Your adductors, the muscles running along your inner thigh, don’t get nearly enough credit. They’re a key part of your core and pelvic floor system, supporting your pelvis, assisting your glutes in single leg work, and working in sync with your pelvic floor and core to manage pressure with every step you take.

Here’s what happens to your adductors during pregnancy, why their strength matters so much for hip stability, and how I gradually rebuild that strength with clients postpartum, plus the exercises I use at each stage.

What Happens to Your Adductors During Pregnancy

During pregnancy, your adductors spend extended periods of time in a lengthened position. As your pelvis adapts and your belly grows, your centre of gravity shifts, and your body naturally favours wider stances and bilateral movement patterns.

That shift makes sense; your body is adapting to real, necessary changes. But it also means your adductors gradually contribute less and less to pelvic and hip stability over the course of pregnancy. By the time you’re postpartum, it’s common for this muscle group to be underused and undertrained, even in people who stayed active throughout.

Why Adductor Strength Matters — Especially for Hip Stability

Every time you take a step, shift your weight onto one leg, or load a single side of your body, your adductors are working to keep your hip and pelvis controlled and stable. They help decelerate and control movement in the frontal plane (side-to-side), which is a plane a lot of people barely touch in their workouts.

Beyond their role in hip stability, your adductors also work in synergy with your pelvic floor and core to create co-contraction and effective pressure management. Weak or undertrained adductors can leave a gap in that system — meaning your hips, pelvis and low back may end up compensating for stability your inner thighs should be providing.

In postpartum specifically, what’s usually missing isn’t muscle. It’s capacity: the ability to contract deliberately, sustain tension, control length under load, and eventually produce real force as part of a coordinated system.

How I Gradually Rebuild Adductor Strength Postpartum

I don’t jump straight to loaded, dynamic adductor work with postpartum clients  and I don’t think anyone should. Capacity has to be built in stages, the same way it does with any other part of postpartum recovery.

I build adductor strength back through three phases:

1. Early Connection — low-load, isolated work to rebuild deliberate contraction and body awareness before anything else is added.

2. Control Through Range — loaded work that builds eccentric and concentric control, and the ability to sustain tension through a fuller range of motion.

3. Integration into Full-Body Strength — standing, dynamic, and functional patterns that ask the adductors to contribute to real movement, not just isolated work.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Phase 1: Early Connection

Adductor Lift — Up and Over

How to do it: Lying on your side, lift your bottom leg up and slightly over your top leg, leading with your heel, then control it back down.

Why it’s on the list: This isolates the adductor in a fully supported position, with no balance demand pulling your focus away from the muscle you’re actually trying to contract. Because it’s slow and controlled, it’s a chance to build deliberate, felt tension in the inner thigh learning to switch this muscle on intentionally, rather than relying on it to fire reflexively the way it often does during pregnancy. That deliberate contraction is the foundation everything else in this progression is built on.

Bent Knee Band Adduction

How to do it: Lying on your back or side with your knee bent and a band looped around your thigh, pull your knee in against the band’s resistance, then control the return.

Why it’s on the list: Bending the knee shortens the lever, which makes this an easy, low-barrier way to add light resistance without overwhelming a muscle group that’s often deconditioned postpartum. It’s a natural next step from bodyweight adductor lifts — still fully supported, but now introducing the idea of working against resistance, which starts building genuine strength rather than just control.

Phase 2: Control Through Range

Glute Bridge with Leg Whip

How to do it: From a standard glute bridge position, at the top of the bridge, straight one leg and whip your leg out into abduction and back into adduction under control, keeping your hips level throughout.

Why it’s on the list: This builds on standard bridge work by adding dynamic hip abduction and adduction at the top of the movement, so your adductors are now working alongside your glutes rather than in isolation. Keeping your hips level while one leg moves independently is a genuine stability challenge — it’s asking your adductors to contribute to pelvic control in real time, exactly the demand they need to be ready for in daily movement..

Adductor Slides

How to do it: Kneeling with one knee on a valslide, back foot planted on the floor on a slider for support, and your other knee tucked under a pad behind you with that foot on the floor — slide the kneeling leg out and away from the midline under control, then pull it back in.

Why it’s on the list: This is where things get more demanding — you’ve moved from side-lying or on your back into a kneeling, weight-bearing position, which asks your adductors to control length under load while your core and supporting side manage stability at the same time. The sliding motion trains lengthening and shortening in one continuous movement, building eccentric control as the knee slides away from the midline and concentric strength pulling it back in. That combination carries over really well into more dynamic lateral work later on. Although this move can be challenging, it can also be scaled and modified for any level, for example, holding on to something for support as you slide the knee away from the midline.

Dynamic Short Lever Copenhagen with Reach

How to do it: In a side plank position with your top leg supported on a bench (bent at the knee for the short lever) and your bottom leg lifted to meet it, hold or move through range while reaching one arm forward or overhead. If these are too challenging, you can regress to a yoga block on the ground (where I start everyone).

Why it’s on the list: A short lever Copenhagen is a far more accessible entry point into isometric and eccentric adductor loading than the full straight leg version, so it lets you build real capacity without asking for more than your body’s ready to give. Adding a reach layers in a core and serratus demand on top — so you’re not just loading the adductor in isolation, you’re asking your whole system to manage that load together, which is exactly the kind of coordinated demand your hips and pelvis face in daily life.

Side Plank with Band Adduction

How to do it: From a side plank position, attach a band to the rack above you or a high anchor point and place your foot inside with a straight leg. Come into a side plank position (this can be modified to short lever to start) and bring the foot towards your midline, pausing in the middle for an adductor contraction. With control, move the leg back away from the midline before repeating the motion.

Why it’s on the list: This challenges the adductors dynamically and isometrically at the same time — the pause at end range asks for a real, deliberate contraction, while your core and pelvic floor are simultaneously managing load through a completely different position: side plank, weight bearing through your shoulder and hip. It’s a great way to build capacity in a more challenging position.

Phase 3: Integration into Full-Body Strength

Explosive Copenhagen

How to do it: Start with your straight leg resting on the bench and your hips resting on the floor. Lift your top leg away from the bench a few inches, then quickly drive it back down with speed, pushing through the foot to explosively lift your hips off the ground. As your hips lift, drive your bottom leg up into hip flexion, pause briefly, then lower with control all the way back to the ground, resting fully before repeating.

Why it’s on the list: This adds a genuine power and rate of force component to the copenhagen pattern. By this stage, your adductors should be ready to produce force quickly, not just hold tension statically  and that’s an important quality, because real life rarely asks for slow, controlled adductor contractions. Catching your balance, changing direction, or reacting to an unexpected shift in load all demand fast force production and this explosive drive and reset pattern is how you train for it.

Deadstop Lateral Squat

How to do it: Step out into a wide stance, then sit back and down into one hip, pausing at the bottom in a true dead position with no bounce or momentum, before driving back up to centre.

Why it’s on the list: This brings adductor strength into a standing, functional, frontal plane pattern. The deadstop removes momentum entirely, forcing your adductors to produce force from a genuine dead position rather than relying on the stretch reflex to help you out of the bottom. That’s a meaningfully different demand and it ties this final phase back to everything your adductors have been building toward: strength that holds up when your whole body is working together, starting from rest.

Roman Chair Adduction

How to do it: Position yourself sideways on a roman chair (hyperextension bench), with your hips locked under the pad and your feet secured under the footpads. Extend your body straight out to the side, so you’re supported horizontally like a side plank off the bench. From here, control your legs down toward the floor, then use your adductors to pull them back up to the starting position.

Why it’s on the list: By this stage, your adductors have the capacity to handle real, loaded strength work through a genuinely full range — something that simply wasn’t appropriate earlier in the progression. Your body weight becomes the resistance here, and gravity pulls your legs down and away from the midline, so pulling back up demands real concentric adductor strength while the lowering phase builds eccentric control through a long lever. This is a more advanced movement, so it comes after your body has already proven it can control length and tension through less demanding positions.

A Note on Individual Recovery

As with any postpartum programming, this isn’t a race through the phases, and it isn’t the same timeline for everyone. Some clients move through early connection work in a couple of weeks; others need longer, and that’s completely normal. Pay attention to your own signals, if a movement feels effortful in a way that isn’t productive, or you notice pain, heaviness, or compensation patterns creeping in, that’s a cue to stay at the current phase a little longer rather than push ahead.

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