The barbell hip thrust produced mean upper gluteus maximus EMG activity of 69.5 percent of maximum voluntary contraction, against 29.4 percent for the back squat, in a 2015 study by Bret Contreras and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Biomechanics. That is more than double, and it gets cited constantly as proof that hip thrusts beat squats for building glutes.
It is not proof of that. EMG amplitude measures electrical activity during a single session, not muscle growth over months. When Barbalho and colleagues ran the twelve week comparison in well trained women, back squat training produced greater hypertrophy in both the quadriceps and the gluteus maximus than hip thrust training, along with larger increases in squat one rep max, while both groups improved hip extensor strength similarly. The exercise with less than half the activation number grew more muscle.
This is the general problem with training arguments built on EMG. Activation during one set tells you what a muscle is doing at that moment. It does not tell you what it will look like in April.
the actual reason legs get skipped
Leg training is uncomfortable in a way that upper body training is not. A heavy set of five squats produces systemic fatigue, elevated heart rate and breathlessness that a heavy set of curls does not, because you are loading a much larger mass of muscle and the cardiovascular demand scales with it.
There is also less visible feedback. Chest and arm training produces a pump you can see in a mirror the same day. Legs are usually covered, harder to see, and slower to visibly change. So the reinforcement loop is weaker for the training that is objectively more productive.
The functional argument is more concrete than the aesthetic one. Lower body strength predicts a great deal about how mobile you stay. Standing up from a chair, climbing stairs, catching yourself when you trip, all of it is hip and knee extension under load. Nothing you do for your biceps affects any of that.
what to actually run
A reasonable lower body week does not need to be complicated. One knee dominant pattern, one hip dominant pattern, and one single leg pattern covers most of it.
Knee dominant means squat, front squat, goblet squat, leg press or split squat. Hip dominant means deadlift, Romanian deadlift, hip thrust or back extension. Single leg means lunge, step up, or single leg Romanian deadlift. Two sessions a week with two to four sets per pattern, in the 5 to 12 rep range, and progressing load or reps over time, will produce more change than any exercise selection debate.
The single leg work is the part most people cut first and it is the part with the most transfer outside the gym, because walking, running and stairs are all single leg activities. It also exposes side to side differences that a barbell hides, since the strong leg quietly compensates on bilateral lifts.
the outdoor argument, examined
A recurring position in fitness culture is that gym strength is pointless if it does not transfer to something you do outside. There is something to that, and it is also frequently overstated.
Strength transfers to activities that resemble the training. Squatting heavy makes hiking with a pack easier because both are loaded lower body work against gravity. It does very little for your swim stroke. The transfer is specific, and “functional training” as a marketing category often means unstable balance work that is worse at building strength than the boring version and no better at transferring.
The honest version of the argument is this: strength is a general capacity that makes acquiring specific skills easier, but it does not replace practicing the skill. If you want to surf, surf. Squatting will not teach you to read a wave. It will mean your legs last longer once you can.
snacking around training, briefly
Almonds come up constantly as the default portable snack and they are a reasonable one: about 164 calories, 6 g of protein and 4 g of fiber per ounce, per USDA data, and they survive a gym bag for weeks.
Where the standard advice goes wrong is protein. An ounce of almonds gives you 6 g of protein, and the research on stimulating muscle protein synthesis generally points to 20 to 40 g of high quality protein per feeding. So nuts are a snack, not a recovery strategy. If the goal after training is to support adaptation, a serving of dairy, eggs, meat or a protein powder does that job. Almonds do not, and no quantity of almonds you would reasonably eat gets you there without a large calorie cost.
the perimeter shopping rule
The advice to shop only the perimeter of the supermarket is memorable and about 70 percent right. The perimeter holds produce, meat, dairy and eggs. The interior holds most of the ultra processed food.
It also holds canned beans, canned tomatoes, frozen vegetables, oats, rice, dried lentils, canned fish and nuts, which are some of the cheapest and most useful foods in the building. Rickman and colleagues reviewed the comparison in a 2007 paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture and found frozen produce generally comparable to fresh on vitamin C, and sometimes higher, because it is blanched and frozen within hours of harvest while fresh produce loses ascorbic acid over days of transit and storage.
A rule that pushes you away from frozen broccoli and canned sardines is a rule with a bug in it. Shop the perimeter first. Then go down the aisles you have a reason to go down.