Do Leg Lifts Help You Lose Weight?

To lose weight, you need to burn more calories through activity and eat fewer at meals and snack time. Leg lifts may be a common addition in fitness routines from Pilates to Jazzercise, but they are not a big calorie burner. Beginning exercisers may use leg lifts to build strength and tone, and athletes may use them to correct muscle imbalances. Leg lifts alone, however, will not help you lose weight.

Calorie Burn

• Leg lifts are a type of calisthenic, an exercise using simple movements to increase body strength and flexibility without using any type of equipment. Jumping jacks, push-ups, bodyweight squats and crab walks are other examples of calisthenics. A complete calisthenics workout routine that involves dynamic moves to raise your heart rate can burn up to 143 calories in 30 minutes for a 140-pound person. A half-hour of leg lifts alone, because they are usually done from a stationary position and do not measurably raise your heart rate, is not going to burn as many calories. To lose one pound of weight, you need to burn off 3,500 more calories than you consume. More effective ways to create that calorie burn through exercise come from large, weight-bearing movements such as running, power walking or dance aerobics.

Lean Body Mass

• Increasing your percentage of lean body mass creates a more toned look and helps boost your metabolism. Muscle burns a greater number of calories at rest than fat, so even when you are resting you use up energy, rather than storing more as fat. For people new to resistance training, bodyweight exercises, such as leg lifts, can help develop muscle. Once you can easily perform 12 or more leg lifts without feeling fatigue in your muscles, you need to add weight to build additional muscle and get stronger. You can loop a resistance band around your thighs as you leg lift, for example, to create this resistance. The bands come in various levels of tension, so you can continue to increase the resistance as you progress.

Spot Training

• If you are hoping leg lifts will help trim the thigh area of unwanted weight, you will be disappointed. The only way to slim down trouble areas, like the thighs for women, is to lose weight all over. Leg lifts can add tone to the thigh region once you have lost excess fat covering the muscles.

Strategy

• Don’t give up on leg lifts because they aren’t a quick fix to a slimmer you. They train the outer thigh and hip muscles, which play the important role of stabilizing the pelvis. When included as part of a complete weight-loss strategy, leg lifts add value. Aim to complete at least 250 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio weekly, such as brisk walking. This comes out to about 50 minutes per day, five times per week, and has been shown to spur significant weight loss, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. Leg lifts can be one exercise in a complete strength-training program that addresses all of the major muscle groups -- the hips, back, chest, legs, arms, abdominals and shoulders -- two times weekly. Eating a low-calorie diet consisting of healthy, unprocessed foods is also essential when trying to drop weight.