Maybe you were an athlete in the past. Or maybe you did a lot of high resistance leg exercises as part of a strength training program. Whatever the reason, you’ve been left with big muscles on your thighs and you want to get rid of them. Well, read on and I’ll teach you how to do just that.

A Bit of Background

There are two main types of muscles fibers: slow twitch (Type I) and fast twitch (Type II). Fast twitch fibers are further subdivided into IIa and IIb types. On average, humans have an equal amount of fast and slow twitch fibers, but there is a lot of variation. For example, Olympic sprinters tend to have about 80% fast twitch fibers and elite marathon runners tend to have about 80% slow twitch fibers. Interestingly, the type of training you do not only develops one type of fiber more than the other, but also seems to convert a small percentage of one type of fiber to another. Primarily, however, your workout will determine how your muscles develop, not what type of fibers you have.

Slow Twitch Muscles

In general, slow twitch muscles are those used in endurance races (as you may have guessed from the marathon runner example!). Slow twitch muscles use oxygen more efficiently and take a long time to fatigue.

Fast Twitch Muscles

Fast twitch muscles are much better at generating short bursts of speed or power but they also fatigue more quickly. Of the two types of fast twitch muscles, type IIa draws on both anaerobic and aerobic sources. Type IIb is purely anaerobic and provides the greatest short-term power, but heavy use of these muscles also leads to the most rapid exhaustion. Most important to your thigh-slimming considerations, the type of fast twitch muscle known as type IIb grows much, much larger than the other types when heavily developed.

Exercising for Lean Muscle Mass

Training for endurance in either distance running or swimming will cause a gradual transformation of some type IIb fibres into the smaller type IIa fibres. In addition, training for endurance improves tone without increasing your muscle mass. In addition, when you do strength training, perform a high number of repetitions with smaller weights. This will still tone your muscles and increase your fitness, while not adding the bulk that results from high resistance strength training

Putting Knowledge into Practice

So, when you’re on an exercise bike, make sure you go with the lowest resistance and increase your pedaling speed to compensate. Likewise when you are on a treadmill make sure you don’t use any hill settings and run on the flat (and obviously, run flat courses for distance instead of sprinting up hills when you are running outdoors, as well). You can still do leg exercises such as squats, leg extensions, and lunges, but make sure you use weights light enough to allow you to do three sets of 20 or more repetitions.

 

Danny Kettoola