We asked where you buy jeans that actually fit if you have the butt and legs of someone who works out a lot. Standard sized jeans that fit your waist may not be able to squeeze over your quads, and it turns out athletes of many sorts (lifters, cyclists, and more) have this problem. Today, we present some possible solutions.
So far, we haven’t heard from anyone who has tried brands that cater specifically to athletes, like Barbell, so those are still a mystery. That kind of makes sense: when you’ve been disappointed by jean after jean, buying pricey ones online is a gamble.
The caveat that applies to all of these recommendations, of course, is that we’re all shaped differently and have difference preferences for how jeans fit. So view these as a starting point for finding the right jeans:
Levi’s 541
If you’re looking for a men’s or looser style, the most popular choice seems to be the Levi’s 541 Athletic Fit. It’s designed to solve exactly this problem, with “extra room through seat and thigh” and 1 per cent elastane blended into the denim so they stretch. We also got a few votes for the 569, the 527, and 502’s with stretch.
Denizen
I promise Levi’s is not paying us to write this. Denizen, a Levi’s brand sold at Target and a few other places, makes jeans that fit muscular lower bodies fairly well, even though that doesn’t seem to be their goal. In other words, they have:
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Women’s sizing (men might like them too, but you’ll probably have to shop the women’s section to find them)
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…with “curvy” styles
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…and a lot of stretch in the material.
“Curvy” is a code word for cuts that are larger in the hips for the same size waist. It works great no matter what those curves are made of (fat, muscle, wide pelvis) so don’t think about whether you’d consider yourself a curvy person, just whether you need extra fabric and stretch in the butt and thigh area. I own a pair of these that are labelled “curvy skinny,” which sounds like an oxymoron, but they fit like a dream, and I wouldn’t call myself either curvy or skinny.
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Old Navy and Gap
Old Navy’s Rockstars with built-in sculpt and Curvy Skinny jeans have their fans, for similar reasons as Denizen. Gap’s True Skinny jeans, too. Some folks just said that these two stores are generally good for finding jeans that fit their butts and quads—just look for the stretchiest styles and ignore the fact that most of them are labelled “skinny.”
Honorable Mentions
These jeans were each mentioned once, so I can’t confirm whether they fit into any particular pattern, but know that there’s at least one happy customer out there:
Did we miss your favourites? Let us know!
Comments
2 responses to “Where To Find Jeans That Fit Your Muscly Legs”
Note: if your leg muscles are all hips and thighs, these might be fine recommendations (I wouldn’t know), but the 541’s I tried are not that great if you’re rocking crazy calf muscles.
I can only assume this just isn’t a problem enough people have, because the only way to get around meaty calves that I’ve found is a frickin’ boot cut.
While I know I’m in trouble when I can’t get jeans up past my knees. the fact that they are a micron wider than my calves is also a big problem.
This seems to be another in a series of recent articles that is almost useless outside the US given that we have almost none of the mentioned stores, and Levi’s has not stocked a lot of its un-skinny options in Australia for well over a decade. Add to that Levi’s propensity for creating multiple cuts of the same item for different markets means that any generic advice about a 5xx is useless. For example some jeans specialists have shown me different cuts of the 501 for US, Australia, Hong Kong and other locations. They are completely different jeans.