Best Exercises to Lose Inner Thigh Fat.

Excess fat around the hips and thighs is a very common problem especially for women. While men are more likely to store fat around their stomachs, women are more likely to store fat around their thighs, their pelvic region and their hips.

This female preferential fat storage pattern is believed to be caused by higher estrogen levels in women leading to more subcutaneous fat storage. In other words more fat get stored under the skin in areas like your thighs rather than visceral fat storage which is fat stored around the stomach area and the organs.

Unfortunately although visceral fat is more dangerous for your health, studies show that continuous accumulation of subcutaneous fat around your lower body comes with it’s own problems. Aesthetic issues like the development of cellulite and an overall pear-shaped body are just two of the many problems people often encounter.

There are many reasons why people want to know how lose thigh fat. Perhaps summer is here and you don’t want to show those legs on the beach. Or you simply want to look better overall.

Whatever your reasons are for wanting skinnier legs, we’re sharing with you today 5 practical tips showing how to lose thigh fat safely and quickly.

Tips and Workouts to Lose Thigh Fat.

Stop Focusing on Losing Thigh Fat

I hate to bust your bubble but it’s the truth when it comes to losing fat around specific spots on your body.  Although our focus is to figure how to lose thigh fat, unfortunately ‘spot reduction’ of fat is a big fat loss myth that many people fall for.

You simply can’t choose where on your body you lose fat. Sorry!

So stop focusing specifically on losing thigh fat and instead shift your focus to losing overall body fat. So many women go to the gym and try to get a thigh fat gap by following a routine they found online or a video they watched on YouTube.

They hope that doing a thigh workout will help slim up their lower bodies.

However, even though there are certain exercises that will help improve the overall shape of your lower body, none of these exercises will help burn the fat directly off the thighs. Instead the fat will only come off your thighs as you lower your overall body fat percentage.

The one way to do that is via dieting. Now don’t be put off by the prospect of going on a diet. You definitely don’t want to go down the traditional dieting route of simply aiming to eat less calories.

For example, a common starting point is to eat 500 less calories per day and reduce calories more over time. This eat less and less approach to fat loss is something that is very common among not just women but most people who are trying to lose weight.

The problem is even if you’re eating less calories, if those calories are still coming from sources that are either processed, high in ‘bad’ fat or sugar, then you’re more likely to create insulin resistance which will physically prevent fat loss.

So instead of burning that extra 500 calories per day your body will just slow down its metabolism to make up for those missing calories. Rather than just tracking calories, it’s very important to also know your macros. These are your proteins, carbs and fats.

Once you do know your macros intake, you want to fill those macros with the fresh whole foods. These single ingredient foods like salmon, avocados, rice or eggs. How do you know how much macros you should take?

You can estimate your daily intake by using a online macros calculator. Also keep in mind that you’ll need to adjust the numbers as you burn fat and as your body adapts to the amount of calories that you’re taking in on a daily basis

Calorie Cycling

Now once you have your macros a great way to prevent your metabolism from slowing down as much is to cycle your calories and macros. Not only does this help keep your metabolism elevated but for many people it may also help you avoid binge eating.

When you start to cycle your calories, naturally, you would incorporate days where you’ll be able to eat more food thus helping you feel more satisfied while still burning fat.

For women that struggle with and want to know how to lose thigh fat, it’s particularly very important that you’re not constantly yo-yo dieting. Why so? Because you’ll never be able to stick to your diet long enough to tap into that stored fat in your thighs.

Every time that you quit it’ll cause you to progressively gain more and more fat around your thighs.

This is one of the main drawbacks of your body preferentially storing fat in your lower body first. In the same way your body preferentially burns the fat from that same area last.

So instead of going down the calorie restriction route, one of the best ways to start calory cycling is by simply dropping your calories a little more aggressively at first by let’s say something like 30% from maintenance for two weeks.

Then after that you would bring your calories back up to maintenance levels for two weeks.

Research shows that this two weeks on two weeks off dieting approach can help lead to more fat loss while being more sustainable. It’s also less likely to result in metabolic slowdown.

Now keep in mind while you cycle your calories you want to mostly cycle the amount of carbs or fats that you’re having per day. At the same time you want to keep protein consistent at about 0.73 grams of protein per pound of body weight.

This is so important because not getting enough protein is another major issue that many women run into. So make sure that you’re doing that to take advantage of the muscle building, appetite controlling and the metabolic boosting effects that come with eating a higher protein diet.

Now as you burn away the fat underneath that fat I’m sure you’re hoping to find some perfectly round glutes and some slender toned legs. However, the only way to ensure that you have a toned lower body is by following the next step.

Focus on Getting Stronger with Weight Training

The next step to lose thigh fat is to focus on getting stronger with weight training. There are many women who are terrified of using weights because they’re afraid of bulking up. And I completely agree that you want to keep your feminine features.

However weight training works hugely in your favor and you want to at least take it seriously if you want to know how to lose thigh fat effectively.

• Available science shows that lifting weights is the very thing that actually helps women get the defined bodies that they want.
• Weight training also helps funnel the protein, carbs and fats that you’re eating towards rebuilding your muscles instead of towards fat storage.
• Another benefit of building more muscle is that it helps elevate your metabolism which is the key to actually keeping the fat off in the long run.
• Lastly even though we can’t target the fat sitting on top of your thighs we can target the muscles like the glutes, quads and hamstrings themselves to improve the shape of those muscles.

So with that said, here are three of the best weight training exercises you can do to kickstart developing your glutes and your thighs that will start to tone up your legs.

Deep Squats

We start first with deep squats. They are excellent at really stretching and challenging the glutes and the hamstrings more than regular parallel squats. Here are a couple of pro tips before you start with deep squats.

Firstly, if your knees bother you or if you’re a beginner then squatting to parallel is still extremely effective as well. So to begin you’ll want to first un-rack a barbell with the barbell resting on your traps. Then spread your feet a little wider than shoulder width apart while slightly rotating your feet outward.

Before lowering yourself down make sure that your chest is up pointing straight ahead and that you’re maintaining that neutral curve in your lower back. Then take a deep breath and hold it as you drive your hips back, bend your knees and lower yourself down.

All this while you need to make sure you’re keeping your weight over the mid-line of your foot. Squat down until your hips are a little under parallel with your knees. Then drive through the middle of your foot extend your knees and come back up.

Then repeat for reps.

Walking Lunges

These are amazing at toning up the legs especially with posterior muscles like the glutes and hamstrings. Start by grabbing two dumbbells. Then take a big step forward and plant your front foot flat on the ground while coming up on your toes with your back foot.

When doing this keep in mind that from a front angle, your feet should still be about hip width apart. You shouldn’t be trying to keep them in a straight line and they we shouldn’t be crossing over.

Once you’re in the proper starting position, lower yourself down by bending both knees and dropping your back knees straight down. Then stand back up and step forward on the other side for your next lunge alternating back and forth for reps as you walk.

While doing this here is something to keep in mind. If from a side angle you’re creating more of a triangle in between your legs instead of what looks like a rectangle or if your front knee is passing over your toes then that means that your feet are too close and you need to have a longer stride length by stepping further away from your back foot as you do your reps.

Step Ups

The third exercise that’s awesome for a thigh gap workout is step ups. To perform step ups, you’ll simply get a platform that’s about knee level. You’ll grab two dumbbells to make the exercise more challenging and then you’ll plant one foot flat on top of the platform.

Then kick off your back foot as you drive down with your front leg and stand straight up. After that lower yourself back down. Then repeat all your reps on one side before switching to the other.

Also if you want to challenge your glutes more with this exercise then point your back toe up before each rep to take your back calf out of the movement.

Now if you simply do three to four sets of each exercise with a challenging weight it should be enough to already get quite a good leg workout.

However, even if you don’t have access to weights and you just do this at home with just your body weight, by incorporating more sets and reps, it can still go a long way in regard to enhancing the muscle tone on your thighs.

Also keep in mind that even if your main goal is to improve your lower body you should still also work the rest of your body with weights throughout the week. This will ensure that you develop a proportional figure while still optimizing your lean body mass and metabolism.

Cardio

Finally the last step that you can choose to take after you have your diet and your weight training already squared away is cardio.

Now cardio can help you burn some extra fat but I purposely save this for last because most women are already doing way too much cardio and not enough weight training.

Even though cardio can help you burn fat if your training plan is all cardio and no weight training, you can bet that you’re gonna sacrifice some muscle mass and your metabolism will drop especially if you’re coupling that with cutting calories.

It’s much better to just focus on burning fat with your diet and to get the best results you want to save cardio for when you hit a plateau and can’t seem to burn any more fat.

Another good time to add cardio is after you’ve already substantially dropped your calorie intake and you don’t want to continue dropping your calories any further. Also if you’re adding in cardio, you want to add it in slowly.

So add one cardio session for the week and see how it goes. If it helps you break through your plateau then don’t add any more cardio sessions unless you plateau and get stuck again.

Now if instead you add a bunch of cardio all at once and you overdo it your body will adapt and start burning less calories from your cardio sessions.

You may also find yourself getting hungrier and taking those calories right back in by eating more food and on top of all that too much cardio will tire you out preventing you from being able to perform optimally during your weight training workouts.

The bottom line is don’t be a cardio queen and instead add cardio in slowly.

It’s also recommended that you also stick to high-intensity interval training (HIIT). With HIIT you can alternate between short 15 to 60 second burst rounds of intense aerobic exercises like Sprint’s, medicine ball slams or burpees.

Then combine that with less intense recovery periods in between. For example walking for 15 to 60 seconds in between each sprint.

Performing cardio like this will help you burn more calories in a shorter amount of time than typical steady-state cardio exercises like running on a treadmill for example.

Lifestyle and Medical Conditions

In this article on discovering how to lose thigh fat, I decided to not bore you with the usual lifestyle changes and common diet tips. Diet tips such as drinking adequate water, limiting your intake of refined carbs and sugar, and portion control, just to name a few.

They are certainly important to your health and you should follow these tips if you want to get great looking legs.

However, there are many people especially women, who have tried every diet in their attempt to lose thigh fat, tone up their legs and get a thigh gap. All these without much success.

So what you need to focus on is to try to lose overall body fat with the exercises listed above, without neglecting healthy eating habits.

What About Lipedema?

There is a medical condition called lipedema that affects about 11 percent of women according to available studies. Briefly, this condition is characterized by a disproportionate accumulation of fat in the lower part of the body, typically in the legs and buttocks.

In this condition, the fat does not respond to dieting or any of the fat loss exercises that have even been proven to work in many people.

If you have an unusually high accumulation of fat in your legs and lower body, please read this article below from WebMD for a better understanding and I recommend you go see your doctor.

Conclusion

Barring any medical conditions such as lipedema, it’s important to understand that transforming your legs to a thing of beauty takes time, effort and consistency. Stick to healthy diets that consists of wholegrain, single-ingredient foods.

You cannot spot train fat loss from any area of your body. Your body will decide where to lose fat. However, if you focus on losing fat overall, you will be able to lose thigh fat as well.

Rarely eat (if you can’t cut them out completely) refined and processed foods, limit your sugar intake and be consistent with your weight training and exercises.

With time and patience you should have a healthy body and the leg gaps you want. If you have any comments or additional tips on how to lose thigh fat, let us know in the comments section below.