Will running up hills make my thighs smaller?

Question

How can I make my thighs and stomach smaller and flatter?

Answer 1

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you exercise them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

Running up hills will burn a lot of calories and build the muscle tone of your legs but:

There is no such thing as "Spot Reducing" it is a MYTH.

Unfortunately, you can choose a specific muscle that you want to make larger or stronger but it is IMPOSSIBLE to target a specific body part so as to loose the fat that sits on top of it specifically and make it more lean in comparison to your other body parts.

Different people loose fat first from different parts of their bodies, for example, If I loose 10 pounds you might notice it a lot in my face, if I loose 15 my legs might seem a lot leaner, but if my stomach is where my body most prefers to store fat (and is most stingy about giving it up), unfortunately I might have to loose 25 or 30 pounds before my stomach looks a lot leaner.

No matter if I do a million crunches everyday. I'll have rock-hard abs, but they will be buried under a lot of flab.

If for you your legs are where your body most likes to store fat then there is no way to make them skinny first, before getting skinny allover, not even if you run everyday and do a million leg lifts.

Work on just exercise and weight loss in general and on being healthy and don't obsess about a particular body part.

Answer 3

Kind of...Depending on your gene make up, you can tone and build. I run up hills and love it. I have smaller thighs but awesome muscle tone. Running in general will help with abs, you burn more fat in running then almost any other workout.

Answer 4

read tips on some great workout and yoga.( yoga will give you leaner muscle mass) on this site

Answer 5

yes even brisk walking every day for 30mins will do it