
Your breasts naturally become less firm as you age when the skin covering them begins to lose elasticity and the breast tissue succumbs to gravity.
Pregnancy, hormone changes, and fluctuations in body weight also affect the shape, size, and firmness of your breasts.
Specific breast-lifting exercises don’t work. However, lifestyle changes, such as maintaining your weight through a healthy diet and exercise and targeting the muscles beneath the breasts with weight-bearing exercises, may help improve the appearance of your breasts and prevent further loss of firmness.
Why Breasts Lose Their Firmness
Ligaments and skin support the breasts. Over time, both of these support systems begin to stretch, resulting in drooping breasts and wrinkled, loose skin.
Frequent weight gain and loss can stress the skin and affect its elasticity. When this happens, the breasts lose their firmness.
Without surgery, ligaments cannot be shortened once they have been stretched.
6 Exercises to Firm Breasts
While exercise can’t tone or tighten fat, glands, ligaments, and skin, you can strengthen the muscles beneath your breasts, called the pectorals.
There’s no guarantee that chest exercises can help tone or lift breasts that have already begun to lose their firmness. However, incorporating specific chest exercises into your routine can help work out the muscles surrounding your breasts.
This, in turn, can prevent you from losing muscle mass beneath your breast tissue, regardless of fat loss, and can result in a slightly lifted appearance.
Push-ups, bench presses (flat, incline, and decline), and chest flies are go-to exercises that may help firm the breasts.
Give the following chest exercises a try during your next upper-body workout.
Also be sure to balance your chest workout by exercising your back and shoulders with rows, overhead presses, and front and lateral raises. Having a strong back and shoulders improves your posture, which can help prevent the rounded shoulders that can make breasts look droopy.
1. Push-Up
- Position yourself on your hands and knees, hands under shoulders and knees under hips.
- Step your feet back and straighten your legs so you’re balanced on your palms and toes.
- Check your body and hand position: Your body should make a straight line from head to hips to heels, and your hands should be directly under your shoulders or slightly wider apart.
- Bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle to your body, and lower your body to the floor.
- Make sure to keep your body in one straight line from the neck through the spine to the hips and down to the heels.
- Press into your palms and push the floor away from you to come back up to a high plank, still keeping your body in one straight line.
2. Dumbbell Bench Press
- Grab two dumbbells and lie flat on a bench or the floor if you don’t have a bench.
- Start with an overhand grip with your palms facing away from you. Your arms should be out to your sides, with your elbows upward toward the ceiling at 90 degrees.
- Exhale as you press the dumbbells upward and inward until your arms are almost fully extended above you and the dumbbells nearly touch.
- Inhale as you slowly bend your elbows again, lowering your arms gently back to the starting position.
3. Chest Fly
- Lie flat on a bench or the floor holding a dumbbell in each hand directly over your chest, arms extended upward.
- With a slight bend in your elbows, rotate your shoulders so your elbows point out to the sides and your palms face each other. This is the starting position.
- Lower the dumbbells to the sides of your chest in an arcing motion until you feel a mild stretch — not pull or pain — in your chest.
- Exhale as you reverse the motion and use your chest muscles to press the dumbbells back to start.
4. Dumbbell Row
- Stand with your feet hip-width apart and hold a dumbbell in each hand in front of your thighs. Shoot your hips back and hinge forward at least 45 degrees, as much as 90 degrees, keeping your back flat. Start with your arms extended toward the ground, palms facing each other.
- Draw your elbows up toward your ribs and pull the weights up alongside your lower abdomen.
- As you lift the weights, focus on squeezing the shoulder blades together.
- Lower back down to the starting position with control.
5. Dumbbell Shoulder Press
- Begin standing or seated with a flat back, feet rooted on the ground, holding a dumbbell in each hand.
- Lift the weights above your shoulders with your elbows bent at 90 degrees, palms facing forward.
- On an exhale, brace your core and press both dumbbells overhead.
- Lower the weights back to the starting position with control.
6. Dumbbell Lateral Raise
- Start standing with a dumbbell in each hand, arms at your sides, palms facing your body. Keep your back flat and knees slightly bent.
- Keeping your core braced, raise the weights out to your sides until they reach shoulder height.
- Lower the weights slowly to the starting position.
Best Workout Equipment for Your Chest
You can use several types of workout equipment and exercise machines to target your chest.
1. Free Weights and Weight Benches
One of the most effective equipment combinations for working your pectoral muscles is free weights and a weight bench.
Both barbells and dumbbells can be used with either a horizontal or incline bench to do exercises such as the bench press, chest press, and chest fly, all of which work to strengthen and tone your pecs and may provide a lift to your breasts.
2. Exercise Machines
Weight machines are a great alternative to free weights. Most gyms have machines specifically designed to target your pecs. These machines typically combine levers with either weighted plates that can be added or removed, or stacked weights that allow you to select the amount of weight you want to lift.
3. Resistance Equipment
Some equipment, such as the Pilates reformer and resistance bands, provides resistance without the use of weights.
The Pilates reformer is a machine with a pulley system that uses springs to provide resistance. It allows you to do variations of chest presses, flies, and rowing exercises that target the pecs.
The same types of exercise can also be performed with resistance bands. These are lengths of elastic tubing with handles on each end that can be attached to a door or a hook on a wall.
4. Stability Ball
A stability ball is a terrific option for an at-home pectoral workout. You can use these large, inflatable balls in place of a workout bench to perform a number of chest-targeting dumbbell exercises.
Stability balls also have the added benefit of challenging your core and stability muscles as you maintain balance during each exercise.
A Note on Diet as It Relates to Firm Breasts
If you’ve recently gained weight, you might find that your breasts are larger but have simultaneously become less firm than they used to be.
Losing weight can reduce your breast size, but whether your breasts will appear more lifted will likely depend on the size and shape your breasts were before gaining weight, what size and shape they are now, and whether the skin around your breasts has stretched.
Eat moderate amounts of whole grains and low-fat dairy and small amounts of healthy fats from nuts, olive oil, and avocados. These foods keep you fuller for longer, and they provide the nutrients you need to stay energized for your workouts.
Your daily diet should include plenty of water to promote elasticity in the skin, too.
The Takeaway
- While exercises can’t lift and firm your breasts, chest exercises can help strengthen the muscles underneath the breasts, promoting a slightly lifted appearance.
- Strength training exercises, including push-ups, bench presses, and chest flies, tone the muscles under and around your breasts. You can use free weights, weight machines, resistance bands, and stability balls for these exercises.
- A healthy diet can help you maintain your weight. Overall weight loss will likely reduce the fat in your breasts and decrease their size, but it may not make them firmer.
- Breast Anatomy. Cleveland Clinic. September 5, 2023.
- Breast Lift. Cleveland Clinic. June 19, 2022.
- Effective Alternatives to Your Favorite Gym Machines. International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA). March 31, 2021.
- Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025. U.S. Department of Agriculture. December 2020.