Most people love to train chest, back, arms, quads, glutes, etc.

But there are several muscle groups that not many seem to care about.

These muscle groups and the movement patterns associated with them are often neglected - sometimes in part, sometimes entirely.

Today, I’ll outline which muscle groups I think are most neglected, and what exercises you can add to your program to address these gaps.

The Adductors

“Adduction” is the motion of a segment inward toward the midline. The “adductors” are muscles of the lower limbs, and, generally speaking, they do this when they contract:

The adductor group is a collection of (at least) 4 major muscles - the adductor brevis, longus, magnus, and pectineus.

Other muscles adduct, such as the gracilis, psoas, and medial hamstrings, but are considered “weak” adductors and do not contribute nearly as much to adduction as the aforementioned muscles.

The adductors play an important role in stabilizing the pelvis and femur during any lower body motion, inside and outside the gym.

They are crucial to the proper function of the hip (and spine indirectly), and yet are one of the least directly trained groups.

My “go-to” choice for training the adductor group is the seated adduction machine, as it provides the highest degree of stability and lowest skill requirement compared to other exercise options:

If you don’t have access to one of these machines, fear not!

Here’s another exercise option you can utilize to train the adductors:

You can also use cables to mimic these adduction motions, but they’re a bit trickier in general to set up due to their unstable nature.

The Obliques

Everyone loves training the “six-pack” muscles, but the obliques are commonly neglected in the average training program.

There are two obliques - internal and external - and they control spine and trunk motion directly (in side bending and rotation).

To train the obliques, we can utilize implements like cables, out bodyweight and dumbbells.

Some machines allow for direct oblique training, but these machines are not often available at the average gym (in my experience).

I like to categorize oblique training into two categories - side-bending and rotation.

Training side-bending is generally easy to setup, but training rotation can be a bit trickier, depending on what you have access to.

Here are several examples of training the obliques in side-bending:

Here’s an example of training the obliques in rotation:

The Spinal Extensors

Are you noticing a theme here? Muscles that move and control trunk motion are often neglected.

But training the trunk is - in my estimation - one of the most critical categories of motion to train for “general health” and resilience to injury (especially as one gets older).

The spinal extensors are commonly trained isometrically - without motion - in exercises like squats and deadlifts, but often aren’t targeted more specifically with exercises that train motion of the trunk.

Much like the obliques, training the spinal extensors - and trunk motion directly - can effectively be done with cables, bodyweight, and dumbbells.

Not many machines allow for training the spinal extensors with motion (most of them load back extension without actually moving the spine, like in a deadlift).

Here’s an example of training spinal extension with a cable:

Here are two variants you can do using a hyperextension:

If you’re new to any of these motions, I’d recommend adding in 2-3 sets per week for each of these categories.

If you’ve never trained these muscle groups directly before, you likely won’t need much volume to improve strength (and potentially hypertrophy) rapidly.

You also likely won’t need to train any of the motions to absolute failure, given that you’ve never done them before.

If you have trained these groups directly before, but haven’t trained any of these exercises specifically, I’d still recommend starting slowly.

I personally only perform each of the categories of trunk motion and adduction 1x per week as supplemental volume to my other training (which has indirect overlap).

Very little volume - in my experience - is needed to reap the benefits of using these kinds of motions in your training. Exposing myself to these motions just 1x per week for the last couple of years has made a tremendous difference in my overall “joint health”, and I think that the same will be true for many of you.

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-Ben

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