When working out, it's common to focus your efforts on areas of the body that seem especially saggy. However, the inner thighs can be a rather troublesome spot, since many exercises don't target these muscles. Plus, if you are overweight, loose skin may form in this area, causing your legs to appear droopy and anything but svelte. Specific exercises can aid you in your efforts toward tighter thigh skin, but might not remedy the situation completely.
Identification
Loose skin on the inner thighs is easy to identify. It appears as droopy patches of skin that hang down from the muscle without tension or tone. The skin may look wrinkly or have cellulite. If you have recently lost a significant amount of weight, the loose skin may be even more pronounced.
Loose Inner Thigh Skin Causes
Before you can even think about using exercise to tighten up the loose skin on your thighs, you need to understand why it showed up in the first place. Being overweight or obese is a primary cause of extra skin. As your weight increases, your skin expands to include the added fat. While losing weight is a step in the right direction to remedying this problem, losing weight too quickly can actually worsen the appearance of the skin if your body cannot naturally reabsorb the extra skin quickly enough, according to Tom Venuto, author of "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle." Additionally, the skin on your thighs may loosen if you aren't very physically active or as a part of the aging process as well.
The Role of Exercise
You can tighten up loose thigh skin with exercise, though it requires the performance of the right exercises to get the results you want. Running can help tone your thighs, burn calories and encourage weight loss. Leg lifts and squats are also effective at toning the underlying muscles of your inner thighs and encouraging the retraction of loose skin. According to Diets.com, you can use dumbbells to help tone your inner thighs. While standing with a dumbbell in each hand crossed across your chest at your shoulders, lower into a squat. Hold this pose for a few seconds before raising back into a standing position. Ten repetitions is plenty to start to tighten inner thigh skin.
Exercise Limitations
Though exercise is beneficial in toning and tightening loose inner thigh skin, it's not a cure. In some cases, exercise just won't achieve the results you want. For instance, if you recently underwent weight loss surgery and dropped several pounds very quickly, the skin likely became loose just as quickly. This sort of shock to the skin can't be remedied with exercise, at least not entirely, says Venuto. Likewise, if you have lived a rather sedentary lifestyle and the skin has been loose for quite some time, it probably won't shrink very quickly with exercise alone.
Alternative Treatments
When exercise isn't enough to address the loose skin on your inner thighs, you may have to resort to other treatments. Eating a healthy diet is, of course, one way to assist in the tightening of loose skin, as is drinking plenty of water each day to keep your skin supple. However, if the skin is uncomfortably loose, you may need to undergo plastic surgery to achieve the results you want. Liposuction can remove fat within the loose skin and body contouring can be used to cut away the excess tissue and lift what remains so that it sits higher on the body and more in line with the natural shape of the leg, reports the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
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