Inner Thigh Exercises?

I've been undertaking a vigorous cycling routine for the past 4 months and working on some floor exercises for the past 8-9 months that help build up and smooth both thigh and bum muscles. Nevertheless, the exercises that I do seem to be concentrated on one area only, so I was wondering whether anyone could give me some exercising routines that concentrate on the inner and outer thigh?

I'd really appreciate it. Thank you in advance. =]

Do you have access to a gym? There are some machines for thighs at my gym that I love. Some pilates moves also work the thighs.

I've always hoped to have access to a gym, but seeing as I live in asia (where everyone is born SKINNY as sticks) and literally hours from town, there's little chance of me havingi access to a gym.

Therefore, I stick to routines that I can do at home. That is, using stationary bikes and adopting exercise routines that I research on through the internet.

I find that wall sits make my inner thigh muscles hurt the next day. Maybe try those?

Ooh, okay.

I've thought of attempting those already (skii-sits), and although I've come around to actually trying them out, I never really maintained a routine with them.

Thank you for sharing though! Time to pull up my sleeves and get down to work. ^^

Why would you want to concentrate on a muscle that, no matter how much you work it, won't look any different?

The inner and outer thigh muscles are tiny, nobody can see them, and your body wasn't designed to do any movement which focuses on them.

Original Post by floggingsully:

Why would you want to concentrate on a muscle that, no matter how much you work it, won't look any different?

The inner and outer thigh muscles are tiny, nobody can see them, and your body wasn't designed to do any movement which focuses on them.

 If they were tiny, then I wouldn't be asking for some sort of routine that would provide me with chance to make them significantly smaller, because honestly, I'm not happy with my thighs in general. I just feel that they could be smaller (and by a great amount)... and knowing myself, I'm bound to go to any length to attempt to do something about it.

But how would they NOT look any different?

I believe there are certain squats you can do to target the inner thighs.  I think they are called sumo squats?  I'd go onto shape.com or similar sites and google inner thigh workouts and see what you find.  I really need to tone mine up to!  there's a inner thigh machine at the gym; but I feel weird using it b/c there are men all around and I'm sitting there pushing two weights together w/ my legs.  It's kinda gross.  LOL!

Original Post by themassivetribulation:

 If they were tiny, then I wouldn't be asking for some sort of routine that would provide me with chance to make them significantly smaller, because honestly, I'm not happy with my thighs in general. I just feel that they could be smaller (and by a great amount)... and knowing myself, I'm bound to go to any length to attempt to do something about it.

So you are trying to spot burn the fat there, not increase the muscle?

Lie on your back with your legs in the air and put an exercise between your calfs. Squeeze the ball and hold for for 3 seconds. You can definitely feel the burn on your inner thighs!

The inner thigh muscles are marked and colored in on this anatomy chart - now you tell, me, do you think a muscle about half the size of your palm and roughly the thickness of your hand will make a significant difference to the appearance of that area?

  Chances are the problem isn't  muscle - and exercises that specifically target one area will not do anything useful to selectively burn fat from that area.

 Feeling the burn in one particular muscle doesn't tell you anything about whether you're performing a useful exercise or not; while performing isometric contractions with a ball might overload a particular muscle's endurance capacity and make you feel it more, isometric contractions don't give particularly useful training responses from the muscle.

 I sometimes go to Shape.com to see what sort of lies and misinformation about exercise physiology the marketing department at Gaiam or Guthy-Renker has come up with this month, but there's nothing there anyone should take seriously as a source for fitness information - stick to reading exrx.net and the position papers of the American College of Sports Medicine if you really wanna learn what's what. Shape is one of the leading peddlers of Pink Dumbbell Misinformation about exercise and has done more harm to the public's general fitness knowledge than most people are aware of.

 Best exercise for training the adductors and abductors in a functional capacity is the lunge progressions, stepups, weighted squat variations and deadlifts. Machines designed for isolation training are a good way to set yourself up for injury and dysfunction-inducing strength imbalances, not at all useful for any results you may actually want.

I've done inner thigh exercises on and off for about 15 years now and never injured myself.  I'm going to try to explain the exercise I always did.

Lie on your left side, propped up on your elbow.

Bend right knee and put your right foot flat on the floor in front of your left leg.

Lift your left leg towards the ceiling.  It's a small movement.

I found a similar exercise from Shape (I feel like I'm going to be bombarded with hypocrite comments just typing the word on this post).  It's much more advanced and I haven't tried it but it gives you an idea of the positioning.  http://www.fitnessmagazine.com/bettertv/?lid= 1348327096&tid=1355446598&cid=1370863 185

Also, side lunges will help some but this is the old school exercise from the days when people didn't do 15 different movements at once to save time.

I hope that helps!

Sorry you have gotten some jerks who instead of helping you have tried to make you feel like an idiot...don't pay them any attention...

I noticed a difference in my inner thighs (which is one of my trouble spots too) when I did a lot of walking uphill.  Hope that helps.

Marly

I don't think people are trying to be jerks, I think they are trying to point out that strengthening those tiny muscles won't do anything because that isn't the problem...it's the fat that's the problem  and the only way to get rid of it is to watch your diet, do strength training that targets the big muscles (squats, lunges) and do some sort of cardio...if you do those 3 right then your body fat will go down and some of that will at some point come off the thigh area...but doing exercises to strengthen the inner thigh muscles will make no difference and isn't effective or efficient...i think that's what people are trying to say, and i don't think they mean to be jerks or anything, just trying to point out that the OP's question isn't asking the right things...i hope that helped

edit: just want to be clear that I didn't think anyone was being a jerk...only that the op took it as being people being jerks which wasn't anyone's goal/aim

There are ways to say things.

Original Post by marlyken:

Sorry you have gotten some jerks who instead of helping you have tried to make you feel like an idiot...don't pay them any attention...

I noticed a difference in my inner thighs (which is one of my trouble spots too) when I did a lot of walking uphill.  Hope that helps.

Marly

The moderator of the fitness forum is a jerk? He knows his stuff, that's kinda why he is the moderator.

Gah people get so upset around here when you tip their little apple carts

Define outer thigh muscles... becuase i've been ice skating and playing hockey, and I can definitely see my quads bulging out like never before. However the smaller adductors/abductors, on the inside toward the hip and other leg and the outside toward the hand... definitely won't do any good for looks, just for the well being of those muscles (ie, let's not go pull our groins playing hockey! :P)

Original Post by rosesarered12:

strengthening those tiny muscles won't do anything because that isn't the problem...it's the fat that's the problem  

This.

Original Post by rosesarered12:

...but doing exercises to strengthen the inner thigh muscles will make no difference and isn't effective or efficient...

The problem isn't doing exercises that strengthen the inner/outer thigh muscles, the problem is doing exercises that focus on those muscles directly. Squats, lunges, step ups, etc are all good exercises that strengthen the inner/outer thigh muscles. 

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for replying in the first place; by taking their time to read and type out a valuable answer. Answers (both negative and positive) that have helped me tremendously.

I'd like to clear out my situation though; maybe it'll help to determine my mistakes or such.

Some of you have mentioned that dieting is crucial when wanting to lose fat. I know for a fact that the inner thigh muscle is considerably small and in comparison to others, and that it probably ins't possible to work on it as you would with others. Nevertheless, if it is the muscle that you can't work on, then maybe there is a way of burning the fat?

Thing is, I cycle (A LOT) everyday and then undergo some aerobic exercises that concentrate on my legs. Although I've managed to burn away the fat and work on the outer thigh muscle, it is now the inner muscle that has become the biggest trouble spot.

I diet. I exercise. I work out. Whatever I need for it to work. I would have hoped that cycling would work on every muscle of your legs, but it has proven not to do so.

Hence... any suggestions? I ought to have mentioned before that lunges and squats (anything that requires you to bend down or such) make my knees hurt a lot. Sometimes when I do lunges it's almost like I can feel the tendons in my knees tear.

I hope this has helped out a little. I'd like to hear what you've all got to say and how I can improve my exercising routine so that I'll be working on ALL of my muscles and not on just a set of them.

Thank you in advance!

Maybe the inner thigh is just where your body likes to store fat the most...meaning it will be the last place to go (I know it is for me); cycling, doing lifting, and a good diet will help you look leaner overall and if you keep doing it at some point your inner thigh will probably decrease, it just might take a lot of patience

be sure you aren't eating too much because you can't outtrain a bad diet and maybe try switching about your workouts a bit if you've been doing them for a long time

also I always was convinced I had huge inner thighs but it turns out they really aren't...i just got so fixated on them that I stopped being able to look at them objectively, so they may have gotten smaller, your eyes just haven't changed how they see them

hope that helped...i am sure others will come along with some more specific advice since there are many more people on this site that are much mroe knowledgeable than me!

Original Post by rosesarered12:

Maybe the inner thigh is just where your body likes to store fat the most...meaning it will be the last place to go (I know it is for me); cycling, doing lifting, and a good diet will help you look leaner overall and if you keep doing it at some point your inner thigh will probably decrease, it just might take a lot of patience

be sure you aren't eating too much because you can't outtrain a bad diet and maybe try switching about your workouts a bit if you've been doing them for a long time

also I always was convinced I had huge inner thighs but it turns out they really aren't...i just got so fixated on them that I stopped being able to look at them objectively, so they may have gotten smaller, your eyes just haven't changed how they see them

hope that helped...i am sure others will come along with some more specific advice since there are many more people on this site that are much mroe knowledgeable than me!

 

 

 Thank you very much rosesarered12. You honestly made me feel considerably better. I know for a fact that I'm not fat or overweight or anything, but I do have the tendency to overanalyse and overfixate on the tiniest things and probably make the biggest fuss out of them. It's just that, since my weight has slowly been declining, it's just my thighs that seem to stand out the most - specifically my inner thighs (which have now become my trouble spot). I would have agreed with you on one thing: that my body may store my fat there, however, that is not the case. My bum has always been my biggest fat storage, but I've successfully decreased and maintained it's size. I'm really quite happy with it now. ^^ But having my bum being my trouble spot, it has now moved to my inner thighs. All of my exercises have probably just concentrated on my outer and upper thighs and buttox, excluding my inner thighs (without me knowing or realising), so now that the rest is a little leaner, the other things that are not seem to stand out more.

As for my diet, I don't eat much. Really. I'm actually sort of worried because I've lost a lot of weight in my upper body. You can even see my sternum and my ribs on my chest, which is probably not a good sign. I suppose I'm following the wrong diet...

It just frustrates me to know that I've done so much and waited so long and so patiently... and still have to keep trying to find SOMETHING that will finally work on shaping my whole body. Also, it frustrates me that only the areas that I don't want to change, seem to change (although that doesn't apply for losing some bum weight), and not those areas that should. =(