what's going on everyone welcome back to my channel in today's video we're looking at exercises to help strengthen your groin muscles which are also called your hip adductors they're the muscles on the inside of your thigh and this is where people typically have groin strains when they injure that muscle group so the exercises are going to be used if you have pain in that area or you've had an injury like a strain to the muscle group they can also just be used if you don't have an injury and you just want to strengthen these muscles to help prevent or reduce the odds of having a groin strain so if that's of interest to you please check out today's video [Music] okay so when we start strengthening the groin muscles we're going to look at three exercises and they're going to progress from less challenging to more challenging so if you've got more pain or you've got an acute injury you might start with just this first exercise and that might be the only one you do so you just have to really basis on your symptoms and how your body responds for all of these exercises you're gonna go for three sets of around 10 to 15 repetitions basically you want to go to your tired or you get pain if pain comes on then that's your stopping point you just try to progress over time so for this first exercise it's called side lying hip adduction again it's going to be the easiest one the least amount of force on the muscles the best place to start if you've got more pain so you're going to lay on your side you want to lay on the side of the injured side so i'm going to lay on my left side and work my left groin muscles so you want to lay down and the leg that you're working is going to be out straight you're going to take the top leg and put it over the top to kind of clear it out of the way and then what we're going to do is lift that bottom leg up off the ground into hip adduction so as you do this it's making the groin muscles contract both concentrically on the way up and eccentrically on the way down so it's going to strengthen them and oftentimes this is pretty challenging it's a movement and a muscle group people often don't strengthen so even just this lifting the leg weight version can be pretty challenging for people so again three sets of around 10 to 15 repetitions if this is way too easy or you don't feel you know you don't feel any fatigue it doesn't hurt at all then you can add an ankle weight to this as an easy way to progress it okay so that's the first one hip side lying adduction for our second exercise we're going to be doing a slider lateral lunge so i'm going to use this core slider i'll put a link in the description for this if you need to get some of these there's even just furniture sliders that were out there that work for this bit it's got a smooth surface that allows you to slide on the ground and reduce friction it's a great one for groin strengthening groin rehab so i'm going to put this on the ground again my left side is the injured side so i'm going to start this exercise with my left leg on the slider basically what i'm going to do is i'm going to have my toes on the slider i'm going to slide out most of my weight's going to be on the uninjured side for right now and i'm going to slide out and then when i go to bring the leg back in i'm going to push into the ground with my injured side to bring that slider back up so the whole time i'm thinking about splitting my weight and in the beginning you may have more weight on your uninjured side so you don't hurt the other side too much and then as rehab goes along you can put more weight into this leg but essentially as this leg slides out almost like it's going into the split it's going to kind of stretch and strengthen the groin muscles on this left leg okay so what you want to do is make sure you do this on both sides because there's benefit to sliding this leg and there's also benefit to the injured side doing this sort of squat this single leg squat our groin muscles adductor magnus the adductor magnus muscle in particular also helps with hip extension which is the movement that we do in squats and in lunges so even just doing lunges and squats can help rehab your groin muscles and help strengthen them okay so that's our second exercise a slider lateral lunge our last exercise is called the copenhagen adductor raise this one's had quite a bit of research on it recently and can be really useful in terms of strengthening the groin and in people who have had groin strains it can help reduce the likelihood they have another one so this is the exercise basically you want to build up to as you go through your rehab process we're going to show i'm going to show two variations of it depending on your current strength level we'll do the easier one first and then the harder one so what you're gonna do if i'm working my left leg that's the injured side that leg is gonna be up on the bench here okay sometimes at home you can even use a chair if it's got enough space underneath it from the floor so what i'm going to do i'm going to lay on my right side and i'm going to put my left leg up on the bench with my knee sort of bent okay so this is the easier version it's basically that i'm going to change the length of my leg the length of that lever arm to make it easier or harder so what's going to happen is my bottom leg is going to go out straight and i'm going to lift it off the ground and i'm going to push down with my top leg which will cause these groin muscles to work to lift my body so it's basically sort of like an adductor plank like a groin plank i'm pushing down into the bench to activate my groin muscles and lift my body okay so that might be confusing to sort of understand but you can really feel it when you do the exercise i'm really using the groin muscles on my top leg to lift my body up and down okay so that's the easier version shorter lever arm to make it harder all i'm going to do is slide out and have a longer lever arm so now just my foot is on again lift the bottom leg and then push and lift so you kind of just see which one you feel like works better for you in some ways i actually like the shorter lever arm version because i feel like i can really squeeze my groin muscles a little bit better this one definitely is harder though so it's kind of nice to experiment with both again though for a lot of people this one hurts too much or hurts inside their knee if that's the case go to the shorter lever arm version okay so those are our three exercises uh there's others out there you could choose but these are three of the best that i like to use with patients you've got the sideline hip adduction then you've got the slider lateral lunge and last the copenhagen adductor plank so give those a try if you have any questions please leave them in the comments section i'll get back to you alright you guys see you next time bye