maratoolWindmills
How to do the windmills
- Lie on your back with your arms extended out to the sides and your legs straight. This will be your starting position.
- Lift one leg and quickly cross it over your body, attempting to touch the ground near the opposite hand.
- Return to the starting position, and repeat with the opposite leg. Continue to alternate for 10-20 repetitions.
Muscles worked
The muscles under tension are the hip abductors — gluteus medius and minimus, which drive the thigh away from the midline and keep the pelvis level when you stand on one leg.
A stretch loads them at the far end of the range they normally work in, so the position you hold is itself the resistance.
Other muscle groups are involved too: the glutes finish hip extension; the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down; the lower back keeps the spine from rounding.
Every exercise for:AbductorsGlutesHamstringsLower back
How this movement works
Force comes toward the body — you draw a limb, or your own bodyweight, in against whatever resists it. What changes between sessions is how far into the position you can get and hold, not how much is loading it.
It is filed under stretching, so the target is range of motion rather than force — a position you can settle into and breathe in, held long enough for the tissue to give.
What you need
These train the abductors too, using equipment this one does not:
- Hip Circles (prone)body only
- Iliotibial Tract-SMRfoam roll
- Monster Walkband
- Thigh Abductormachine
Difficulty
Listed at intermediate level. It assumes you already own the underlying pattern and can hold position under load — if the position breaks before the target muscle tires, drop back to a beginner variation until it does not.
Of the 8 abductors exercises in this database, 3 are listed at intermediate level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.