How Can I Make My Muscular Thighs Smaller?

I am a fairly fit person. My waist is only 26 inches but I have huge legs and thighs. My thighs currently measure 24 inches. I run about 6 miles, 5 to 6 days a week. My thighs are very muscular but they really bother me. Are there any specific types of cardio exercises I can do to tone up and slim down my legs?

Wow, you really do have a tiny waist (I’m jealous)! As you know, we come in all different shapes and sizes and sometimes our genetics leaves us with a feature we’d prefer not to have. We all have them and it’s something we just have to learn to accept and turn our attention towards the positive things about ourselves. It’s just mind over matter. In time what this will do is naturally alleviate our constant and unproductive focus on our large hips or thighs, small bottom and big top, or barely-there breasts. The last one is me by the way!

Some women are pear shape; others are hourglass, or apple. There’s athletic, slender, inverted triangle, tall, petite, the list goes on. The point is it doesn’t matter what body type you have, there will always be something you just aren’t happy with. For you it happens to be your muscular hips and thighs.

It’s also important to note that many men are extremely attracted to healthy and athletic women with muscular legs, tight thighs and a round butt which it sounds like you have. Most men really don’t like women who are too skinny and don’t have anything to grab onto. They want someone who is “healthy”. This goes back to how men are hard-wired genetically to be attracted to women who have child-bearing qualities like large hips and a fuller body. The aesthetics of a curvy women who is in great shape with a tiny waist and powerful sexy legs is a big time turn on for a lot of guys. So, if you’re currently single you might just not realize what you truly have in terms of the attractive qualities for the opposite sex!

With a true understanding of how genetics work, you’re going to have to work on accepting your situation to some degree because there is no way to make one part of your body slender or smaller, at least significantly. Not unless you lose weight all over. Now, you can tone and strengthen and this will naturally make you a little smaller, but not drastically.

If you weren’t in shape and running so much already I would get you doing some strength training and cardio interval training to build muscle and burn fat, which would “shrink” your thighs some. But you’re already on top of that one!

What I might suggest is that you change things up a little and shock your system. Doing this is going to make your body change. So what you might want to do is continue with your running but only do it 3 days a week. The other 3 days you could try some sort of interval training class like a boot camp. So you can force your body to burn more fat and build more muscle, which theoretically should make your legs smaller.

This is going to work your muscles differently, kick your metabolism in the butt, and leave you with loads of energy and a leaner body to boot. If you want to see any sort of change in your body when training, I can’t stress how important it is change things up on a regularly basis. By keeping your psychosomatic guessing and your muscles unsure, you’re forcing more calories to burn. This of course is exactly what you want to happen if you need any part of you to shrink!

I am sorry that I couldn’t tell you to do a specific exercise to shrink your legs, but that’s just not how it works. Oh and one other strategy is to do lots of toning and stretching leg exercises. What this does is help physically elongate your muscles and make more room for lean muscle to build. It also helps “lengthen” the look of your leg, which is what you want.

Implement these strategies into your workouts and it won’t be long before you start seeing positive results. See the positive in this, accept you for you and be grateful for what you “do” have!