Abduction and Adduction Are Key Movements for Your Workouts. Here's How to Tell Them Apart.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below."
IF YOU'RE FAMILIAR with the words “abduction” and “adduction” but you're not exactly sure what they mean, you've probably spent some time on the floor of a big box gym and perused all of the machines. The thigh abduction and adduction machines are the two that act like giant Thigh-Masters, with upright bench seats and leg pads that you squeeze together or press apart.
Those machines can be fun to load up the weight and rack out—but adduction and abduction mean much more to your physique and movement than just squeezing your thighs, says Jarrod Nobbe, C.S.C.S., the head weightlifting coach for the Athletic Lab Weightlifting team and Garage Gym Reviews.
“Training in different planes of motion is going to increase your ability to perform, increase your tolerance to injury, and promote injury prevention,” Nobbe says.
Abduction and adduction are fundamental movement patterns that every gym-goer should be training, and they apply to more than just your thighs. The key is keeping them straight, and understanding the difference between the two. People often mix them up “because they sound so similar,” says Mike Nelson, Ph.D, C.S.C.S., an associate professor at the Carrick Institute. To distinguish the two movements with clients and athletes, coaches like Nelson will pronounce abduction as “A-B-duction,” and adduction as “A-D-duction.”
Here’s how to tell abduction from adduction, why each form of movement is important, and how to train these movements in your workouts to be a stronger, more resilient lifter, athlete, and and all-around human.
What is Adduction?
Adduction refers to a movement when one of your limbs moves towards the center line of your body—often referred to as the midpoint—an imaginary vertical line that goes from the top of your head straight down to the ground. So if your arms are out in a “T” shape and then you bring them down to your sides, that’s adduction. Or if your leg is out to the side in a lateral lunge and you bring it back to center, that’s adduction.
To remember the term, Nelson says, think about this as “when a body part moves towards the midline of the body, we’re ‘adding’ something to the body,” so it’s adduction.
Usually adduction (and abduction) is used to refer to moving limbs to and from the sides, or from a lateral position. Bringing your arms from the side—like when you’re bringing weights down from a lateral raise—recruits muscles including your pectoralis major, your subscapularis and infraspinatus, two of the four muscles of your rotator cuff, Nobbe says.
The muscles that perform adduction in your lower body are often called “adductor muscles” as a group.
“You’ve got your adductor longus, adductor brevis, and adductor magnus,” Nobbe explains. Along with some other small muscles, these three are found on the inside of your thigh, stretching from your groin down to your knee.
What is Abduction?
Abduction is the opposite of adduction: Instead of bringing the limb back to the body, abduction refers to a limb moving away from the midline of the body. To remember this term, you might think of your arm or leg being “abducted” from your torso, Nobbe says.
When you abduct your legs, as in a clamshell exercise, you’re using the muscles that run from the outside of your hip down to the outside of your knee, he explains. One of the primary muscles used is the gluteus medius, a muscle that lifts your leg to the side and rotates your hip to the outside. Your iloitibial band, or “IT band,” also gets involved, though it’s not a muscle—it’s a bundle of a type of tissue called fascia.
When you abduct your shoulders, as in a lateral raise, you use all three heads of the deltoid, or cap of the shoulder, says Guillermo Escalante, DSc, C.S.C.S, a professor at California State University San Bernardino and NASM’s subject matter expert for the Bodybuilding and Physique Coaching certification. “They’re the prime movers in shoulder abduction. But you’re also going to get, in the first 15 degrees or so of the lift, a lot of recruitment from your suprispinatus,” one of the muscles of your rotator cuff.
The Benefits Abduction and Adduction for Your Workouts
“If you look at athletic movement, a lot of it occurs not just in what’s called the sagittal plane, [where you’re moving forward and backwards,] but there are lateral, side-to-side movements that make a big difference,” says Nelson. But as we get older and get away from playing sports, our movements become more and more front-to-back: We run, walk, cycle, bench press, squat, and perform other exercises in this sagittal plane, but don’t move laterally.
“This lateral movement separates the ‘athletes’ from the people who are just fast,” he says. That's what allows you to slide and shuffle along with the player you’re defending on a basketball court, or turn and run as you try to chase down a fly ball or long throw in ultimate frisbee. And being athletic is beneficial even if you’re not playing sports—it could make you less likely to get injured in your daily life.
“If you think about falling down, you’re going to reflexively stick your arms out in front of your face—there’s not much you can do about that,” Nelson says. When you’ve trained your abductors and adductors in your hips and shoulders, you can make these kind of fall-saving movements more quickly, and potentially take the brunt of an impact better. “If your shoulders or hips don’t move in very good fashion, and aren’t good at taking on loads in different directions, then your risk of injury is going to be much higher.”
Training your abduction and adduction muscles will also help you become stronger in your front-to-back lifts, Escalante says.
The supraspinatus, for example, is strengthened during a lateral raise. That muscle “is a stabilizer when you’re doing an incline bench press, a shoulder press, or a chest press,” he says. The gluteus medius, which is involved in hip abduction, assists the gluteus maximus during squats, which means you may be able to squat more.
During bigger movements with bigger muscles, like the bench press or squat, these smaller muscles are involved, but they’re not getting as much training, Escalante says. Instead, the big muscles are doing most of the work. But focusing on these smaller muscles with abduction and adduction exercises allows them to be isolated and strengthened, so they’re available to assist and stabilize during the bigger lifts.
Upper Body Exercises to Train Abduction and Adduction
For upper body abduction, the lateral raise has been mentioned several times above. But Nelson suggests changing the way you do it.
“People tend to go too heavy. Just to get the movement down, I like it to be done while seated with more of a pause at the bottom and pause at the top,” he says. He also likes the move to be done holding small plates—like 5s or 10s—instead of dumbbells to strengthen the hand and thumb while keeping the movement light.
Plate Lateral Raise
●Sit upright on the end of a flat bench without back support, your feet flat on the floor and your arms at your sides. Hold small weight plates in each hand with a clamp grip, your thumb on the flat side of the plates.
●Keeping a proud chest and your elbows straight, raise your arms up to the sides until your body forms a “T” shape. As you raise, think about widening the caps of your shoulders away from each other to avoid hunching your upper traps. At the top, hold for a beat.
●Control the weights back to the start position. Pause for a beat, then repeat. Do 3 to 4 sets of 12 to 15 reps.
For adduction, Escalante likes a cable movement that reverses a lateral raise by bringing the arms down.
“Instead of doing a dual cable chest fly, I’ll do it in an adduction style,” he says. “I go from an abducted position down to the midline, or to the side, and that gets the entire pec. I’m also getting the adductors in that movement.”
Cable Adduction
●Stand between two cables with handles attached, the cables anchored slightly above shoulder height.
●Grab the handles out to your sides so your body forms a “T” shape.
●Keeping a proud chest, pull the cables down to your sides.
●Control the weights back to the “T” shape. Perform 10 to 20 reps per set with a light weight.
Add moves like these in at the end of a workout, Escalante suggests, after you’ve done your bigger lifts like bench presses.
Lower Body Exercises to Train Abduction and Adduction
Nobbe says you can train abduction and adduction in the same move: the lateral lunge. When you step out, your hips abduct. And when you step back in, you’ll use your inner thigh muscles to adduct back to standing.
Lateral Lunge
●Stand with your feet together, toes pointed forward. Hold your weights (if you use them) in front of your legs, palms facing in.
●Take a big step to the right, pushing your hips back and descending as you step by bending your right knee, keeping it tracking over your right toes. Keep your torso upright as you descend, the position of your arms not changing in relation to your body.
●Press your foot off the ground back to start. Repeat the move to the left.
Both Nobbe and Nelson suggest adding lateral lunges to your warmup routine. Nelson also recommends training abduction and adduction with another athletic warmup move—side shuffles.
“When you think about someone standing in an athletic, ready position, and now they’re going to move fast laterally to their right side, then fast laterally to their left,” he says. This is abduction and adduction in action, and “you’re going to get much more transfer from that [to real life] than sitting in a machine with your knees out in front of you.”
Nelson suggests putting shuffles into your warm up, and doing them explosively and athletically—instead of turning them into a type of cardio, he suggests doing a few explosive shuffles to the right, then resting fully, and doing a few explosive shuffles to the left.
“You may not go real far, but you want to make sure your movement is coordinated. You're putting your feet in the most efficient place and you're getting there as fast as you can,” he says. “I think a mistake a lot of people make as they're thinking too much about fatiguing muscle. I'm thinking more about how can I get the highest level performance from that exercise, because if they're going to be on the field, they're going to get rewarded for speed and power, not necessarily being able to go slow all day.”
You can also train lower body abduction with clamshells, Copenhagen planks, and, of course, the hip adduction and abduction machines. You may have seen fit folks on Instagram doing this move with their butt lifted out of the seat instead of on it, Escalante says.
“I really see zero added benefit from doing it in that position,” he says, and says he hasn’t seen any studies comparing the two different methods. But if you feel it differently while propped up, it might be worth doing for you. “Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. It’s worth investigating.”
You Might Also Like
