Hip Abduction Exercise To Improve Your Body Posture & Stability

Hip abduction described as the movement of the leg away from the midline of your body. We are taking this action without knowing while taking side step, getting out of the bed, and getting out of the car. 

The hip abduction strengthen those muscles that are required for our stable standing, walking, and rotating legs with ease. The hip abduction will help you in getting toned and tight backside. This leg exercise will also be helping you in treating knees and hip pains.

If you are an athlete or a regular runner, you can add this exercise that can strengthens and help you in shaping your lower back. Equally effective for men and women of all ages. 

Anatomy of Hip Abduction

The hip abductor muscle includes muscles of gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, and tensor fasciae latae. These muscles are responsible for moving your leg away from your body, and also help you rotate your leg around the hip joints. These muscles are important in stabilizing your body position when walking or standing on one leg.

Weakness in these muscles may lead toward pain and stabilizing issues. You must train these muscles to have better health there that will really help you in your regular routine works.

Benefits of Hip Abduction Exercise

• Reduce Knee Valgus: knee valgus is a term used when your knees are caved inward giving a knock knee appearance. This can be easily observed in young ladies and older adults. If you perform some exercise with improper form, that might lead you towards this state. 

Hip Abduction exercise will release the tension in all these muscles that will really help you to restore the shape and strength it need

• Better Muscle activation: the hip abductors are closely related to the core muscles that are important part of the body balance. If you are spending a lot of time spending on the chair then there are chances that you may have weak gluteus muscles. 

If you are not moving these muscle for extended period of time, they might get weak and you will face difficulty in doing some exercises or movements. You should know how to activate these muscles while performing squats. You can have resistance band for that purpose around your knees

• Decrease Pain: you might face some serious overuse injuries if you are having weakness in hip abductors muscle like gluteus medius. These injuries might include patellofemoral pain syndrome and iliotibial band syndrome. The major problem behind the pain of knee cap is PFPS when you have to sit for longer period of time.

Effectiveness of Hip Abduction

There has always been a confusion whether hip abduction weakness is a cause or a effect of knee problem. There are different opinions for relationship between hip abduction and knee issues. Yes! Strengthening these muscles will give you a lot more benefits.

• Study done in 2008 described the positive impacts of six week exercise that focused on hip abductor strength. They said that the physical movement related to the hip abductor strength can be significantly improved in 2, 4, and 6 weeks
• A study done in 2011 on 25 people that were there to perform hip abductor exercises. Amongst them, 15 were having PFPS. These 15 people found decrease in hip pain and increase in strength.

How to Perform

There are many variation of exercises that can be performed to target your abductor muscles. The side leg raise is one of them that is known by the most. This exercise is suitable for all level people. It effectively targets your hips, glutes, and legs.

Here is guide to perform side leg raise in proper form

• You need to lie down on your right side by extending your legs out straight.
• There is need to support your head. You can do it either by your hand or with cushion that suits you better.
• Slowly raise your leg as high as possible in comfortable range.
• You have to hold this position for few seconds and then lower your leg back down.
• Do 2 to 3 sets with 8 to 16 repetition on each side