Adductor and groin strength for runners

Most runners look after their calves, quads and glutes and never give the inner thigh a second thought. Yet your adductors, the group of muscles that run down the inside of your thigh, are working on every single stride. They help control your pelvis, keep your knee tracking over your foot and stop your leg collapsing inwards when you land. Ignore them and you leave stability, efficiency and a bit of injury resilience on the table. Here is what these muscles do, how to tell if yours could be stronger, and a simple set of exercises to build them.

What do your adductors and groin actually do?

The word adductor simply means a muscle that pulls a limb toward the midline of your body. The adductor group sits on the inside of your thigh and includes the adductor longus, brevis and magnus, plus the gracilis and pectineus. Together they draw your leg inwards, help rotate the hip, and, just as importantly for runners, they help stabilise your pelvis and control the way your thigh moves in every direction.

People often picture the groin as a single spot, but it is really the whole region where the top of the inner thigh meets the pelvis. That area takes a lot of load. When you push off, decelerate, or change direction, the adductors fire hard to keep your hips level and your knee in line. They also work as brakes, lengthening under tension to slow your leg down. That braking role, known as eccentric strength, is exactly where many runners are weakest.

Why should runners care about groin strength?

Running is not the two-legged, straight-line activity it looks like. It is a long series of single-leg landings, and each landing asks one hip to stay stable while the rest of your body passes over it. Strong adductors help keep your pelvis from dropping and your knee from caving inwards, which means less wasted movement and a cleaner, more efficient stride. Over the miles, small savings in stability add up.

The case gets stronger the moment your training stops being a straight line. Hybrid sessions, obstacle races, trail running and functional events all involve sharp decelerations, side steps and quick changes of direction, and the adductors are central to all of them. This is also why the groin is such a common strain site: it is loaded hard, often at speed, and frequently when the muscle is being stretched and braking at the same time. In team-sport research, structured adductor strengthening has been linked to fewer groin problems, and while running is not football, the underlying muscles and demands overlap. Building strength here is a sensible, low-cost bit of insurance rather than a magic fix.

How do you know if your groin is weak or strained?

You do not need a lab to get a rough sense of things, and there is no need to be alarmist about it either. A few everyday signs suggest your adductors could do with some attention:

• A feeling of weakness or fatigue on the inside of one thigh compared with the other.
• Tightness or a dull ache in the groin during or after longer runs.
• A twinge when you squeeze your knees together, kick, or change direction quickly.
• A knee that drifts inwards when you hop or land on one leg.

A genuine groin strain is different. It usually shows up as a sudden, sharp pain on the inside of the thigh or high in the groin, sometimes during a fast effort or a quick change of direction, and it tends to be sore to touch and to stretch afterwards. If that is you, this is training guidance, not treatment. Rest the area, avoid the movements that hurt, and see a physio for any groin pain that does not settle within a couple of weeks.

Which exercises build adductor and groin strength?

You can cover the whole group with a handful of moves, most of which need little or no kit. The table below gives a sensible starting point. Treat the sets and reps as a guide, keep everything pain-free, and build up over weeks rather than days.

A few form cues to keep it honest. On the Copenhagen plank, set up on your side with your top foot and shin resting on a bench, then lift your hips so your body forms a straight line, squeezing the top inner thigh to hold you up. It is genuinely hard, so start easy: rest your bottom knee on the floor, or bring the bench support closer to your knee rather than your ankle, and hold for only a few seconds at first. For the adductor squeeze, sit or lie with a ball or a rolled towel between your knees and press in smoothly without holding your breath. On side lunges and Cossack squats, sit your hips back, keep the working heel down, and only go as deep as you can control. With the banded work, move slowly and resist the pull on the way back rather than letting the band snap your leg in.

To progress, add a little at a time. Hold the Copenhagen plank for a few seconds longer, move from a bent-knee version to a straight-leg one, add reps or a light weight to your side lunges, or slow the lowering phase to make the muscle work harder. The aim is steady, boring progress, not heroics in week one.

How should you fit this into your running week?

You do not need a separate leg day for any of this. Two short sessions a week, tacked onto the end of an easy run or a strength session, is enough for most runners to build and keep adductor strength. Warm up with a few easy squeezes and some gentle side lunges before you load up, and leave the hardest groin work away from the day before a big session or race, since the muscles can feel tender for a day or two while they adapt.

Ease in gradually. The Copenhagen plank in particular has a habit of leaving people very sore if they go straight to long holds, so begin with the shortest, easiest version and add time only when it feels comfortable. If a movement causes sharp groin pain rather than honest muscular effort, back off and, if it lingers, get it checked. Consistency over a few weeks beats one punishing session you then need to recover from.

How does this fit an Edge hybrid plan?

The trap with strength work is treating it as a separate hobby that competes with your running. Edge is built to avoid exactly that. Instead of a running app on one phone and a strength app on another, Edge treats running, strength, HIIT and mobility as one plan, so adductor work like this lands in the right week, at the right volume, around your key runs rather than on top of them. That balance is the whole point of training as a hybrid rather than juggling single-discipline apps. Edge is a free app to start, with Edge Pro from £19.99 a month if you want a fully personalised plan and a real coach to message anytime, and 18,000+ members are already training this way.

This article is general guidance, not medical advice. If you are new to exercise, returning from injury, pregnant, or managing a health condition, speak to your GP before starting, and see a physio for any niggle that does not settle.