Hip Adduction

🎯 Quadriceps🏋️ CableIsolationAbductors (2°)

How to do the hip adduction

  1. Stand alongside a cable pulley stack and attach a cuff to the pulley and your ankle.
  2. Step away from the stack, holding onto the stack for support.
  3. Standing firm on the foot not attached to the cable and slowly abduct, or pull, your cuffed ankle in front of your stabilizing leg.
  4. Repeat and switch ankles.

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the quadriceps across the front of the thigh, which straighten the knee and, just as importantly, control it on the way back down.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the abductors stop the knee collapsing inward and hold the pelvis square.

Every exercise for:QuadricepsAbductors

How this movement works

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

A cable holds tension for the whole range, including the point where a free weight would go slack. Moving the pulley changes the angle the resistance arrives from without changing the movement.

Every exercise using:Cable

These train the quadriceps too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.