How To Get Skinny Legs Series: Top 3 Mistakes You’re Making
I hope you’ve been enjoying my how to get skinny legs blog series. I have given you the foundations of nutrition and exercise to help you achieve lean and toned legs. Now I’m going to provide you with some information about common mistakes that you might be making.
1. HEAVY SQUATS
Through my experience and that of others, I have learned that heavy squats don’t work for most body types. It results in overly muscular legs (but does amazing things for the rest of your body!). While squatting is still good for you and can really help tone up your legs, I would avoid squatting heavy (I’m sure most personal trainer’s are hating me right now).
2. TARGETING INNER THIGHS
There is a common misconception that if you do exercises to target your inner thighs, your inner thighs will get smaller. This comes from the idea that you can spot reduce fat from specific areas of your body. This is not really true, except for doing cardio (particularly running and walking) to reduce body fat on your legs (read more here).
In fact, by doing exercises to target your inner thighs you are actually making the muscle bigger, which may make your inner thighs look bigger. To reduce the size of your thighs you need to do cardio to reduce the fat (plus eat healthy)!
3. NOT EATING ENOUGH
Yes in order to lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit, which means eating less food than your body needs. BUT many people underestimate the amount of food they need and severely restrict their calorie intake.
I know I have mentioned this time and time again, but not eating enough food slows down your metabolism and causes your body to go into “starvation” mode. This means that when you do eat more food or have a naughty meal, your body will store it as fat.
If you starve yourself for a long period of time (more than 6 months eating less than 1200 calories), you will do long term damage to your metabolism.
The other bad side effect that can be caused by severely cutting calories is binge eating. Binge eating will DEFINITELY cause you to gain weight and causes inflammation within the body.
So please please don’t do any crash diets or juice cleanses or try to starve yourself, as I PROMISE it will backfire in the long run!
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Rachael is an Australian born certified personal trainer and nutritionist who holds a Bachelor degree in Science.
After struggling for years to find an exercise and diet program that is tailored to women striving for lean and toned body with no bulk she designed her Lean Legs Program. This program is tailored to each body type and focused on helping women get toned but feminine bodies, without getting bulky.
Her mission is to empower women and help them stay in shape in a healthy and balanced way.
I am convinced and can walking every day morng and evening tone legs
Hi lovely,
Power walking 5-6x a week can definitely help slim down your legs but we highly recommend that you incorporate the right resistance workouts for your body type and adjust your diet for weight loss in order to get the best and fastest results. The right resistance workouts will help build lean muscle and tone your legs. It will also help you avoid the ‘skinny fat’ look. I hope this helps. xx
I can’t slim down my legs
My trainer is all about heavy squats
And i want the model legs look
I don’t know what type of exercises to do
Hi lovely,
If your goal is to slim down your legs, there are 3 steps you should follow – do the right type of cardio, do bodyweight resistance training and adjust your diet for weight loss.
I have a very detailed blog post that will help you learn how to slim down your legs so please go give it a read.
It will definitely help! :)
Also, feel free to check out our 3 Steps To Slim Legs Program. This plan was made to not only lose fat but also slim down bulky muscle and achieve a more lean and toned look.
If you have more questions, feel free to email us at info@rachaelatard.com
Love,
Len
Does swimming Salem your legs? If it does how?
Hi lovely,
thanks for reaching out!
Swimming definitely helps get slim legs. It’s a great form of cardio which helps lose overall body weight :)
I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any questions! xx
Love,
Sanja
Hello I’m a teen ballet dancer and I’ve noticed that my legs have really have started gaining a lot of muscle after puberty will your program still work to give me skinny legs even if I’m still in ballet I was thinking of quitting and doing ganother sport if ballet is going to keep my legs muscular is there any oher sports that would be good for me? Oh and by the way in my family everyone also has a tendency to put on a lot of leg muscle especially in the calf’s and we have sort of a wider(not fat or “big boned”) bone structure will your program still help considering that?
Hi lovely,
Thanks for reaching out!
Since you are still a teenager (you’re still growing and developing), I wouldn’t advise our Program – it just hasn’t been tailored for girls who are so young. I also don’t want to discourage you from doing ballet if that’s something you genuinely enjoy! :)
But yeah, ballet is obviously pretty leg focused so if you gain muscle easily, it will most likely affect you.
If I were to recommend another sport, I would recommend swimming – it’s a great cardio workout :)
Love,
Marina