Christopher Ellis shows how to do standing hip abduction to target the gluteus medius and minimus. Keep your pelvis level, hold onto support, and lift your leg with the heel leading slightly back. Avoid common mistakes like hip drop, foot turn-out, or lifting too high, which recruits your back instead of your glutes.
This is how to perform standing hip abduction. Hip abduction is this lateral movement of the hip. It's there to target your glute medius and minimus. So what this muscle does, it's really important in hip stabilization. So for example, when I'm standing on one leg, this one is on to keep that pelvis from dropping. So that's a disengaged glute on this side, and that's engaged. That's important how you do that, because when you do this exercise, Both sides are gonna be working a little bit differently. So first off, grab something, hold on to something. This is not a balance exercise. Now, as soon as I lift this leg in the air, this is now isometrically under a contraction. So don't let that hip drop at all. Keep that hip parallel to the ground and then go out like so. Lead with your heel and bias slightly backwards. Don't go just straight out and don't let the foot turn out. Okay. And the other thing you don't want to do is go too high. If I go high enough where my pelvis starts to tip up, now I'm using this back muscle, and that's not the intended target. It's these 2 muscles. That's where you should feel it. It just looks like that. Over time, as this gets easier— and you definitely want to do both sides, by the way— you can put a band around your knees. And when that gets easy, you can put the band around your ankles. The further down your leg the band is, the harder it becomes.
