4 Walking Tricks To Firm Your Thighs Faster

Walking may be excellent cardio, but you can easily squeeze more from those daily jaunts. With a few tweaks to your strides, you'll increase the burn in your thighs. "You can tone key muscles like thighs by including a few additional elements to your walk time," says certified trainer Tiffany Cruikshank, founder of Yoga Medicine and author of Mediate Your Weight. Here are 4 simple tricks to turn your walks into thigh-toning wonders.

Change direction: If you're able to get outdoors and walk, do it. Not only does it allow you to incorporate various types of resistance, it also allows you to easily change up your direction such as walking laterally. "Your inner thigh muscles, called adductors, are not specifically targeted during a general stride," says Sarah Kusch, a nationally certified fitness and wellness expert in Santa Monica, and the mastermind behind Prevention's 21-Day Walk a Little, Lose a Lot Challenge (check out the challenge here.) "Putting in the extra work of bringing your inner thighs together can help specifically target these areas." Incorporate 4 60-second intervals of walking sideways - alternate directions with each interval. Give yourself about a minute between each interval to recover. Salt in a little high-knee action to your walk for an extra dose of thigh burn. "Simply lift your knees as high as you can with every step forward," says fitness expert Dempsey Marks, co-creator of the PreGame Fit fitness/lifestyle program. "Try to get your knee in line with your hip. You can make this even more challenging by holding your knee at the top of the movement for 2 to 3 seconds before taking your next step," she says. "Try doing high-knees for 30 seconds at a time during your walk, and repeat it 2 to 4 times."

Find a hill: Sprinters always incorporate hill work in their training, and it's not just to get their heart rate up. Climbing that incline focuses the demand on your thigh muscles. "Walking up hills both backwards and forwards will increase the intensity of your walking workout and helps tone your thighs," explains celebrity fitness trainer Donovan Green, founder of the Chair Workouts app. Adds Kusch: "Anytime you add intense variables to your walk such as hills or speed, it maximizes fat burn."

Lift your legs: Here's an easy ways to target the back of your thighs: As you take a step forward, extend the back leg straight up behind you. "Raising your leg behind you contracts your glutes and increases definition and tone up the back of your thighs and glutes," explains Kusch. Try doing this for 30 seconds every other minute or so during your walk.