A workout app looked at millions of logged sessions from more than 700,000 users. The data breaks the gym stereotype in two directions at once.
Ask anyone to picture a woman’s gym routine in 2026 and you will probably hear about glutes. Hip thrusts, band walks, a ring light pointed at the squat rack.
The training logs tell a messier story.
When the makers of the StrengthLog app analysed millions of workouts recorded by more than 700,000 users, the most popular exercise among women was not a glute move at all. It was the bench press, at 8.2% of all sets women logged. The squat came second at 7.7%, and the deadlift third at 5.4%.
The hip thrust was there, but in tenth place, at 2.0% of women’s sets.
And yet the stereotype is not invented. Compared with men, women performed the hip thrust 830% more often. No other gap the analysis highlights comes close.
Both things are true. That is the interesting part.
One exercise, two readings
An 830% gap sounds enormous, and it is. For every set of hip thrusts a man logs, women log roughly nine. Men, meanwhile, out-train women on the bench press by 30% and on the barbell curl by 71%, according to the same analysis. Women train the leg press 42% more than men.
So the lower body really is where women’s programmes differ most from men’s. But “differ most” is not the same as “consist mostly of”. A woman who hip thrusts in this data set is far more likely to bench, squat and deadlift first.
Put plainly: the glute-focused woman of the internet is a real person who also does everything else on the list.
That gap between the image and the log matters, because the image is what most people see.
The minority who lift at all
The StrengthLog users are, by definition, people who already train with weights and bother to record it. They are not typical.
Across the country, most women do not meet the basic recommendation for strength work. In 2023, only 27.6% of American women aged 18 to 44 met the federal guidelines of regular aerobic activity plus two days of muscle strengthening a week, according to America’s Health Rankings, drawing on the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
The wider picture is not much better. Fewer than 30% of U.S. adults meet the guidelines for muscle-strengthening activity, the American College of Sports Medicine noted in its 2026 trends report, where traditional strength training ranked seventh.
Translate that into a group of ten young women. Roughly three meet the full recommendation, strength days included. The other seven fall short somewhere, and the few who lift consistently tend to become the ones everyone else watches.
Why the minority sets the picture
That last point explains a lot about fitness media. The women who train seriously are a small group, but they are the ones who film it. Their sessions become the reference for what a “fit” woman’s week looks like.
The ACSM’s survey of 2,000 exercise professionals put wearable technology at number one for 2026, noting that nearly half of U.S. adults now own a fitness tracker or smartwatch. The devices now go well beyond step counts, the report notes, with sensors that capture heart rhythm, blood pressure, skin temperature and even blood glucose. Training has become something people measure, log and share, often in more detail than their doctors ever see. The same habit that produced StrengthLog’s data also produced a generation of women who document their progress publicly.
There is one more finding in the ACSM report worth holding on to. National surveys, it said, show mental well-being is now the top reason people choose to exercise, ahead of fitness or appearance.
That is the motivation the hip-thrust stereotype leaves out. Many women lifting heavy are not chasing a shape. They are chasing a habit that makes them feel steadier.
From the log to the lens
Some of those women have turned the habit into work. A lifter who already films her sets for her own records can publish the same footage, with her own commentary and on her own terms, and get paid for it.
One caution before going looking: every tag on a creator page is self-applied. Nobody checks a programme or verifies a lift, so a label says fitness and only the footage shows whether the training is real.
For anyone who would rather follow the training than the stereotype, the practical move is to look for fit girls on OnlyFans who film their actual sessions, where a full week of bench, squat and deadlift days is as likely to appear as a glute workout.
What the numbers actually say
The 830% figure will keep circulating, because it confirms what people already believe. It is accurate. It is also the least representative number in the study.
The more telling line is the first one. Given a barbell and a free choice, the women in this data set reached for the bench press more than anything else.
Read the rest of the list and the pattern holds: lat pulldowns, overhead presses and rows all rank above the hip thrust for women.
The stereotype is a glute. The log is a whole body.
