reckonerMachine hip abduction
Sit down, knees against the pads, push them apart. It loads the muscles on the outside of the hip directly and in small steps, which almost nothing else does, and it is worth more than its reputation in most gyms suggests.
Push the knees out slowly, sit tall.
- Pattern
- Hip isolation
- Trains
- Abductors, glutes
- Kit
- Machine abduction
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg 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 starting width narrow
Begin with the pads close together so the movement starts from a long muscle. Use the same setting each session so the reps you log describe the same exercise.
Sit tall against the back rest
Hips right back in the seat, feet flat, hands on the handles. Sitting upright puts the work at the outside of the hip. Leaning back changes which muscles the machine is pointing at, so pick one position and keep it.
Push the knees apart under control
Drive the pads out steadily to the end of your comfortable range and hold there for a beat. It is the outside of the hip pushing, not the whole leg bracing.
Come back slowly
Let the stack bring the knees back in slowly rather than letting it snap them together. The return is loaded and it is half the set.
What goes wrong
Bouncing the stack
Short fast reps let you set a heavy number and put the muscle under load for almost none of the movement. Slow it down and the weight comes off.
Changing the seat angle between sets
Upright and leaned back are two different exercises on the same machine. Switching between them mid session makes the numbers you log mean nothing week to week.
Treating it as a warm-up
It is usually done for two minutes with a light setting before something else. Loaded properly for hard sets it is one of the few direct ways to train that hip.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 35 kg, 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 10 at 35 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 at 35 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 at 35 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 at 35 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 35 kg | 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 14 at 35 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. 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
Is the machine better than a band?
It is easier to load precisely and to progress in small steps, which is what makes a movement trainable over months. It has not been measured against the side-lying version directly, and that is worth stating rather than glossing: what has been measured is that side-lying hip abduction produced the highest gluteus medius activity of twelve exercises, at 81 per cent of a maximal contraction against 48 for lunges and hops and around 40 for the two clams1.
Does training this prevent knee problems?
That link is proposed rather than established. The paper that measured these exercises says as much in its own background: gluteal weakness has been suggested to be associated with lower limb injury1. Training the hip is reasonable. Promising it will keep your knees healthy is not something the evidence supports.
How does Reckoner progress this?
Reps first and then load, on the machine's own stack increments. The run above is a real one rather than a description of one.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Distefano and colleagues, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2009. Gluteal muscle activation during common therapeutic exercises twenty-one healthy active adults across twelve exercises, where side-lying hip abduction produced the greatest gluteus medius activity at 81 per cent of a maximal contraction against 38 to 40 for the two clams and 48 for lunges and hops, and where the authors describe the link between gluteal weakness and lower limb injury as proposed rather than established