Waist Training Before and After

Speculation about the effects of Corset Training has been going on since before the Victorian era!

REAL LIFE CORSET TRAINERS AND THEIR EXPERIENCES

Your body will change shape instantly the moment you put on a waist training corset and tighten the laces for the first time. This is because the corset will displace (for want of a better words) the fat around your middle and hold your body in the new shape.

So you can literally design your own body shape to a point.

Your figure will then obviously return to its natural shape once you take the corset off again (yes it’s a shame it can’t just stay put).

Wearing a corset regularly however, does have a long term effect on your body shape.

For years women have been training their waists, reducing them down gradually over months and years. Separating the truths from the myths about what can and can’t be achieved while waist training however can be tricky. What is and isn’t ‘permanent’?

So I’ve talked to a few of the waist trainers out there and they’ve kindly agreed to share their experiences and waist training before & after photos below – 

An Interview with Kathy Chin

Kathy is a model specialising in underwear, corsetry, cosplay, alternative, and fetish modelling and is a corset maker herself –

Kathy Chin’s corset training results – before and after 1 year of waist training, 3inch reduction

K C – I started waist training in September 2011, with a natural waist of 29″. These pictures [above] show my progress over the course of a little over a year, reducing my natural waist by 3 inches. I also worked for a while as a personal trainer, and was able to demonstrate exercises like planks, squats, and crunches to my clients, still wearing my tightlacing corsets under my uniform. Since exercise in a conventional corset can lead to corset damage, I am looking to develop a true training corset that is also workout-friendly.

S – You worked as a personal trainer while wearing your corset? I’ve always been told you should take it off for exercise, do you do cardio in your corset or just the stretch and strength stuff?

K C – Just the stretch and strength stuff. I never do heavy cardio corseted. I have tried walks and ran after a train in one, it’s difficult. Might look into something more elastic. Do note that I have gone back to 28″ without regular training. Waist training is more semi-permanent than permanent.

S – You said that you went back to a 28″ without training, what did you get down to? So many people ask me if they corset train for a few years will they still have a tiny waist when they take it off and if they stop completely, the answer is obviously that you expand when you take it off but it would be great to know first hand how much.

K C – At my smallest I was 19″ corseted but I expanded back to a 26″ when I took the corset off! I always say, if you want a natural X sized waist you need to get to Y size in a corset. Y being X minus 7”- 8″. These days it’s more around 24″ corseted.

S – Did you find it shaped your ribs, I get asked that one A LOT! Do ribs stay in their ‘corseted’ shape after you stop corset training?

K C – Yes, it did shape my ribs quite a bit. 🙂 And sadly no they don’t stay, at most I kept an inch off my starting size. That’s it.

S – Ah finally the myth busted! It’s nice to know what to expect.

K C – I’d love to get a professional opinion on that some day!

Special thanks to Kathy – KathTea Katastrophy. All images of Kathy reproduced with her kind permission.

A Chat With May Molinar

May is a corset trainer who has actually kept a blog of her progress. I had a read of her blog waist-training-journey.blogspot.de and a chat with her about her experience –

May’s corset training results before and after – Before waist training: 26.5″ waist, After waist training: 24″ waist

M M – The first picture was taken last summer, a few months before I began waist training.

I did not consider myself fat back then, but I knew my waist to hip ratio was not as notorious as I’d like, I felt I was lacking curve on the hips and that there was no way to change that. I know most girls just want to be slimmer, but that is not exactly what I wanted. I always wanted to be curvier,  I had good proportions before and had no problems with my top or bottom, it was the middle section that I did not like so much.

Dieting or going to the gym were not going to make a big difference, because when I lose weight I tend to get even less curvy on the hips and my waist would look the same since I do not carrying much fat there anyway.

When I started reading about waist training I knew this was what I was looking for, I saw all of Lucy’s videos, I read all I could on the internet (the Lingery addict, OCC blog, Romantacy web page, Stay lace, etc) I saw all of the youtube videos I could find about corsets, and I followed another girl that started her journey almost at the same time as me  (souljagurlsha).

I got addicted to the information and spent hours reading about corsets, then I joined Facebook pages like the tightlacing society and corsets on sale.

I believe doing research keeps you motivated, so I hope my results will give some inspiration to those who are starting this journey.

May’s waist training results

Hope this helps Scarlett. I’ve been training since November 2013, with a few breaks, the longest one was 3 months and it was over winter, so I had the perfect combination between excess of food and lack of exercise. I lost an inch of progress but I got it back in a little more than a month just by going back to the gym and doing a couple of juice cleanses.

To this day my waist is back to 24″ even if I stop training for a couple weeks. I’d say my ribs could compress more, but I don’t have the right corset for that. I am still using OTR [off the rack corsets], now in a size 20″ and I wear them with a slight A shape at the back [wider lacing gap at the bottom of the laces].

S – You look fabulous, you really have gotten a lot curvier, how long and for how many hours a day do you train?

M M – The longest break I’ve had was about 3 months and I lost some progress but it took me less than a month to gain it back. Also I train 10 to 12 hours [per day] now.

What May had to say on sleeping in a corset –

During the first months of my training I was very excited to know if this could really work, and I wanted to train as hard as possible. I felt super comfortable wearing my corset during the day (It helps a lot with my posture issues) but I could not understand how women slept with it on.

I started taking naps with my corset really loose, I was very tired after work, so it was not so difficult, I did it for a couple of weeks and then started wearing it to bed.
At the beginning I would take it off in the middle of the night, but I’d put it back on as soon as I woke up. I learnt that it’s better to wear a loose corset than no corset at all , so I kept trying.

After a few weeks I was able to keep it on almost every day, I decided I’d train 20 hours a day; I saw results a lot faster, I stopped after 3 months because I had reached my goal. My first corset was fully closed and I just wore it at work (10 hours daily) without losing any progress.

Special thanks to May Molinar. All images of May reproduced with her kind permission.

Photos From Renee Posey

Renee’s waist training, the results. Before and after – December 2014, February 2015…

R P – Here are some of my progress pictures, Scarlett. I’ve gone from a 54 inch natural waist in December to a 41 inch natural waist [June]. This is obviously mostly due to diet and exercise (when you’re as big as I was, it comes off pretty quickly at first), but I wear a corset 12-18 hours daily and find that it helps a great deal in me being aware of how much and what I’m eating, and I think it’s helped to shape where on my body the weight comes off from to some degree. My goal is to have a 28″ natural waist measurement eventually.

The first [picture] is from December 2014, the second is from February 2015, followed by May 2015 and June 2015.

continued – May 2015 and June 2015

Special thanks to Renee Posey. All images of Renee reproduced with her kind permission.

If you have images and a story you’d like to share of your corset training experience then please email me so I can add you to the page – corsettraining ‘at’ gmail.com.

Conclusion

Rib re-shaping

Dispelling out-of-date ideas about Waist Training

So the only permanent change you can potentially make to your body using corset training is to the lower ribs, which will compress over time to follow the shape of your corset (for this you’ll need a conical corset rather than one with an hour glass shape as these types leave room for the ribcage. Click here for more details on corset training shapes). But even the ribs will return part way to their original shape and at best this is still an educated guess from me! We need more information and more waist trainers to come forward with their real world experiences. The dusty old historic drawings like this one need to be set aside in favour of real women’s (and men’s), real world experiences. If you’d like to add yours to this page, email me at [email protected].

Internal Organs

If you plan on corset training to the extreme, your internal organs will be affected. A corset will restrict your waist, causing your organs to shift. This does place added pressure on your organs, similar to the pressure a woman’s body goes through during pregnancy. The female body is designed to take the added pressure and organ movement, but if you plan on undertaking extreme tight lacing you should do so under your doctor’s supervision.

Body Shape

The fact is that corset training results are semi-permanent and your body will generally fill out again once you stop. This doesn’t mean that waist training with a corset won’t have some effect on your body shape over time. We are talking years though, rather than months. The ribs are a solid bone structure, so as we’ve discussed are unlikely to fully revert back to their original position if corseted for long enough. Soft tissue however, will tend to expand back to its original shape eventually. If you do waist train down to a smaller size and maintain it for a number of years before stopping, you’ll probably remain a great deal thinner at the waist than you would otherwise have been, as we naturally fill out around the middle as we get older. However there are reports of it taking under a year for the body to return to its previous size, this really does vary from one person to the next though and like I said above, we need more corset wearers to come forward with their stories to gain a better understanding. Corset training really is more a way of life than an alternative to the surgeon’s knife or a healthy lifestyle (nothing is ever an alternative to a healthy lifestyle!). It’s no quick fix and should be undertaken for the joy of tight lacing, with a ‘long term’ mindset and a realistic (and safe) goal.