued before most trainers took it seriously.
Why Do Women’s Programs Fail at Glute Development?
The answer involves a concept Contreras calls gluteal amnesia, and it is more common than most people realize.
Vladimir Janda, a physical therapist, identified the gluteus maximus as the muscle most prone to inhibition in the human body. Prolonged sitting causes hip flexors to adaptively shorten. Shortened hip flexors reflexively suppress glute activation through a neurological mechanism. Add hours of compression from sitting (which impairs blood flow and neuromuscular signaling) and the reflex shutdown that follows any lower-body injury, and you have a muscle that is partially dormant in most sedentary adults.
The consequence is practical and frustrating: a woman can squat consistently for a year and produce minimal glute development because her quads and spinal erectors are compensating. Her glutes are present but not participating. This is why glute activation work (bird dogs, side-lying clams, bodyweight glute bridges) opens every Strong Curves session. It is not filler. It is the prerequisite step that determines whether everything else works.
Beyond dormancy, most programs also fail by training only one dimension of gluteal function. The gluteus maximus has four actions:
- Hip extension (squats, deadlifts, the vertical plane)
- Hip abduction (band walks, side-lying clams, the lateral plane)
- Hip external rotation (cable rotations, the rotational plane)
- Posterior pelvic tilt (hip thrusts, back extensions, the horizontal plane)
A program built entirely around squats and deadlifts trains one of those four. The other three remain untrained. The glute may grow in absolute size but stays flat rather than round, because the upper fibers responsible for the outer curve are never challenged. Strong Curves programs all four vectors every week, by design.
How Does the Strong Curves Program Actually Work?
The book includes four 12-week programs: Booty-ful Beginnings (complete beginners), Gluteal Goddess (advanced), Best Butt Bodyweight (home/travel), and Gorgeous Glutes (lower-body only). Each runs in three 4-week blocks with progressive increases in volume and intensity.
The session template is the same across all programs:
- Glute-dominant exercise first (hip thrust or glute bridge)
- Horizontal pull
- Quad-dominant exercise
- Horizontal/vertical press
- Hip-dominant/hamstring exercise
- Glute accessory
- Linear core
- Lateral/rotary core
Hip thrusts go first, not last. That placement is deliberate. When the glutes are fresh, neural drive is highest and the mind-muscle connection is easiest to maintain. Most conventional programs put squats first and treat hip thrusts as a finisher, which means the primary glute exercise happens after the glutes are already partially fatigued.
Three mechanisms of muscle growth run through every training week:
- Mechanical tension from heavy loaded hip thrusts and glute bridges (the primary driver)
- Metabolic stress from high-rep band work and accessory movements (the pump and burn)
- Muscle damage from deep-range squats, lunges, and split squats that stretch the glute under load
Programs that rely only on high-rep bodyweight work (Brazilian Butt Lift-style) create metabolic stress but miss mechanical tension entirely. That is why they produce results in weeks one through four and then plateau. A bodyweight glute bridge activates the glutes at 20-30% of maximum voluntary contraction. A 225-pound barbell hip thrust activates them at 100%. No amount of rep volume compensates for that gap.
Contreras also devotes a full chapter to the training log, which he treats as non-negotiable. Progressive overload without a log is accidental. With one, it becomes intentional. Before each session: review what you did last time, set the next target, and try to beat it on at least one metric. This is the mechanism. Not the exercises, not the program structure, not the warm-up. The relentless, documented effort to lift more or move better than last time.
Does Strong Curves Address Body Recomposition and Weight Loss?
Yes, and in a way that is unusually honest about the limits of scale-based progress tracking.
The book documents Kellie Davis’s 18-month recomposition: same body weight at the end as at the beginning, but approximately 8 pounds of muscle gained and 8 pounds of fat lost. The scale showed zero change. The body looked completely different.
“You must also forget about starving yourself skinny. You need to eat the right amount of calories from the right foods every day to achieve the body you want, and that body is one with full, rounded, and athletic muscles. It isn’t one with soft, barely-there muscles and a fat layer resting upon bone. That’s what starvation will get you.”
That quote is from the nutrition chapter, which is the oldest-feeling section of the book. The caloric formulas (bodyweight × 14 for maintenance, × 11-12 for fat loss) are a reasonable starting point, but they predate more recent work on protein optimization and female-specific hormonal context. If nutrition is your primary question, supplement this book. The training programming is the real value.
What the nutrition chapter gets right is the reframe: the goal of eating during a strength program is to fuel muscle retention, not to accelerate weight loss. Large caloric deficits cause muscle loss alongside fat loss, and the body that emerges from aggressive dieting looks smaller but undefined. Eating near maintenance while training for progressive overload produces a slower scale change but a better body composition outcome.
For anyone currently on a GLP-1 medication (semaglutide, tirzepatide), this framing is directly relevant. GLP-1 drugs suppress appetite aggressively, and many people end up in larger deficits than they intended. Muscle loss during GLP-1-assisted weight loss is a documented concern. The Strong Curves approach, with its emphasis on protein-supported progressive overload, is one of the better frameworks available for preserving body composition during active weight loss. Nothing in the book addresses GLP-1s specifically (the book predates their widespread use by a decade), but the principles apply cleanly.
Is Strong Curves Worth Reading?
Read this if you have been training consistently and haven’t gotten the lower-body results you expected, especially if your program is squat-and-lunge-centric. If you have been afraid to lift heavy because of the “bulk” myth, the book addresses this directly and with clinical precision. (Women don’t have enough testosterone to accidentally get huge. This takes years of intentional effort.) Also read this if you are losing weight and want to prioritize body composition over scale weight.
Skip it if you already have a well-designed program that includes hip thrusts, multi-vector glute work, and progressive overload. In that case, Contreras’s follow-up Glute Lab (2019) has updated research and more nuanced periodization, and it is the better use of your time.
One caveat worth naming: Bret Contreras has faced serious personal conduct allegations in recent years. This review focuses on the book’s content because the science behind it does not depend on the author’s personal conduct, the methods have been independently validated, and the co-author Kellie Davis played a genuine role in developing and testing the material. Readers are entitled to weigh that context as they see fit.
The bottom line: the training science holds up. The hip thrust is now everywhere because the research was correct. A decade-old book that correctly predicted how the industry would change is worth reading, whatever you think of its author.
Books Like Strong Curves
| Book | Author | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Lean and Strong | Rachel Hillis | Women new to strength training who want a simpler on-ramp |
| Year One Challenge for Women | Michael Matthews | Detailed progressive overload programming with more nutrition depth |
| Next Level | Stacy Sims | Female-specific physiology, training around the menstrual cycle and perimenopause |
| The Joy of Movement | Kelly McGonigal | The psychology of why movement feels good and how to build lasting exercise identity |
| Spark | John Ratey | The brain science behind exercise and why it matters beyond aesthetics |