17/02/2022
Adductors
The adductor muscles adduct the hip but did you know they also internally rotate the hip and depending on which adductor you are thinking about it also has a role in flexion and extension of the hip?
Adduction is the movement where you bring a leg towards the midline of your body: for example from a star shape bringing the legs back together.
Our concentric nature of thinking leads us to think that we must strengthen the adductors through an active contraction, bringing a leg across the body against resistance. And yet given my opening statement, where are the exercises to internally rotate it and incorporate the relevant flexion/ extension?
This is where I like to flip the thinking. What if we consider how the muscle lengthens? After all my educational stance is that in motion muscles lengthen before they contract. This means that instead of adducting a hip, we would abduct the hip - taking the leg out and away from the body. The act of abducting the hip triggers a contraction response in the adductor muscle. It contracts to slow down the movement of abduction. Like an elastic band resisting a stretch always pulling against the direction of force.
We can then flip the whole thing and consider that the adductor is slowing down abduction, external rotation and in most cases extension of the hip too. Now the only question that remains is when exactly does this happen in our daily movements? As that is when you are most likely going to need your adductors firing on all cylinders ...
