Where Is a Groin Pull Located? Muscles and Anatomy

A groin pull is located on the inner thigh, where a group of five muscles called the adductors attach to the pubic bone and run down toward the knee. The muscle torn most often is the adductor longus, a strap-like muscle sitting near the surface of the inner thigh, and the tear itself usually occurs either where the muscle meets its tendon near the pubic bone or lower along the muscle belly. But “groin pull” is a loose term that can involve several neighboring structures, and the exact spot matters for recovery time and treatment.

The Muscles on the Inside of Your Thigh

The adductor group accounts for a surprisingly large share of your leg. Five muscles make up the group: the pectineus, adductor brevis, adductor longus, adductor magnus, and gracilis. Together they represent roughly 22.5% of the total muscle mass in the lower limb, making them one of the largest functional groups in the leg.¹ Their primary job is pulling the leg inward toward the midline of the body, but they also help stabilize the pelvis and assist with hip flexion and rotation.

All five muscles originate from the pubic bone or nearby bony landmarks and fan out along the inner femur. The adductor longus sits right at the front and center of the group, which partly explains why it takes the brunt of injury. Beneath it lies the adductor brevis, a shorter, deeper muscle. The gracilis is the only one that crosses both the hip and the knee, running all the way down to the inner shinbone. The pectineus sits highest, near the crease of the hip, and the adductor magnus is the largest of all, covering a broad area toward the back of the inner thigh.

One detail that matters for injuries: the tendons of adductor brevis and gracilis are fused together where they attach to the pubic bone, forming a shared insertion point. Meanwhile, adductor longus and brevis both contain unusually long internal tendons running through their muscle bellies. The adductor longus tendon extends roughly 11 centimeters inside the muscle itself. These internal tendons are also less well supplied with blood near the bone, which may slow healing after a tear.²

Where Exactly the Tear Happens

When researchers use MRI to look at acute groin injuries in athletes, adductor longus dominates the injury list. In a detailed imaging study of 111 acute adductor injuries, adductor longus was the most frequently injured muscle, accounting for 62 of those cases. Adductor brevis came next with 18, followed by pectineus with 17. The gracilis and adductor magnus were rarely torn on their own.³

Within the adductor longus itself, tears don’t cluster in one spot. That same study found three main injury locations: about a quarter of injuries occurred at the proximal insertion where the tendon meets the pubic bone, another quarter at the musculotendinous junction near the top of the muscle, and the largest share (roughly 37%) at the junction of the muscle and its lower tendon.³ So if you think of the adductor longus as a rope with a bony anchor at the top, tears can happen at the anchor, partway down, or toward the lower end of the rope’s internal tendon.

This distribution matters practically. Tears at the bony attachment tend to be more painful immediately and can involve tendon avulsion, where the tendon actually peels away from the bone. Tears in the muscle belly or at the lower junction often feel like a sudden sharp pull during activity and may show more bruising on the inner thigh a day or two later.

How Groin Pulls Happen During Movement

The mechanism behind most groin pulls comes down to timing and stretch. During a soccer kick, for instance, the adductor longus reaches its fastest stretching rate while the hip is extending backward. That peak stretch happens at roughly 40% of the kicking motion’s swing phase, and the muscle is actively firing at the same time. The combination of rapid lengthening and active contraction creates high tension in the muscle-tendon unit.⁴ The adductor longus appears most vulnerable during the transition from hip extension to hip flexion, when the muscle switches from being stretched to actively shortening.

Cutting and change-of-direction movements pose a similar risk, though the mechanics differ slightly. During a sharp lateral cut, the stance leg’s adductors are loaded eccentrically, meaning they’re trying to control a motion that’s pulling the leg outward. The force produced during this kind of eccentric contraction is higher than during a normal shortening contraction, and when that high force coincides with maximum muscle activation, something has to give.⁵ This is why groin pulls are so common in sports that involve repeated kicking, cutting, and rapid direction changes.

Other Muscles That Get Caught Up

The adductors get most of the attention, but groin pain in athletes isn’t always limited to one muscle group. The iliopsoas, the deep hip flexor that runs from the lower spine through the pelvis and attaches to the upper femur, is involved more often than many people realize. In a study of 638 athletes evaluated with MRI for groin pain, about 21% showed signal changes in the iliopsoas, meaning either inflammation around the tendon or actual muscle strain. The recovery timeline depended on the type of damage: athletes with muscle-strain changes returned to play in an average of about nine weeks, while those with inflammation of the tendon sheath took around 20 weeks.⁶

Iliopsoas pain tends to sit deeper and more toward the front of the hip crease, whereas adductor pain is more clearly on the inner thigh. But the two overlap enough that clinicians often have to use imaging to tell them apart, especially when both are irritated at the same time.

The Pubic Bone Connection

The anatomy around the pubic bone is more interconnected than a simple muscle-to-bone attachment. The adductor longus tendon blends with the abdominal wall through a shared sheet of connective tissue called the pubic aponeurosis. Because of this, forceful pulls on the adductors can stress the lower abdominal wall too, and vice versa. This interconnection is behind the condition sometimes called “sports hernia” or athletic pubalgia, which involves injuries to these musculotendinous structures and instability around the pubic symphysis, often without any actual hernia being present.⁷

A related condition, osteitis pubis, involves inflammation right at the pubic symphysis joint itself. It’s an overuse problem seen in athletes who do a lot of kicking, twisting, and cutting. Rather than a single acute tear, it develops from repetitive microtrauma as the adductor and abdominal muscles tug on the pubic bone from opposite directions.⁸ The pain from osteitis pubis is centered right on the pubic bone and can radiate into the inner thigh or lower abdomen, making it easy to confuse with a classic groin pull.

When the Pain Isn’t a Muscle Pull at All

Not every “groin pull” is actually a pulled muscle. The hip joint itself is a common source of groin-region pain, particularly when the labrum (the ring of cartilage lining the hip socket) is torn. Labral tears typically present as anterior hip or groin pain, sometimes with a catching or clicking sensation during movement.⁹ Some people with early hip joint problems also experience posterior pelvic pain alongside the groin pain, which can make the picture confusing.¹⁰

What makes labral tears tricky is how common they are even in people without symptoms. An MRI study of football players found labral tears in about two-thirds of hips that had no reported pain.⁵ So finding a labral tear on MRI doesn’t automatically explain the groin pain. It may be incidental, especially in athletes whose hips have accumulated years of loading.

Nerve entrapment is another mimic worth knowing about. The obturator nerve runs through the adductor region and supplies sensation to the inner thigh. When it becomes trapped in connective tissue as it enters the thigh, it can cause exercise-induced medial thigh pain that starts near the adductor origin and radiates down the inner thigh, closely mimicking a muscle strain.¹¹ Unlike a muscle tear, nerve entrapment may also cause weakness when squeezing the legs together and sometimes a patch of altered sensation on the inner thigh.¹²

How Clinicians Pinpoint the Injury Location

Given that so many structures can produce groin pain, the physical exam becomes important for narrowing things down. For adductor injuries specifically, three clinical tests are particularly useful: resisted adduction with the hip in an outer range, a squeeze test with the hip in a neutral position, and a passive adductor stretch. When any of these tests is positive, the probability of a confirmed adductor lesion on MRI is around 80-81%, and the accuracy for localizing the injury to the correct spot is even higher.¹³ Simple palpation of the adductor tendons, while basic, also has strong ability to rule out an adductor injury when it doesn’t reproduce pain.

Hip flexor tests, by comparison, are much less reliable at predicting what MRI will show. Positive hip flexor provocation tests predicted an MRI-confirmed lesion only about a third to two-thirds of the time.¹³ This is one reason why deep hip flexor injuries are underdiagnosed compared to adductor injuries. For long-standing groin pain, MRI can visualize swelling and tissue changes, though the relationship between what the scan shows and what actually hurts is not always clear-cut.¹⁴

Strength Imbalances That Set the Stage

One of the most consistent findings in groin injury research is that the balance between adductor and abductor strength matters more than raw strength alone. In soccer players with chronic adductor-related groin pain, the abductor-to-adductor strength ratio was significantly higher on the affected side, meaning the adductors were relatively weak compared to the abductors.¹⁵ A prospective study in male soccer players found that a lower adductor-to-abductor strength ratio in the non-dominant leg was actually associated with reduced groin injury risk, suggesting the relationship between these ratios and injury is more nuanced than simply “weak adductors equal injury.”¹⁶

The practical takeaway is that adductor strengthening, especially eccentric strengthening where the muscle works while lengthening, is a cornerstone of both prevention and rehabilitation. The Copenhagen adductor exercise, where a partner supports the lower leg while the athlete holds their body in a side plank using the top leg, has become a standard tool. A randomized controlled trial in soccer players with adductor-related groin pain found that incorporating this exercise into rehab significantly improved eccentric hip adduction strength, reduced pain scores, and lowered self-reported disability.¹⁷ Progressive programs using this exercise have also shown that athletes can build strength while keeping delayed-onset muscle soreness manageable over an eight-week period.¹⁸

Why Groin Pain Looks Different in Younger Athletes

In adolescents, the anatomy around the pelvis creates a different vulnerability. The growth plates (apophyses) where muscles attach to bone haven’t fully fused yet, and a sudden forceful contraction can pull a chunk of bone away rather than tearing the muscle itself. These avulsion fractures are concentrated at a few predictable spots on the pelvis. A review of the literature on pelvic avulsion fractures in adolescent athletes found that the most common sites were the front of the hip bone (anterior superior iliac spine, 37%) and just below it (anterior inferior iliac spine, 31%), with the ischial tuberosity (the “sit bone”) accounting for about 14%.¹⁹

The important distinction is that avulsion fractures at the pubic bone or ischium can mimic the location and symptoms of a classic adult groin pull, but the treatment and recovery outlook differ. Most adolescent avulsion fractures heal with rest alone, with about 79% of conservatively treated athletes returning to their pre-injury sport level. Surgical repair, when needed, had a higher return rate of about 95%.¹⁹ If a teenager reports a sudden onset of groin or pelvic pain during a sprint or kick, an X-ray is usually warranted to check for a bone fragment that wouldn’t show up on physical exam alone.

How Sex Differences Shift the Injury Pattern

Groin injuries are far more common in male athletes, and the reasons appear to be at least partly anatomical. The wider female pelvis changes the angle at which the short adductor muscles pull on the pubic bone, creating a more oblique line of force that may reduce the tractional stress at the muscle’s attachment point. This could explain why women have fewer insertional muscle tears in the adductor region.²⁰

There’s also a hip joint factor. Cam-type impingement, where extra bone forms at the front of the femoral head-neck junction, occurs more frequently in males. This bony bump can pinch the labrum and surrounding soft tissue during hip flexion and rotation, predisposing male athletes to labral tears that show up as groin pain.²⁰ So when male athletes present with groin pain, the source is more likely to be either an adductor tear or an intra-articular hip problem, while women with athletic groin pain may have a broader differential that includes more hip flexor and pubic bone involvement relative to adductor strains.

These anatomical differences don’t mean women are immune to groin pulls. They do mean that the same symptom of “pain in the groin during sport” can have a different structural explanation depending on the athlete, and clinicians who default to assuming every case is a simple adductor strain risk missing the actual source.