reckonerSide-lying hip abduction
Lie on your side and lift the top leg. It looks like a warm-up and it is not: measured against eleven other exercises, this one produced the most gluteus medius activity of the lot, and by a wide margin1.
Lift with the heel, don't roll back.
- Pattern
- Hip isolation
- Trains
- Abductors, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Lie in a straight line
On your side with the body in one line from the ear to the heel, bottom arm under your head, top hand on the floor in front of you for balance. Bottom leg straight or slightly bent.
Turn the top leg in very slightly
Point the toes a fraction toward the floor rather than up at the ceiling. That small rotation is what keeps the movement at the side of the hip rather than at the front of it.
Lift with the heel leading
Raise the top leg by driving the heel up and slightly back, keeping the leg straight. Stop where the hip stops moving, which is much lower than most people go.
Lower slowly and do not rest on the way down
Come back to just above the bottom leg rather than letting them touch, so the hip stays loaded, then go again. Both sides, and let the weaker one set the number.
What goes wrong
Rolling the top hip backward
Leaning back lets the front of the hip take over and the leg goes much higher, which feels like better range. If your back is not against an imaginary wall throughout, that is what happened.
Lifting too high
Above about hip height the pelvis starts to tip to buy the extra range. The useful part of the movement finished before that.
Leading with the toes
Pointing the toes up rotates the leg outward and hands the work to the front of the hip. Heel first, toes slightly down.
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 10 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 bodyweight really enough here?
For most people starting out, yes. Across twelve exercises this one produced 81 per cent of a maximal contraction at the gluteus medius, against 48 for lunges and hops and around 40 for the two clam variations1. A long leg is a long lever, and that lever is the load.
How do I make it harder?
Slow it down, pause at the top, or move to the machine version where you can add weight in small steps. Reckoner has the machine in the library and treats the two as alternatives, so alternating keeps your history in one line.
Will this stop my knees hurting?
There is no honest way to promise that. The paper behind the measurement above describes the link between gluteal weakness and lower limb injury as proposed rather than shown1. It is a good way to train that hip, which is a smaller claim and a true one.
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
- 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