Lying Bent Leg Groin
A partner-assisted adductor stretch done on your back in a butterfly position: you press your knees together against your partner's hands for 10-20 seconds, then relax and let them ease the knees toward the floor. The contraction is what buys the extra range, not the push itself.
Own the movement
Set up first, then execute. Every cue below is something you can check on your next set.
Before the first rep
- Lie flat on your back with the soles of your feet pressed together and heels drawn toward your groin.
- Let your arms rest on the floor at your sides so your shoulders and lower back stay down.
- Have your partner kneel at your feet and place a flat palm on the inside of each knee, not on the shin.
- Agree a stop word before you start. Your partner cannot feel your end range, and this is the stretch where that matters most.
- Press your lower back gently toward the floor so the hips, not the lumbar spine, take the movement.
Every rep
Breathing & tempo — Breathe normally through the 10-20 second squeeze — if you could not hold a conversation, you are contracting too hard. Release with one long six-second exhale, and have your partner move you only while that exhale is running.
Before you load it
- Skip this entirely with an acute groin strain, and for at least six weeks after any adductor tear. Passive overpressure at end range on healing tissue is a reliable way to set recovery back.
- Brief your partner properly: pressure only on the inner knee, movement only when you have stopped contracting, and immediate stop on your word.
How much, how often
Where to start, and what to change when it stops being hard.
No external load — your partner supplies the resistance and the overpressure. Two or three contract-relax cycles per session, each roughly 15 seconds of contraction plus 20-30 seconds of stretch, two or three times a week. Track it properly: have your partner note the gap from the outside of each knee to the floor at the end of a session. That gap shrinking over four to six weeks is progress; a harder push inside one session is not.
What goes wrong
The errors that show up most often, and the cue that fixes each one.
Move the hands to the inner knee, just above the joint line. Pressure on the shin levers the knee open sideways and stresses the medial ligament instead of stretching the adductor.
Push at the effort you would use to hold a magazine between your knees, not to crush it. Past about a third of maximum the relaxation window gets no bigger, and you finish with adductors tender enough to show up in your next squat session.
Count the seconds out loud. If you can talk, you are breathing, and the relaxation phase afterwards will actually happen.
Say the stop word the moment tension becomes a pinch or a burn near the pubic bone, and have your partner hold there without adding pressure. Nobody else can judge your end range for you.
Why bother
This is contract-relax stretching, and the mechanism is neurological rather than mechanical. When you squeeze your knees inward against resistance and then stop, the adductors go briefly quieter than their normal resting tone. Your partner moves into that window. The gain comes from reduced protective tension, not from tissue being physically lengthened in twenty seconds.
The butterfly position is what makes it specific. With the knees bent and the soles together, the hip is already flexed and externally rotated, so the load falls on the short adductors — pectineus, adductor brevis, upper gracilis — rather than being shared with the long adductors and hamstrings the way a straight-leg groin stretch does.
Where it fits
After training or on a rest day, two or three times a week. Two or three contract-relax cycles per session is enough; more brings no extra range and leaves the adductors feeling bruised. Do not use it as a pre-squat warm-up — a deliberately relaxed adductor group is not what you want under a loaded bar.
If this one isn't it
No kit, too hard, or too easy — here's where to go instead.
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When this gets easy
Asked and answered
Can I do this without a partner?
You can approximate it: lie in the butterfly position, press your knees up into your own hands for 15 seconds, then relax and let your hands ease them down. It works, but your arms are weaker than the adductors and cannot apply the same steady overpressure, so expect a smaller gain per session. Do it more often to make up the difference.
Why contract before stretching at all — is that not backwards?
It seems backwards but it is the most reliably effective stretching method there is. A hard contraction is followed by a short window of lowered muscle tone, and moving into range during that window gets you further than a passive hold. The extra range fades within hours unless you repeat it regularly, which is why frequency beats intensity here.
How much range should I expect from this?
A few degrees more knee drop within a single session, most of which is gone by the next day. Real, lasting change takes weeks of consistent work two or three times a week, and it holds better if you also train the adductors through range with something like a Copenhagen plank or band adductions.
How is this different from just sitting in a butterfly stretch?
Sitting in butterfly, gravity pulls the knees down while your own adductors quietly fight it, so you are stretching a muscle that is switched on the whole time. Lying on your back takes the trunk out of it, and the contraction deliberately quietens the adductors just before the range is taken. Three cycles here will drop the knees further than two minutes of sitting, and it is far easier on the lower back.