How to Make Your Hips Smaller: The Best Exercises

First things first, the hips are a bone structure and, as a result, are a fixed size – short of removing pieces of bone, they cannot be changed! So, you cannot reduce your hip size per se. This being said, you can reduce the amount of fat around them, giving the appearance of smaller hips.

How can I reduce my hip size?

The best way to reduce hip size is to reduce the amount of fat around them. Fat loss cannot be spot targeted. You cannot decide to lose it from any particular area, but rather must lose weight overall, from your whole body. Where it goes from first will depend more on genetics than anything else.

To lose weight, and thus reduce hip size, you will need to maintain a daily caloric deficit. This should be roughly 500 calories per day for every pound you want to lose per week and can be created using a combination of restricted food intake and increased energy expenditure (exercise).

For example, if you want to lose 2lbs (1kg) per week, you will need a daily caloric deficit of 1000. If your maintenance intake is 2600, this means 1600. You should aim for a mix of expenditure and dietary restriction. Thus, you could eat 2000 calories, giving you a deficit of 600. You could then top this up by performing 400 calories worth of exercise, bringing you down to your goal of 1600.

10 exercises to slim your hips

Let’s break this into two sections. To ‘slim’ your hips, we will want exercises that are metabolically demanding, and so will help you to create and maintain a caloric deficit, and those that build muscle around the hips, to give them a toned appearance when the fat is gone.

Weight loss

These are all metabolically demanding exercises that will utilise the muscles in and around your hips whilst allowing you to burn through a lot of calories. They can be performed regularly (daily, if you want to) and should last for anything upwards of 20 minutes per session.

1. Swimming
2. Cycling
3. Sprinting
4. Skipping
5. Boxing

Muscle building

These are all exercises designed to stimulate muscular growth (hypertrophy) through the muscles in and around hips, including the muscles of the obliques and legs that sit above and below them. They can be performed several times per week. Go for 3-4 sets of 10-16 reps each, except for the side planks which will require 20-40 second holds rather than reps.

1. Double banded pull through
2. Banded hip march
3. Banded squats
4. Side planks
5. Bulgarian split squats