4 Quick Tips to Fix Your Ankle Mobility

"Ankle mobility" seems to be a buzzword these days. Coaches often tell their athletes that the limiting factor in their squats is the lack of range of motion in the ankles. Everyone claims to have poor ankle mobility, and they're all looking for the magical way to improve it. You'll see them stretching their ankles into oblivion, hooking resistance bands around their malleoli, and placing barbells on top of their knees, yet their efforts are futile.

Why isn't your ankle mobility improving? Well, as I've said before, stretching is like a Band-Aid. It will result in a temporary improvement, but it doesn't get to the root of the problem. You cannot, I repeat, cannot, change the length of a muscle. Therefore, no amount of yanking and distraction and stretching will not miraculously lengthen the gastrocnemius and soleus (calf) muscles. Instead, you have to address the cause of the stiffness.

A lack of ankle mobility can be the result of either improper motor patterning, poor choice in footwear (think: high heels), or it may be from minimal stability up the kinetic chain.

The ankle is, as you see in this photo, a "mobile" joint. The knee is a stable joint, and then the hip is another very mobile joint. If the ankle does not have adequate mobility, the knee and hip will suffer as well. Mike Boyle, a very well known Strength and Conditioning coach, notes:

An immobile ankle causes the stress of landing to be transferred to the joint above, the knee. In fact, there is a direct connection between the stiffness of the basketball shoe and the amount of taping and bracing that correlates with the high incidence of patella-femoral syndrome in basketball players. Our desire to protect the unstable ankle came with a high cost. We have found many of our athletes with knee pain have corresponding ankle mobility issues. Many times this follows an ankle sprain and subsequent bracing and taping.

Address the ankles, and you cure up a lot of other issues! Here are some ideas to help improve your bottom position in your squat and free up some movement in your ankles.

1. Change your footwear. Now, here's where the shoes can be a very important factor. If you're wearing shoes that act as a cast, meaning they try to provide the strength artificially, your body no longer needs to or wants to utilize this strength on its own. So many people roll their ankles because, guess what? They have weak ankles. An ankle sprain is entirely preventable, in most cases!

Other shoes like high heels force your feet to remain plantarflexed (pointed) for hours on end. As a result, the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles become reflexively shorter to adapt to the way you move. Your body remembers routines, and it likes to conserve energy wherever it can. Therefore, regularly wearing certain types of shoes will affect the musculature around the foot.

I do think training barefoot has a tremendous amount of benefits, but, at the very least, try to find a shoe that allows you to "feel" your feet and does not significantly alter your gait. You can also mobilize the plantar fascia before your workout to increase neural activity in your feet.

2. Strengthen your dorsiflexors. Individuals with tight calves have overactive plantarflexors (gastrocnemius, soleus, plantaris, tibialis posterior, flexor hallucis longus, flexor digitorum longus, fibularis longus, and fibularis brevis), which are the muscles that point the foot. A ballerina, for example, would have incredibly strong plantar flexing muscles. The dorsiflexors are the muscles that pull your toes towards your kneecap (tibialis anterior, extensor hallucis longus, extensor digitorum longus and fibularis tertius); these muscles will contract at the bottom of your squat, so if they're stronger, you'll see significant improvement.

One of my favorite exercises for this is banded dorsiflexion. This movement also strengthens the hip flexors, which will further develop your bottom position. Bear crawls will also help improve the range of motion in the calves. For an extra challenge, try them with straight legs.

3. Improve rotation of the fibular head (pronation). As you squat, the fibula, the outer bone in your lower leg, has to rotate. When you have muscular tension in this area, then you will have a limited amount of rotation. If you have this problem, you may experience pain on the lateral portion of the leg.

To improve this rotation, you can do banded eversion and inversion, or you can do this half kneeling drill. Rolling out the calves with a lacrosse ball will also help improve your range of motion.

4. Correct your squat pattern. Finally, we have to think about motor patterns. The vast majority of people I've met who appear to have insufficient ankle mobility, actually just don't understand proper sequencing. Usually, they don't grasp the concept of "hip hinging," and they initiate a squat or a deadlift in an anteriorly tilted pelvic position. I want to help my clients understand what it feels like to initiate a movement properly at the hips. I will start these people doing a squat with the help of a TRX or gymnastics rings. A wall squat will also help reinforce good movement patterns. Sometimes, people just don't really grasp how a well-executed squat or deadlift should "feel," and in those cases, these drills can elicit immediate results.

If your ankles are stiff, stop trying to stretch the hell out of them against the wall. Figure out why your calves are so tight in the first place, strengthen the weaker muscles, and build a rock solid foundation for all of your lifts. With more range of motion in the ankles, the rest of your joints will be spared of excess wear and tear, and you will improve your mechanics.


Works Cited:

1. Michael, Boyle. "THE JOINT-BY-JOINT APPROACH." Gray Cook Physical Therapist Lecturer Author. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Sept. 2015.
2. Splichal, Emily. "Foot Function & Fascial Lines: Lateral Ankle Stability." From the Ground up. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Sept. 2015.
3. Splichal, Emily. "Plantar Cutaneous Feedback & Ankle Instability." From the Ground up. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Sept. 2015.

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Where Does Your Knee Pain Really Come From?

The knees are the largest joints in the human body. Unfortunately, these large joints also seem to be an even bigger area for pain and injury. In the U.S. alone, surgeons perform around 700,000 knee replacements annually--that's a lot of bionic knees! Other knee-related injuries include ACL tears, MCL tears, patellar tendon tears, patellar tendonitis, dislocated patellas and osteoarthritis. In my opinion, many of these surgeries or injuries are easily preventable. With the proper training protocol, you can avoid knee pain and inevitable surgery down the line.

We use our knees for a lot of different activities from walking and running to jumping, squatting and lunging, and therefore they withstand a lot of impact. It is incredibly important to prioritize solid movement patterns to avoid any further stress.

I should warn you, that this post will be fairly heavy in anatomical jargon. Brace yourself.

The "knee" covers an area of four bones: the femur, the fibula, the tibia, and the patella. As a hinge joint, the knee can only flex and extend. Though its actions are simple, the muscles around it are vast and complex. Some of the important muscles that directly help the movement of this joint are the hamstrings complex (semimembranosus, semitendinosus, and biceps femoris), the quadriceps complex (vastus medialis, vastus lateralis, vastus intermedius, and rectus femoris), the calf muscles (gastrocnemius, popliteus, tibialis anterior, and the peroneals). If you feel overwhelmed with the laundry list of muscles I just mentioned, fear not! I will elaborate.

Now, we need to remember that the body acts as a chain. One part of the body reacts to the feedback of another part. What are the two major joints near the knee? If you guessed the hip and the ankle, high five! We cannot just consider the knee in the case of knee pain, but rather, we must think about how the surrounding joints are compromising the integrity of the knee. If you have poor hip or ankle stability, the knee is going to work a lot harder to compensate for the lack of stability elsewhere.

Let's start from the ground up, at the ankle. The ankle can plantarflex (point), dorsiflex (flex upwards), invert/supinate, or evert/pronate. Check your feet. Are your arches exceedingly high or collapsed? What happens to them as you squat or jump? Ideally, we want to strive for a perfect balance between pronation and supination when standing. Both of these two movements are completely natural ankle movements when walking or running, but we do not want either in excess.

If, for example, you squat and your ankle collapses (pronates) completely, you will likely experience some collapse of the knee with it. The muscles on the inside of your leg (adductors) are over-active or tight, while the antagonists (abductors) will be lengthened. Do you often feel pain in your IT bands? Well, you may fit into this category of people. Your IT bands may be tense because they're working really hard for some other guys. Think about how this position is going to effect the ligaments and tendons in your knee!

Look at the relationship between his knees and ankles in the squat.

Conversely, if you drive your knees out too much and shift your weight laterally (supinate) your feet, the opposite will happen. Your adductors are going to be lengthened while your abductors will work over time. I was one of these people. The lateral areas of my knee always caused me pain, because I was nearly rolling my ankles as I squatted.

Obviously, the ankle position will effect the knee and hip mechanics, and vice versa.

If one lacks sufficient strength in the gluteus medius and the peroneals, the lifter will, again, revert to a valgus (collapse) of the knees. Weak gluteus maximus will result in an abuse of the quadriceps complex, which is going to pull onto the patellar tendon for dear life. Put more simply, if your glutes aren't strong enough, your knees are going to pay the price.

As I said, we want to maintain a balance in how we shift our weight as we move. Too much outward shifting of the hip or ankle is just as counter-productive as shifting too much weight inward. True strength comes from a balance.

Some of these inefficiencies may be a matter of learning. You might not understand what a proper squat should look like, and there for cueing and repetition will go a long way. If cueing has not helped, then you need to follow a strengthening and mobility routine. The exercises I've listed below will be tremendously helpful.

Now that we've made it through the meat of this article, it's time to learn how to correct these faults. Figure out where you lie on this spectrum of movement dysfunction, and correct your mechanics as necessary.

Here are some great ways to mobilize the hips and the ankles:

• Subtalar eversion and inversion
• Resisted half-kneeling ankle mobility
• Soleus and gastrocnemius release
• Gluteus medius release
• Plantar fascia mobilization

Once you've mobilized, the next step is to strengthen the targeted muscles:

• Single leg RDL
• Banded squats
• Ankle step downs
• Squat off of box
• Banded eversion
• Banded inversion
• Barbell hip thrusters

Where there is pain, there is weakness and dysfunction. You don't have to "accept" being in pain. Strengthening the hip and ankle muscles are vital in perfecting your mechanics and preventing unnecessary stresses on the soft tissues of the knee. Pay attention to those stabilizers and you will save your knees for many years of heavy lifting to come.

Works Cited:

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 06 Jan. 2015. Web. 29 June 2015.
2. Myers, Thomas W. Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 2001. Print.
3. Weinstock, David. "Neurokinetic Therapy®." Neurokinetic Therapy. N.p., 22 Apr. 2012. Web. 29 June 2015.

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