Strengthen your inner thighs with this low impact exercise!
This exercise is excellent at building inner thigh strength. Inner thigh strength is essential for keeping the head of the femur in the hip socket. It is also very helpful if you are twisted one way or the other in the hips to help stabilize your alignment. This exercise helps isolate that inner thigh muscles while keeping you out of the outer hip muscles (including the IT band and TFL), which often try to do the work of the inner thigh instead.
Important things to remember:
- It does not matter how high the bottom leg comes off the floor. The bottom leg might just barely come up off the floor.
- Keep your bottom knee straight as the leg comes off the ground by reaching the quad and calf down through the heel.
- Keep the top hip stable: This is very important. It should stay stable and not wiggle forward and back AND it should continue reaching down to that bottom heel as the bottom leg comes up. Imagine your top hip is a wall (a stable force) and your bottom leg can only go as high as that top hip can stay stable.
- Keep your abs pulled back toward your spine, pubic bone pulled slightly up.
- Keep shoulders down away from your ears.
- Keep your bottom ribs off the ground like you are creating a mouse hole in your bottom side (see video for more tips).
- Squeeze your sits-bones together, keep your tailbone dropped down toward your bottom foot, and keep your low abs pulled in to help you stabilize your pelvis for this exercise.
- Reach the outside of the bottom leg (part on the ground) away from your torso as you go up.
Watch the video to try this amazing exercise for yourself!
Looking for more leg strengthening exercises? Schedule your free 90 minute consultation.
This blog was contributed by our Pilates guru, Kaethe Birkner. Kaethe is a certified Pilates instructor through Balanced Body and dances ballet professionally at Continental Ballet Company. She has been teaching Pilates since 2012 and has been taking Pilates since 2004.