Tired of wondering how to lose thigh fat? Toning the thighs takes time and effort. You need to eat healthy and choose the right kind of exercises. Here are the most-effective ways to lose thigh fat.
Fat is stored in special compartments or fat cells called adipocytes located all over the body. When you eat more fat than required, it either gets stored in the arteries of your heart (causing atherosclerosis that may lead to chest pain or heart attack), in your liver (causing fatty liver that may lead to liver failure or liver cancer), or at adipocytes of your hips, thighs and buttocks. Excessive fat accumulation in adipocytes poses health risks including uncontrolled glucose and lipid levels, finds the journal Diabetologia.
What you need to do is to manage what you eat and be physically active. “No other intervention will do more to burn fat and improve your health than physical activity,” says a study titled Burning Fat Through Exercise. Choosing the right types of training can help burn thigh fat and tone your legs. Here are some simple forms to start with.
HIIT Training
Doing HIIT (High Intensity Intermittent Exercises) has a greater impact on fat reduction at thighs. Study in Journal of Obesity finds a significant 24% increase in thigh muscles and reduction in thigh fat after participants engaged in HIIT training for 15 weeks.
HIIT includes short blasts of intense exercises followed by small periods of rest. Simple examples of HIIT include running at high intensity for 30 seconds and resting for 30 seconds, or 60 second butt kicks and then 30 seconds of rest. Doing HIIT helps pack up the thigh muscles resulting in an effective strategy to burn thigh fat.
Walking
Fat deposition within mid-thigh muscle is a bit of chemistry, but nothing you cannot handle. Study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests walking 3 times a week to reduce mid-thigh fat deposition.
The study asked participants to walk regularly for a period of 6 months and analysed lean tissues in the mid thigh region, and glucose-lipid metabolism in the body. Researchers found significant improvement in reduction of thigh fat besides reduction in total body fat by 15 percent, and improved aerobic capacity by 8 percent.
Other studies too recommend a brisk walk of 30-minutes to cut down on thigh fat. Consistent walking for 6 months can tone your calves, quads, hamstrings and lift the glutes.
Lunges and Squats
According to Journal of Human Kinetics, split squats or lunges are an effective exercise to increase hip and knee muscle strength. The relationship between knee muscle strength and fat muscle mass at legs including thighs makes an important difference.
When fifteen young, healthy, resistance-trained men performed two different lunge exercises (in-line and traditional), researchers measured muscle activation of gluteus maximus, and gluteus medius (muscles of hips and thighs). They found that muscles in the anterior part of leg had a better activation than the posterior position. It concluded that lunge exercise, a multi-joint exercise can play an important role in core stability and muscle strength for both legs. Strength increases lean muscle mass, in turn enhancing metabolism and making it easy to burn calories and losing thigh fat.
In addition to the exercises, simple measures such as drinking sufficient water, cutting back on salt, increasing the intake of proteins and fibre have found significant impact in thigh fat reduction.