Adductors

legs4 muscles

The adductors are the muscles of your inner thigh that pull your legs together. They are much more involved in squatting and sprinting than their reputation as an inner-thigh machine suggests.

Adductors: its 4 muscles highlighted on an anatomical figure, from the front — Adductor Magnus, Adductor Longus, Adductor Brevis and Gracilis.
Where the adductors sit, from the front.

Five muscles fill the inner thigh, four of which are shown here: adductor magnus, adductor longus, adductor brevis and gracilis. All of them run from the pubic region of the pelvis down to the thigh bone, except gracilis, which continues past the knee to the shin.

Their shared job is adduction — pulling the thigh in toward the midline, and stopping it being pulled outward. That happens constantly in walking and running, where the adductors control how far the leg swings sideways with every step.

What their name hides is how much hip flexion and extension they also do. The adductors have a large cross-sectional area and cross the hip at an angle that lets them contribute to both, and the largest of them — adductor magnus — is a powerful hip extensor in its own right, comparable to the glutes and hamstrings in a deep squat.

This is why they are considerably more important to squatting than most people expect. In a wide-stance squat the adductors are among the primary muscles moving the weight, and even in a normal stance they contribute substantially out of the bottom.

Grouping them under one name is gym vocabulary. They are separate muscles with different attachments and, in the case of adductor magnus, more than one nerve supply.

Training notes

They are trained by squatting, and the wider the stance the more of the work is theirs. Sumo deadlifts, wide-stance squats and any lunge or split squat with a lateral component all load them heavily.

Adduction machines have a poor reputation and do not deserve all of it. They load the muscle through its actual range, which nothing else in a normal program does, and they are a reasonable addition when the adductors are the weak point in a wide-stance lift.

Depth matters here as it does for the glutes. The adductors contribute most out of the bottom of a squat, so a partial squat trains them least.

The idea that adductor work makes the inner thigh smaller is the same spot-reduction myth that attaches to the obliques and the abs, and it is wrong in the same way. Training a muscle makes it bigger.

Cossack squats and lateral lunges load them through a range under bodyweight, which suits a muscle group that responds well to being trained at long lengths.

Muscles in this group

Exercises

Antagonists

Synergists