At Fighting Fit, we’re not interested in simply settling your groin pain and sending you back onto the field hoping for the best.
We want to understand why it’s happening, what your body can currently tolerate and what needs to improve to get you back to your sport.
1. Assess What’s Actually Going On
First, we need to work out whether your symptoms are coming from the adductors or another structure around the hip and groin.
We’ll look at things like:
- Your injury history and symptoms
- Adductor and hip strength
- Hip movement
- Pain with resisted movements
- Current training loads
- The specific demands of your sport
Because treating the wrong problem isn’t going to get you very far.
Assess. Don’t guess.
2. Build Adductor Strength
This is a big one.
Your adductors need to be strong enough to tolerate the forces involved in running, kicking and changing direction.
Rehab may start with exercises like adductor squeezes before progressing to more challenging movements such as:
- Copenhagen adductor exercises
- Side lunges
- Loaded adductor strengthening
- Single-leg strength exercises
- Sport-specific movements
The goal isn’t to find one magic exercise.
It’s to progressively build the strength your sport demands.
And that means challenging your adductors appropriately as they recover.
3. Manage Training Loads Without Losing Fitness
One of the biggest mistakes athletes make is swinging between two extremes.
Option A: Stop everything until the pain disappears.
Option B: Keep training at full intensity and hope it sorts itself out.
Neither is necessarily the best approach.
Depending on the injury, we can often modify training while keeping you active.
That might mean temporarily reducing sprinting, kicking or sharp changes of direction while maintaining other forms of conditioning.
Then, as your capacity improves, we progressively reintroduce those movements.
Because we don’t just want you pain-free on the couch.
We want you ready for the field.
4. Progress Back to Sprinting, Kicking and Changing Direction
Here’s where proper rehabilitation makes a difference.
Being able to perform an adductor squeeze without pain is a good start.
But it doesn’t mean you’re ready to sprint at 100%, kick at full power or change direction under pressure.
Your return-to-sport program should progressively prepare you for:
- Running and acceleration
- High-speed sprinting
- Deceleration
- Cutting and side-stepping
- Kicking
- Full training and competition demands
We also want to consider your strength, symptoms, confidence and how you respond to increasing loads.
Pain-free isn’t the finish line.
Being prepared for your sport is the goal.
