Build your bum with Meggan Grubb’s go-to 100-rep squat challenge

Posted by author March 4, 2025 Fitness

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If you’re one of Meggan Grubb’s 1.3 million Instagram followers, you’ll know she’s no stranger to a bum workout. The fitness trainer and mum to 18-month-old daughter Winnie regularly shares snippets of her workouts online, but as she explains in a recent YouTube video, she swears by her 100-rep squat pyramid set.

‘A pyramid set which will not only let you work at a hypertrophy rep range, which will benefit muscle growth, but also get to your maximum weight for one rep,’ she explains. ‘It’s a brilliant challenge to do every few weeks to really test your strength, and also your endurance due to the sheer amount of reps.

‘It’s a must-do and I always programme it into my fitness plans for women to really challenge themselves, increase their strength and test their cardio. Don’t be scared of it, I know it sounds like a lot of reps, but you will feel amazing afterwards and it’s just so good for your body.’

Here’s exactly how to do it.

Meggan Grubb’s 100-rep squat challenge

Equipment needed: Barbell, set of weight plates – you will need six pairs for six different total weights per set of squats, starting with your lightest load and incrementally increasing per pair of weights.
Weights to use: If you know your 1RM (the heaviest load you can lift for one rep), decrease by 5kg per set. So, for example, if your 1RM for a squat is 50kg, your first set will be 25kg, with each set differing by 5kg.

The workout:

How to do it: ‘In a nutshell we start at a set with the most reps, then each set we increase the load and decrease the reps until we reach our one-rep max. We then reverse the pyramid, decreasing the load and increasing the reps every set until we start back where we began. My lightest weight here was for 15 reps and my heaviest for one rep at the top of the pyramid.’

Perform the prescribed number of reps, taking 60 seconds rest between each set, and 90 seconds between the one rep and four-rep sets.

Warm up: 10 bodyweight reps
Set 1: 14 reps (lightest weight)
Set 2: 12 reps (increased load)
Set 3: 8 reps (increased load)
Set 4: 6 reps (increased load)
Set 5: 4 reps (increased load)
Set 6: 1 rep (heaviest weight)

Then reverse it…

Set 7: 4 reps (decreased load from set 6)
Set 8: 6 reps (decreased load)
Set 9: 8 reps (decreased load)
Set 10: 12 reps (decreased load)
Set 11: 14 reps (lightest weight)

Bridie is Fitness Director at Women’s Health UK. She spends her days sweating over new workouts, fitness launches and the best home gym kit so you have all that you need to get fit done. Her work has been published in Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s also a part-time yoga teacher with a habit of nodding off mid savasana (not when she’s teaching, promise).