The adductors are the group of muscles along your inner thigh that pull your leg toward the midline of your body. Five muscles are usually counted in the group: adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, gracilis, and pectineus. They also help steer and stabilize the pelvis whenever your weight shifts sideways, which is most of walking, running, and cutting.
Why it matters
Most training happens in the sagittal plane. Running, cycling, and straight-line lifting move you forward and back, so the muscles that resist sideways collapse rarely get loaded hard. That gap shows up in two places.
The first is injury. Adductor longus is the most commonly strained muscle of the group in sports that cut and change direction, and low eccentric hip adduction strength is one of the better-established risk factors for groin problems. The second is your squat and your hinge. Adductor magnus is one of the largest muscles in the lower body, and its posterior fibers extend the hip, so it does real work every time you stand up out of a deep squat. Treating the group as a vanity muscle for a machine misses both jobs.
How to use it in training
Wide stances load the group harder. Sumo squats, deep goblet squats, and lateral movement all put the adductors at longer muscle lengths under load. Side lunges are the simplest way to add frontal-plane work to a program that has none.
For dedicated work, the Copenhagen plank is the strongest option available. It loads the adductors eccentrically at long muscle lengths using bodyweight alone, and it is the exercise the groin-injury prevention research is built on. Two or three sets per side, twice a week, alongside a normal lower-body program is enough to move the needle. Start with the short-lever version (bench under the knee rather than the ankle) and expect genuine soreness in the first two weeks.
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Want the trials behind adductor training? Read our full breakdown: Copenhagen plank: what the research actually shows.