4 Inner Thigh Moves to Strengthen Your Lower Body

Balance is important in any workout routine, and it’s especially vital in lower-body programming. For instance, fitting in an inner thigh workout is key because it helps create balanced strength between your inner thigh muscles (your hip adductors) and your outer hip muscles (your hip abductors).

“You need to have a balance between the inner thigh muscles and the outer thigh muscles to help stabilize your pelvis,” ACE-certified personal trainer Sivan Fagan, owner of Strong With Sivan in Baltimore, tells SELF. “Your hip adductors, along with some other muscles, stabilize the hip, but if you don’t have sufficient strength in each muscle or proper firing in the muscle, then you can develop issues.” That instability, she says, can have a domino effect throughout your body, possibly leading to issues like lower-back pain.

Ideally, you’d be including workouts in your routine that challenge your outer thighs (like this hip abductor workout) and your inner thighs, like the inner thigh workout Fagan created below.

As a refresher, you primarily work your outer thighs when you bring your legs away from your body (by abducting your hips), and you challenge your inner thighs when you bring your legs in toward the midline or center of your body (by adducting your hips). The muscles that work when you bring your legs in toward your body are known as the hip adductors. There are five main hip adductor muscles are: adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, gracilis, and pectineus.

In the inner thigh workout below, you’ll work your hip adductors with two supersets. Both begin with a compound exercise, which is a move that works multiple large muscle groups at once, and end with an isolation move, which is a move that targets one specific muscle. Compound moves are important because they give you the biggest bang for your buck, challenging a whole host of muscles including your glutes, quads, and hamstrings, as well as your inner thigh muscles, Fagan says.

With these compound moves—the sumo squat and the lateral lunge—you’ll be working your hip adductors with an eccentric contraction, or the portion of a move when your muscle is lengthening, says Fagan. With the isolation moves—the inner thigh raise and inverted thigh opener—you’ll be working your inner thigh muscles with a concentric contraction, or when your muscle is shortening.

Ready to build some balanced lower-leg strength? Get ready to give this inner thigh workout a try.

Inner Thigh Workout

What you’ll need: A moderate-to-heavy dumbbell and an exercise mat for comfort.

The Exercises

Superset 1:

• Sumo Squat
• Side-Lying Inner Thigh Raise

Superset 2:

• Lateral Lunge
• Inverted Thigh Opener

Directions

• For superset 1, perform 10–12 reps of the sumo squat and 15–20 reps per side of the side-lying inner thigh raise. Rest 1–2 minutes after both exercises are done. Do 3 rounds total.
• For superset 2, perform 12–15 reps per side of the lateral lunge. Then do AMRAP (as many reps as possible) per side of the inverted thigh opener. Rest 1–2 minutes after both exercises are done. Do 3 rounds total.

Demoing the moves below are Cookie Janee (GIF 1), a background investigator and security forces specialist in the Air Force Reserve; Helen Pries (GIFs 2 and 4), a fitness model; and Angie Coleman (GIF 3), a holistic wellness coach in Oakland.