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Fix Your Adductors – The Ultimate Guide

This is the ultimate guide to relieving tension in your adductors.

In it, you’ll learn everything you need to know to fix the underlying cause — not just treat the symptoms.

I’m going to start off with some basics, but feel free to skip to the actionable advice here.

What Are the Adductors?

The adductors are a group of five muscles along the inner thigh:

They are the adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, gracilis, and pectineus..

These muscles help move your legs toward your body’s midline — a motion called adduction. But when they’re overworked or full of tension, they can cause:

Inner thigh and groin pain
Limited hip mobility
Poor movement patterns and muscle compensation

Symptoms of Adductor Dysfunction

You may be dealing with an adductor issue if you experience any groin pain when walking, squatting, or lunging.

You can also feel inner knee pain, clicking or snapping in the hip, or general pain that doesn’t go away.

And this can be dangerous to live with because it can spiral into bigger issues like hip misalignment or recurring muscle pulls.

Step 1: Identify the Cause of the Tightness

Before you jump into treatment, it’s important to understand why your adductors are tight or painful so you can stop it from happening again after fixing the pain.

The main causes can be:

Sedentary lifestyle – because sitting shortens and stiffens the inner thighs

Muscle imbalance – because weak hamstrings, glutes or core can force the adductors to compensate.

Old injuries – that haven’t fully healed can reoccur and trigger points build up post-strain.

Poor form in training because repetitive poor biomechanics will overload these muscles over time and put them in a compromised position.

To get lasting relief, your recovery plan needs to address mobility, trigger points, and strength.

Step 2: Stretch the Right Way

Start with my list of adductor stretches to see if it helps relieve the tension. I have them arranged from easiest to perform to most difficult to perform.

These improve blood flow, reduce tension, and prep the muscles for deeper work.

If that protocol doesn’t give enough relief, you need to move to the next step.

Step 3: Release Trigger Points

If stretching alone isn’t helping, your pain may be caused by trigger points — tiny, knotted areas of muscle.

And if trigger points are in your adductors, this guide will show you how to find them.

It goes over how to use massage balls and foam rollers to relax the muscles before targeting them with a stretch.

When paired together, a trigger point and stretch session is the best combo to truly relieve tension in any muscle group.

Step 5: Rebuild with Strength

The final — and most often skipped — step is strengthening your adductors and the surrounding muscles through a full range of motion.

This requires more effort, but following a full range of motion adductor workout is the best way to rebuild healthy muscles.