If your body naturally adds muscle quickly to your lower body how do you stay proportional.

I have a natural tendancy to have my legs and ass grow really fast from very little stimuli. They also keep their size even on Fat fast (chest arms and abdomin shrank a ton). As such I cannot diet them smaller. I want to shrink my thighs and ass a bit. I realize this is spot reducing but how do you guys stay proportional… Those who have a natural tendancy to throw muscle on fast. How would you stop training legs and still stay in althletic shape? The problem is this my legs have gotten so large so quick that my thighs are getting huge stretch marks on the insides and they are banging together when I run so much it is ripping all the hair from the insides of my legs (can you say rash). This is a serious question. I was thinking if I cut out running and working legs directly I could grow my upper body to make it proportional but then I lose my athletic performance ability (this is unacceptable). Any help welcomed (oh yah and bring on the flames…)

I used to have a similar problem with regard
to hip size. The solution was simple: no squats, no deadlifts, no leg presses, etc.
With time I became proportional. For me,
leg extensions, leg curls, and the Med-X
Lumbar Extension proved entirely satisfactory for training those body parts. I’d suppose others might not find them adequate, or might need to add in abduction and adduction, but I did fine with this.

So far as reducing thighs goes, is your bodyfat quite low? If not that could account
for a lot of the thigh size. If your bodyfat
is low, then all I can suggest is not training
the offending muscles, assuming appearance is your goal; or if some particular degree of strength is desired equal to or less than your current strength, limiting training to such weights and reps.

I am pretty well proportioned but my legs are very large as well and I know what you mean when you refer to the rash. My inner thighs are constantly chafing and if I have to do a lot of walking in one day the pain gets pretty intense. I feel for you man.

Bill, I understand taking out the big movements to decrease your hip size, but what happened to your quads? Were you able to maintain quad size? What about adding more size?

what was your body fat % when you finished your fat fast and shrunk your upper body? Were your legs shredded? Also if you are afraid of losing athletic peformance then just work on maintaining your strength. Do a powerlifting routine with low eccentric times. Other wise do long aerobic workouts on the bike to specifically hit legs. I don’t see how you would lose athletic performance if you lost fat and mass in your legs while gaining aerobic conditioning. You realize that gaining mass on the upper body puts more pressure on the legs and the heart to perform at the same athletic level as before. laters pk

I have totally stopped squating (although it pains me on leg day and I get withdrawal symptoms)due to the rate that my quads grow, but I unlike you am still deadlifting due to I need to bring up my hamstrings. Is it your quads or your adductors that are too big, because it sounds like your adductors to me, as such you can do exercises that put all the stress on the quads (i.e narrow foot position). if you only want to keep the strength and power I would suggest working them less often whilst doing more upper body work and only do stuff like plyometrics or high load low rep work. like me do you find you have to by huge waist band trousers so there big enough and your legs dont rip the damn thigh areas.

Thanks guys I will give these a try. Any others welcome. As for the dude asking about gaining size on his legs there are about a million other posts asking that I would prefer if this kept on the subject. Thanks.

Oh yeah Bill my BF is about 12% or so now. It is not really low I could try lowering it some more but I really like my strenght at this level. I think I may try CKD. Do like a Natural Hormone Enhancement type diet see if the loss of water will help the chaff thing. Thanks again.

Chris, my quads improved.

I completely disagree with the more-or-less-religious statement often heard that “leg extensions are not mass exercises, you need squats for mass.”

In my case however for good results with
leg extensions, I must warm up much more
carefully than with any other exercise,
starting with about 35% 1RM and doing doubles with about 20 seconds rest, going up about 5% 1RM each set (this need not be exact at all), increasing rest period to 40 seconds and doing
singles when they become at all difficult, and then overshooting the weight that will be used for training, increasing rest to 2 minutes for the last set or two. All this sounds like quite a production but enables
me to work much harder in the work sets than I could with no warmup or with other sorts of warm-up.

No kidding, a weight that I might get only 3 reps on without this warmup, I could get 7 reps or so with the warmup. I suspect it’s because leg extensions are such an unnatural movement and something, perhaps the Golgi tendon organ, limits performance badly when I just jump straight into it.