reckonerStanding cable hip abduction
A side leg raise on a low pulley with an ankle strap. You stand side on to the machine and lift the outside leg out and away. It trains the glutes at the side and top of the hip, the part a squat or a hip thrust reaches least.
Lift the leg out to the side, stay tall.
- Pattern
- Hip isolation
- Trains
- Abductors, glutes
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Clip the strap to the outside ankle
Fasten an ankle strap and clip it to a low pulley. Stand side on with the strapped leg farther from the machine, so the cable pulls it across your body.
Stand tall and hold on
Hold the frame with your near hand. Stand straight, hips level, standing knee soft. Holding on keeps balance out of it, so the side of the hip does the work.
Lift the leg out to the side
Keeping the leg straight and the toes pointing forward, lift it out and away from your body. Stop before your torso starts to lean, because past that point the height is coming from your side, not your hip.
Lower slowly, then switch
Bring the leg back under control until the feet nearly meet. Finish every rep on one side, then turn around.
What goes wrong
Leaning away to lift higher
A lean gets the leg higher, so it feels like more range. The extra height came from your side, not your hip. Stay tall and accept a shorter range.
Turning the toes up
Rotating the foot so the toes point up feels like it helps the leg rise. It shifts the work to the front of the hip. Keep the toes pointing forward.
Letting the stack slam
Dropping the leg back feels like rest between reps. It skips the lowering. Control it all the way in.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 5 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 5 kg | More reps 10 → 11 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 11 at 5 kg | More reps 11 → 12 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 12 at 5 kg | More reps 12 → 13 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 13 at 5 kg | More reps 13 → 14 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. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 5 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 5 kg | More reps 14 → 15 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. 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
What does hip abduction train?
The glutes on the side and top of the hip. In a ten week trial, cable abduction grew the upper glute max and the smaller glutes beneath it, while cable hip extension grew more of the glute max overall1. Use both if your glutes are a priority.
Cable or seated abduction machine?
Same job. The cable works one leg at a time and needs no special machine. Reckoner keeps them in the same abduction group.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
It can. It is logged one leg at a time. Hip is recorded against it, so it comes out if you declare that in setup.
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
- 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 training one leg with cable hip extension and the other with cable hip abduction for ten weeks, extension growing the gluteus maximus 9 per cent against 5, and abduction producing proximal dominant gluteus maximus growth and a small gluteus medius and minimus effect. Published ahead of print