Ankle Mobility #1

“Hey everybody! Today, I’m going to go over an excellent stretch you could do before training or before really any of your daily life, especially this is really great. If you have knee pain or if you have shin splints, anything like that. Before we get into it, I want to describe two things for you so we can really get the most benefit out of this stretch.

(1) First, whenever we’re thinking about stretching out, dealing with knee pain, shin splints, anything below the foot, we really want to think about the foundation that we’re standing at. Sometimes even hip pain can be a result of immobility in the ankle or the foot. So this stretch is really going to stretch out that ankle and help anything up your kinetic chain. A lot of times injuries even to the shoulder can be simply caused by immobility in the foot. So if you’re dealing with any of those issues, this may also be a great stretch for you. 

(2) Second thing I want to discuss is the intent. So the intent, in which you do this stretch, how hard you push yourself is going to determine the results you’re going to get. You can passively go through this, or you can listen to the little cues and really push yourself. If you do that, you’ll get a great benefit.

So before I get into the actual stretch, it’s always important to test and then retest yourself to see if anything has actually changed whenever we’re trying to stretch out or mobilize a joint. So the first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to test the ankle here. We’re going to take a thumb, stick out your thumb here. You’re going to find a wall here, and you’re going to put your big toe at the back of your hand. So your thumbs against the wall like that (please see the video), this should be about four inches or so away from the wall. Now, what you want to do is you want to drive your knee into the wall without lifting your heel. If you have very stiff ankles, like my left ankle here is relatively stiff, it’s going to be very difficult to get it there without lifting the heel up. So if you can’t get it there, that’s okay. Just go as far as you can, you can see, I can’t quite get it there right now. So that’s what you would do initially to test your flexibility. If you can’t hit it against the wall, that means you have tight ankles. So then what do you do?

I’m gonna show you a very simple stretch here. You can find a box where or you could do this on a step at your house, really anything. Um, you’re gonna elevate your foot here., kind of take a split stance position. I like having something that I can grab in front of me to kind of pull me forward. But what you’re going to do is you’re going to put a lot of pressure here with your left hand, push the knee forward here from this position you want to push, really push your knee forward. And then when you get to the very end, you’ll start to feel a little pinching or tightness when you feel that push forward and then lift your toes, trying to lift your toes up. Like you’re trying to touch your shin here. So you’re going to push forward, lift your toes here, and you’re going to hold for five seconds. Then you relax a second. When you do that, you should feel some cramping kind of up through here, even in the front of the shin a little bit.

After you do those 5 sets, then you’re going to again, want to retest. We’ll see how that just doing that brief one did for me. So we’re going to take our thumb again for the retest, put your hands against the wall here, that was against the big toe. I’m going to drive my foot forward. See if I can get it. 

It was barely able to touch it there, but you could see just even from doing that a little bit there, I was able to get a far greater range of motion. So the main points of that stretch is you’re really gonna want to push it forward to that end of range and then lift the toes up. This is great for people who are running, dealing with shin splints. Do you have any knee pain? Definitely want to do this one, or if you find really that you have trouble getting low on your squats, this is another great remedy for them. All right. That’s all for today. Hope you found value in this video. If you did give me a thumbs up, if you loved it, give me a heart.”

-EarthFIT Coach Sam