Can You Get Rid of Gynecomastia with Exercise?

November 14, 2014

Many men who have excess breast tissue know one thing for sure: they want it gone, and they are willing to do anything to get rid of it. A quick search online will find you thousands of results for miracle pills that claim to “get rid of man boobs fast” and trademarked exercise regimes to help you “lose moobs now.” It’s no wonder I hear questions about these claims from men all the time. They want to know if any of these treatments work to get rid of gynecomastia. Here’s what I tell my patients and what I want men who are unhappy with male breasts to know. You may be the ideal gynecomastia candidate.

Gynecomastia is a condition that causes breast tissue to become enlarged in men. Sometimes that tissue is glandular, sometimes it’s fatty, and sometimes it’s even a combination of both. It’s true that exercise and diet can help eliminate fat in the body, and that’s probably why a lot of people assume you can get rid of excess male breasts by working out. For some men, the underlying cause of this condition can be attributed to marijuana use, steroid use, hormonal imbalance, environmental factors, or genetic abnormalities — none of which can be solved with exercise. But the majority of men with gynecomastia find that it’s in fact idiopathic, meaning we just don’t know what’s causing it.

If you look at a lot of these recommended exercise routines for getting rid of gynecomastia, you’ll notice that they suggest a lot of pectoral work. When you do intense exercise of the muscles in the chest, you are primarily building more muscle mass. Exercising a certain area doesn’t allow you to target fat loss; you lose fat all over the body in small increments. So this means that chest exercise doesn’t allow you to lose fatty tissue in the targeted area, and it’s not possible to eliminate glandular tissue with this strategy either. What happens instead is that you increase the size of your underlying muscle, which causes the condition to become more prominent and pronounced. So instead of getting rid of excess male breasts, you actually end up making them worse.

The fact is, gynecomastia doesn’t respond to diet and exercise because it’s a medical condition and not simply a case of being out of shape. Over the more than 25 years I’ve spent helping men eliminate it, the only thing I’ve seen work consistently and permanently is male breast reduction surgery. If there was an exercise or a pill that could fix it, someone would be a millionaire by now, because so many men are dealing with this problem daily and they’re really tired of having it affect their lives. We’re happy to be able to finally provide some real help to these men who’ve tried everything.

• posted by Dr. Frank Lista, MD, FRCSC