Why do your thighs expand so much when sitting down?
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They’re not expanding – tissue is just being redistributed from the back to the sides. The only solid parts of your leg are the bones. When you push on any part of your body, the squishy meat parts squish – for example, if you press down on your stomach, you can press down quite a long way and you’re only stopped by pain. When you do that, the tissue doesn’t disappear, it gets moved to the sides, which is what’s happening with your legs – the entire weight of your torso, arms and head is pushing down on the bottom of your legs, which pushes the muscle on the back of your thighs to each side, giving the appearance of expansion when you look down from the top.
No doctor here, but I’ll take a stab at this until someone with more knowledge can jump in, but if I were to assume it would be that you have a lot of muscles down there and they aren’t taut all the time.
As we’re bipedal animals all of our weight has to be supported by our 2 legs. This means that our thighs are some of the bigger muscles in our bodies (our thigh bones are also very big/strong for this reason). When a muscle isn’t tightened in use it feels much more flaccid. So when you’re sitting on this big bundle of muscle fiber, not using it, it spreads out under out weight.
To be fair, some people also gain fat deposits there, so that could be another aspect of it.
I’m not a doctor or anything but I’d assume that it’s just the body making sitting as comfortable as possible. Sitting down places a lot of pressure on your buttocks and thighs so they spread out to distribute your body weight as much as possible. Hope this at least somewhat answers your question.
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