reckonerLoop hip abduction
A short loop above your knees, pushed out wide while you sit. It works the outside of your hips and some of your glutes, and the kit fits in a pocket. Treat it as a useful extra beside your main glute work, not in place of it.
Push out wide, come back slowly.
- Pattern
- Hip isolation
- Trains
- Abductors, glutes
- Kit
- Mini band
- Loading
- A loop
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 20 to 25 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- A heavier loop once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the loop above your knees
Pull it up above your knees and lay it flat so it does not roll. Sit on a bench or a box with your feet flat and your knees over them.
Sit tall
Keep your chest up and your hips still. Set your knees wide enough that the loop is tight before the first rep, and keep it tight the whole time.
Push out wide
Press your knees apart as far as you can with control, keeping your feet down. Hold for a beat at the widest point.
Come back slowly
Bring your knees in under control and stop while the loop is still tight. Then push out again.
What goes wrong
Rushing the reps
Short fast pushes feel busy, and the loop does the return for you. Slow it down and hold the widest point, and the set gets a good deal harder.
Rocking your body to get wider
Your knees travel further and the reps stop describing the same work. If the only way to reach the width is to rock, take the loop one band lighter and keep your body still.
Making it your main glute lift
In a ten week trial on a cable, hip abduction grew the gluteus maximus by about 5 per cent, against 9 for hip extension1. It is real work and it is smaller work. Keep your hip thrusts and squats where they are, and add this beside them.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 22 | More reps 22 → 23 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 23 | More reps 23 → 24 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 24 | More reps 24 → 25 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 25 | Next loop Heavier loopEvery set reached the top of the range with good form, so you move to a heavier loop. More pull, same reps. |
| 5 | 3 x 25 | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 25 | Holding steady Same bandThe lighter week was for recovery, not a test, so nothing logged in it counts against this exercise. It stays where it was before the lighter week. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Does loop hip abduction grow your glutes?
Some. The best measure available used a cable rather than a loop: over ten weeks, abduction grew the gluteus maximus about 5 per cent and the gluteus medius and minimus about 41. Neither study here tested a loop, so read those numbers as a guide. For the side of the hip, the side-lying version has been measured at 81 per cent of a maximal contraction for the gluteus medius2.
How heavy should the loop be?
Heavy enough that the last reps of a set are hard, and light enough that you still reach full width with your body still. Muscle growth has been reached across a wide spread of loads3, which is why a light loop can do the job when you work it hard.
How does Reckoner progress this lift?
It reads your reps and which loop you logged. When every working set was on one loop, at the top of your rep range, and you rated the lift Clean or Fair, it suggests the next heavier loop on your list. You can always choose a different one. There is never a weight on the loop.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Attarieh and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2026. Regional hypertrophy of the gluteal muscles is task-specific: differential responses to 10 weeks of hip extension versus hip abduction training seventeen young adults over ten weeks of cable work, one leg on each exercise, measured by MRI: abduction grew the gluteus maximus 5 per cent and the medius and minimus 4 per cent, against 9 and 2 per cent for hip extension
- Distefano and colleagues, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2009. Gluteal muscle activation during common therapeutic exercises twenty-one healthy active adults, with side-lying hip abduction producing the greatest gluteus medius activity of twelve exercises at 81 per cent of a maximal contraction
- Schoenfeld and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2017. Strength and hypertrophy adaptations between low- vs. high-load resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis twenty-one studies, with muscle growth achieved across a spectrum of loads and one rep max gains favoring heavy loads