Articles
Why You Have Skinny Legs & How to Make Them Bigger
There are three reasons why some women have skinny legs:
- Too little muscle: Your legs aren’t strong enough. This is especially common for naturally thinner women because if you don’t weigh very much, your legs don’t need to work as hard to lift you out of chairs and carry you up stairs. Plus, as women age, they tend to lose muscle mass, especially in their legs (study).
- Too little fat: It’s easy to think of fat as the enemy, but women are supposed to have generous reserves of fat in their hips and thighs.
- Your fat is in the wrong place: You might be thin through the legs and thick through the torso, in which case you need to encourage your fat to migrate down south.
All three problems look different, but they all share the same solution.
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The Ideal Women’s Waist Size: For Health & Attractiveness
Having a narrow waist is incredibly important for your health. Most research shows that your waist size has an even stronger effect on your health than your weight (study).
Your waist size also has a huge impact on your appearance. I’ve run several surveys on thousands of men and women, and waist size has a more powerful effect on a woman’s appearance than body-fat percentage (survey).
It’s healthier and more attractive to be overweight with a smaller waist than to be of normal weight with a larger waist (study). Most women know this intuitively, which is why it’s so common for women to strive for a slimmer waist rather than slimmer hips, thighs, and breasts.
But what exactly should that goal be? When is a small waist small enough? What’s the ideal waist size?
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“Why Am I So Skinny?” Why Some Women Can’t Gain Weight
In the middle of an obesity epidemic, as almost everyone else is desperately trying to lose weight, it can be lonely and confusing as a skinny woman trying to gain weight. The common advice is to eat more food, and that makes sense, but some skinny women actually eat quite a lot and still can’t gain weight.
We’re naturally skinny ourselves, and we’ve spent the past 15 years helping over 15,000 naturally skinny people build muscle, gain weight, get fitter, and improve their health. Our clients include naturally thin high school, college, and professional athletes, as well as women on our Olympic rugby team. We’ve also worked with underweight teens and grandmothers. This is what we do.
You’re probably naturally skinny because you have a thinner bone structure, fewer fat cells, a faster metabolism, a smaller stomach, or a lower appetite. Maybe you have all of those traits. I do.
Fortunately, there are solutions to all of these problems. In fact, most of them aren’t even problems. Having fewer fat cells is a good thing. There’s no downside to it. It’s a pure advantage, and one you can benefit from for the rest of your life.
Gaining weight and building muscle is difficult, though. It’s hard to build curves where you want them. You might find yourself accidentally gaining belly fat as you get older. It’s frustrating to lose weight when you get stressed or sick.
Let’s talk about what’s going on and how to fix it.
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Beginner Muscle-Building Workout Plan for Women (Home or Gym)
This is a 3-day full-body muscle-building routine for women just starting out or just getting back into lifting weights. You can do it in your living room with adjustable dumbbells, in your basement with a barbell home gym, or with a full gym membership.
This is a beginner routine, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t serious about it. Marco has experience training some of the best female athletes in the world, including women on our Olympic rugby team.
The workouts are designed to stimulate muscle growth, which makes them perfect for gaining weight and building muscle, but you could take this one of three ways:
- Bulking: If you’re gaining weight, this workout program will help keep your gains lean.
- Cutting: If you’re losing weight, this workout program will maintain your muscle mass, allowing you to burn pure fat. You may even gain a small amount of muscle.
- Recomping: If you’re skinny fat, you can build muscle while burning fat. This workout program will stimulate muscle growth, and your body will pull the energy it needs from your fat stores.
I’ll explain the workout routine, and Marco will teach you the exercises with tutorial videos.
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The Ideal Female Body Shape (According to Men)
This article is about the ideal female body according to men. I’m writing this because women read my article about the ideal male body according to women, and they wanted me to do the same for them. That article went into the science of beauty, but it was also based on thousands of survey responses from women, who rated photos and illustrations I drew.
So, I did the same for women. Over the past fifteen years, I surveyed thousands of men from cultures all around the world. You can see the results of one of those surveys here. Different cultures sometimes prefer slightly different things, but I’ll focus on what was universally preferred across all of them.
Some of these findings might surprise you. Most women have a fairly good idea what other women prefer, but they aren’t nearly as good at guessing what men find most attractive.
This article is long, so I understand if you don’t want to read the whole thing. Here’s a quick and simple trick to make yourself instantly sexier: have a drink. It will boost your attractiveness (to yourself) by 50%. This is known as the Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer-Holder effect (study). You don’t even need to have a real drink. The participants who drank the placebo beer got the same attractiveness boost.
If you’re looking for a longer-lasting improvement, or perhaps one that other people would notice too, that’s what the rest of this article is about.
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How to Get a Smaller Waist (With Before/After Photos)
The most obvious way to get a smaller waist is to lose fat overall. As you lose weight, some of that weight loss will be fat loss, and some of that fat loss will come from your waist. But we can do much better than that..
Have you heard of spot reduction? It’s the idea that you can burn body fat in a specific area by targeting it with your training. For example, to burn belly fat, you’d train your abs: sit-ups, crunches, and so on.
It doesn’t work. The evidence is clear. There aren’t any specific waist-slimming exercises (study, study, study, study). In fact, focusing specifically on training your abs would cause those muscles to grow proportionally more than your other muscles, giving you a larger waistline. That wouldn’t be unhealthy, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re specifically after a smaller waist.
And so, understandably, that leads most people to assume they can’t specifically target the belly fat that would make their waists smaller. But it’s actually the opposite: no matter what area you try to target, you always burn proportionally more belly fat.
More squats? Smaller waist.
More running? Smaller waist.
Yoga, pilates, spin class? Smaller waist.
It can work surprisingly well, too.
Seated Cable Row With Neutral Grip: Overview, How To Do It, & Tips
The seated cable row with a neutral grip is a great exercise for women who want to build some muscle in their back. You use a weighted cable machine that is set up horizontally with foot plates. Like other horizontal rowing variations, the main muscles it works are the lats, rhomboids, forearms, traps, and rear delts. It’s also fairly good for your arms, though, and should stimulate a bit of biceps growth. Let’s take a closer look at how to do this row variation, common mistakes, and how to program it into your workouts.
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Barbell Romanian Deadlift For Women: Overview, Proper Form, & Tips
The Barbell Romanian deadlift is one of the best female lifts because it’s a compound lower-body exercise that targets your hamstrings and glutes while also training hip mobility, good posture, and balance. The barbell allows you to safely and consistently increase the weight over time, allowing for easy progressive overload. The end result is not only an attractive, curvy body but an athletic one too. Let’s take a closer look:
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How to Make Your Butt Bigger in a Week
There are four ways to make your butt bigger in one week:
- Do a few sets of glute exercises to get a muscle pump. That will make your butt look bigger for about 30 minutes. It isn’t much, but it’s a start.
- Train your glutes hard enough to cause some soreness and swelling. That swelling will make your buff look bigger for a few days. If you train your glutes every few days, you can keep them looking fuller and harder forever.
- Eat enough carbs and calories to pump your muscles full of glycogen. When you eat more food, especially when that food is rich in carbs, your muscles will start holding onto more glycogen (which is made of carbs). That glycogen makes your muscles look harder and fuller. Training your glutes will cause them to store even more glycogen.
- Build muscle! Building muscle takes time, and you won’t gain a noticeable amount in a single week, but you might see noticeable progress in a month, and you’ll certainly see progress within a few months.
I’ll explain how to do all of this, and then we’ll give you some extra butt-building tips.
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Double Dumbbell Front Squat: How To Do It Properly & Tips
The double dumbbell front squat is a great variation for women ready to progress past the dumbbell Goblet Squat. It’s a great choice because while it hits the quads and glutes, it’s also a full-body exercise that hits the anterior core, upper back, and shoulders as you stabilize the dumbbells on your shoulders. The double dumbbell front squat will help to develop not only an attractive female body but an athletic one, too. Let’s take a closer look:
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