reckonerMachine hip adduction
Sit down, put your knees against the pads, and squeeze them together. It is the most maligned machine in most gyms and it is the one piece of kit that lets you load the inside of the thigh precisely, in small steps, with no coordination required and no shin on a bench.
Squeeze the knees in under control.
- Pattern
- Hip isolation
- Trains
- Adductors
- Kit
- Machine adduction
- 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
Most machines let you choose how far apart the pads start. Take as much width as you can control comfortably rather than the widest setting available, and use the same one every session so the reps are comparable.
Sit back and stay back
Hips right into the seat back, feet on the platforms, hands on the handles. Sitting upright and rigid is what keeps the movement at the hip rather than in your lower back.
Squeeze the knees together
Bring the pads in under control until the knees are close. It is the inside of the thigh doing this, not a general clench, and it should be a deliberate contraction rather than a snap.
Open slowly against the stack
Let the pads push the knees apart slowly to the starting width. Do not let the stack throw you open at the end of a hard set, which is the one moment on this machine where something can go wrong.
What goes wrong
Slamming the pads together
Fast reps make a heavy setting movable and the muscle spends almost no time under load. Slow the squeeze down and the weight you need will drop.
Leaning forward to help
Rocking the torso forward as the knees close adds nothing to the adductors and takes the hips out of position. Stay against the seat back.
Going to the widest setting on day one
A very wide start is a long muscle under load, which is exactly where a groin strain happens. Build the range you use over weeks rather than taking all of it at once.
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
Does this prevent groin injuries?
That is not what was tested, and the distinction matters. The trial that cut groin problems in footballers by 41 per cent used a program built on the Copenhagen adduction exercise, not this machine1. What is fair to take from it is that adductor strength is worth training. What is not fair is to move a result from one exercise onto another because they work the same muscle.
Machine or Copenhagen plank?
The Copenhagen is the harder exercise and the one with the trial behind it. The machine is the one you can load in small steps, which makes it the better choice when you are building back up or when the harder version is beyond you today. Reckoner treats them as alternatives.
Will this slim my inner thighs?
No. Training a muscle does not remove the fat over it, and this machine is no more able to do that than any other exercise. What it does is make the muscle stronger.
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
- Harøy and colleagues, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2019. The Adductor Strengthening Programme prevents groin problems among male football players: a cluster-randomised controlled trial thirty-five semiprofessional teams and 652 players cluster-randomized, where a single exercise program built on the Copenhagen adduction cut the average in-season prevalence of groin problems from 21.3 to 13.5 per cent and the risk of reporting one by 41 per cent