Exercises to Get Rid of Hip Dips [YES it's possible!]

I’ll save you the drama and cut straight to the point, can you get rid of hip dips with exercise?

YES (with a caveat, I’ll explain in a minute).

First the important part, proof that there is hope!

Here is my hip dip before and after:

Those are pictures of me 2 years apart, but I made most of that progress in the last 8ish months.

My hip dips used to be one of my absolute worst insecurities.

I hated them. I would change what I wore based on hiding them.

If that sounds all too familiar, don’t worry, there is a solution!

What are hip dips?

If you’re not even sure what hip dips are, think about a silhouette of a body.

Where the hips are typically depicted as protruding out, some may be a bit concave.

An example of hip dips in the picture below on the left versus “no hip dips” on the right.

What Causes Hip Dips

There is no “cause” for hip dips, it’s just part of your body structure.

First things first, let’s be clear that there is absolutely nothing wrong with “hip dips”.

They are a completely normal body frame, and actually, more common than you probably think.

The structure of the hip bone has an indent in it, for EVERYONE.

How noticeable this indent or “hip dip” is depends on your frame, where your hips fall (hip dips are also called “high hips”), and how your skin, tissue, and muscle cover the bone.

That being said, I mentioned above that we can get rid of hip dips – with a caveat.

YES, we can absolutely do things to make this “dip” less noticeable with exercise, however, technically speaking, your hip bone will always have this indent, everyone has it!

How to Lose Hip Dips

Okay so I promised I’d explain how we can lose these dreaded hip dips..

And we can, with just the right diet and exercise!

To understand how to do this, we need to make one key distinction.

Hip dips, as we just went over, are part of your body structure.

However, they can be emphasized by having extra fat tissue around your midsection, aka “love handles”.

Taking this into consideration, we can fix our hip dips two different ways.

The first way is by building muscle around our hips to make them appear wider and fill in the portion of our hips that looks ‘indented’.

The second way is by reducing our body fat and therefore getting rid of our love handles.

These two things combined are exactly how I significantly reduced how noticeable my hip dips were.

As I mentioned getting rid love handles will also help diminish how noticeable your hip dips are, but most importantly building up the muscle around her hips will make the biggest difference.

Building muscle can also help reduce fat so we’ll focus on this area in exercises that build the muscles around your hips to get rid of are hip dips.

Before we get into the exercises that help get rid of hip dips, it’s important to understand how muscle building works.

Muscle building is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.

How to Build Muscle to Get Rid of Hip Dips

1. Nutrition

Just as it is extremely important when trying to lose weight to focus on your diet, it’s equally as important to focus on your diet when trying to build muscle.

In order to build muscle, you have to be in a caloric surplus.

This just means that you need to eat more calories than you take in.

In order to do this while putting on the least amount of fat possible and optimizing how much muscle we gain, we need to focus on the actual nutrients that our bodies taking in and not just calories.

So what are the optimal macronutrients for muscle building?

That’s an entire topic in and of itself and so if you’re interested in that check out this article that I wrote on how to calculate the optimal amount of macros for your body.

2. Lifting HEAVY

The other key factor to putting on muscle is lifting heavy.

It’s a common fear for women to not want to lift too heavy because they’re concerned that they might get or look bulky.

This is a common misconception.

It is extremely difficult to put on muscle, especially for women.

This shouldn’t be a concern for you since it is our goal to put on muscle.

To do this, we need to focus on progressive overload.

Progressive overload simply put just means that you are constantly challenging your muscles whether it be through added weight, resistance, or repititions.

2. Focusing on the Correct Movements

When it comes to building muscle around your hips what were actually building in working on it is our glutes.

You might think that your butt is just one big ol muscle, but it’s actually three distinct muscle groups.

Your gluteus maximus is the biggest and main muscle.

The ones that we want to focus on in order to make our hips look wider are the gluteus medius and gluteus Minimus. (see image below)

Focusing on exercises for these muscle groups, we can reduce our hip dips without putting too much muscle on in other areas – if you still had concerns about getting too “bulky”.

3. Consistency

The final key component to putting on muscle in our hips and therefore reducing our hip dips is consistency.

I can’t emphasize enough how difficult putting on muscle is and how important it is to train on a consistent basis.

1 day a week or once every few weeks will not get you results.

4. Rest

That being said, rest is equally important when focusing on exercised to lose your hip dips.

The way muscle grows is actually during rest, as explained by bodybuilding.com.

When you work out a muscle and put strain on it, you are actually damaging the muscle.

The body then goes to work while at rest to repair the damaged muscle.

It does this by adding and fusing to together your muscle protein strainds.

This only happens when at rest, so it’s critical that you find the correct balance between challenging your muscles through progressive overload and rest.

5. Plan

The real key to muscle building is to optimally combine the three points above in a strategic and optimize plan… And to actually follow that plan consistently.

The plan you choose to follow needs to have a diet plan tailored to your body and lifestyle.

It also needs to strategically layout exercises and target the muscle groups in an optimal way that utilizes both compound and isolation movements.

Simply doing a ton of squats might help a bit but you’re probably not going to get the results you want.

Doing a bunch any one exercise or only doing compound or only isolation movements similarly will probably not get you the results you’re looking for.

That’s why it’s so important that you choose a plan that has these laid out in a strategic way.

I do have my own glute (and hip dip) growth training program, that also works your gluteus medius and minimus and therefore will help grow your hips.

Even if you don’t choose mine, I do recommend either deep diving to do research to create your own or following another plan.

That being said, I obviously would love for you to choose mine and to be able to help you reduce your hip dips and give you the confidence to be able to wear whatever you want without having to worry about those damn hip dips!