Ah, skinny legs! One of the few things that guys absolutely despise but can’t seem to escape from it. If we take the entirety of the current male world population, I’m pretty sure that the majority of them will have skinny legs, especially if you compare them with those of women. It’s a curse that seems to hit most men. And it’s not because they skip leg day (well, maybe), there are in fact many factors that play a role in this “phenomenon”. With that being said, why do most guys have skinny legs?
The main reason why most guys have skinny legs is because of genetics and the fact that, for them, fat is stored in the stomach and midsection first. Contrary to women where fat is naturally stored in the legs in order to support and handle pregnancy.
In this article, we’ll talk about the main reasons why most guys have skinny legs and why they’re skinnier than those of women.
Table of Contents
Why Do Most Guys Have Skinny Legs?
There are many reasons why most guys have skinny legs, these include:
Genetics
Genetics is pretty much the steering wheel behind the human body. It controls everything in it like the color of the eye, height, skin, bones, how strong we are, the traits that differentiate between men and women, and most importantly, the natural size of our muscles (anything that you can think of in the human body is controlled by genetics).
What I want you to do now is to focus on those two last attributes. First of all, genetics controls the different traits of male and female bodies. These traits include the voice, the amount of hair, the shape of the body, and so on (If you’re thinking about testosterone, you’re right, but even this hormone is controlled by various genes).
This difference in body shape is what gives women sort of a pear look and men that v-shape look, and the fact that women store fat in the legs first while men store it in the stomach and midsection first.
The main reason behind this genetic difference is that women store fat in the legs in order to support and handle pregnancy. If a woman has skinny legs, she’ll have a hard time, especially during the last couple of weeks of pregnancy.
In terms of reproduction purposes, men’s bodies don’t feel the need to store fat in their legs and prefer to store them in the stomach or in the upper body generally to support more heavy duties.
Another factor to keep in mind that is controlled by genetics is the fact that the natural size of the muscles varies from one person to another. This is the main reason why some men have big and strong legs while others have tiny and skinny ones.
Reproduction Purposes
As I mentioned earlier, women store fat in their legs in order to support pregnancy while men store them in the stomach and upper body to handle heavy duties and it all comes down to reproduction purposes.
This may sound weird since we’re living in a modern era but If you think about it, genes are inherited by our parents, and our parents’ genes were inherited by their parents, and this goes on for thousands of years in the past. In other words, there will always be a connection between us and our ancestors from before.
And during our ancestors’ lives, their main goal was to survive and reproduce. Men were going on hunts to provide food for their families, and women were constantly getting pregnant. This is the main reason why their bodies adapted to their environment and made sure to store fat in the lower area of women in order to support pregnancy and upper area of men in order to handle hunts and heavy duties. And this stayed true until our present day and will still go on for thousands of years in the future.
Height
Height also plays a huge role in terms of having skinny legs. Most tall guys will naturally have them unless they train them using some form of resistance training. According to BMC Musculoskelet Disorder, stature (height of a person) is an essential predictor of muscle strength in children, but could also be applied to adults. This muscle strength is what essentially controls how skinny your legs will be since smaller quads and calves mean smaller legs.
When you think about it, tall guys have longer limbs and bones. This means the muscles that will sit on top of them have a larger surface and thus, will appear smaller compared to a short guy that has smaller limbs.
Leg Day Skipping
This applies mainly to guys that lift and have somewhat of a muscular upper body with skinny legs. It just means that they skip leg day a lot or even ignore it. Guys are instinctively more inclined to train the upper body since that is what appeals most to them and to women and it’s the part that is most visible.
Another reason why they skip it is simply that leg day sucks. If you’ve ever trained legs, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Squats are some of the hardest exercises to perform and quads are the most challenging muscles to train since they’re pretty big so they require a lot more effort. And when you train them, you’ll wake up the next day feeling sore and unable to walk or do basic activities and you stay that way for like 2 or 3 days.
And even if you train them, it takes a lot of time to see results which demotivates most guys so they decide to just ignore them.
Conclusion:
As you can see, there are many reasons why most guys have skinny legs. It all comes down to genetics which is the main factor behind their appearance, the fact that guys don’t need to store fat in their legs unlike girls based on reproduction purposes, height, and sometimes, there are some guys that like to skip leg days (don’t be like them).