Hip Strength and Groin Pain: What Athletes Need to Know

The pain that shows up mid-sprint

You plant a foot to change direction. Something grabs high on the inside of your thigh, and the next stride is nothing like the last one.

If you play soccer, football, or hockey, you already know this one. It calms down in a few days, so you go back. Then it grabs again in the same moment of the same movement, and now you are guarding every cut.

Playing through it is not weakness. You had a season to finish and a team counting on you. It is also the reason groin pain has a habit of lasting months instead of weeks.

What is actually going on

Your adductors are the muscles on the inner thigh that run from the pelvis to the thigh bone. They do more than pull your legs together. They brake, they steer, and they hold your pelvis steady while one leg drives.

Sprinting, cutting, and kicking load them hard and fast. Groin pain in these sports is usually not one dramatic tear. It is a tissue being asked, repeatedly, to absorb more force than it can currently handle.

That distinction matters. A capacity problem responds to building capacity. It does not respond to rest alone, which is why the pain comes back the week you return to full speed.

What the research points to

A systematic review and meta-analysis looked at this directly. Researchers searched six major databases for studies that measured hip strength in healthy athletes, then followed those athletes to see who went on to develop groin pain.

Thirteen high-quality studies made the cut, mostly soccer players, plus athletes from rugby, ice hockey, and Gaelic football. Three measures were examined: hip adduction strength, hip abduction strength, and the ratio between them.

• Athletes with stronger hip adductors were less likely to develop groin pain later on.
• The effect was moderate but significant, both for groin pain generally and for time-loss injuries, meaning the ones bad enough to keep an athlete out of play.
• Hip abduction strength and the adduction-to-abduction ratio showed no significant relationship with future groin pain.

So adductor strength is not a guarantee, and it is not the only thing that matters. It is a number worth knowing before the season instead of after the injury.

What to do about it

• Measure it, do not guess it. Adductor strength gets tested and compared against normal values, so weakness shows up as a number rather than a hunch.
• Load the adductors on purpose. Strength comes from progressive resistance over weeks, with the load rising as you tolerate it.
• Train the movement, not just the muscle. How you decelerate, cut, and kick decides how much force those tendons take in the first place.
• Retest. If the number has not moved, the program changes.

When to get it looked at

• Groin pain that has hung around more than two weeks, or that returns every time you go back to full speed.
• Pain when you squeeze your knees together, or a squeeze that feels obviously weaker on one side.
• Pain that spreads into the lower abdomen or down the front of the thigh.
• A sudden pop or tearing feeling with immediate loss of speed. That one gets looked at now, not next week.

An evaluation that looks for the cause tells you which of those you have, and what it takes to fix. One more season of guarding your cuts costs more than one hour of finding out.

Read how we handle hip and knee pain, see what sports rehab involves, or request an appointment and get your hip strength tested one-on-one with a licensed physical therapist.