🦵 ANKLE MOBILITY 🦵

❓ Have you been walking or running more recently? Do you have knee and or ankle pain? Are you suffering with limited or reduced ankle mobility? Do you actually know if you are lacking mobility in this area?

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🤔 We know that making improvements to our ankle mobility can help our walking and running gait pattern, it can help us achieve that squat depth we all strive for and reduce our injury risk.

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☝️ This simple drill acts as an assessment tool to measure our ankle mobility – specifically ankle dorsiflexion as well as flexibility of our calf muscles and achilles tendon. And once we have used this to assess, we can use the drill to help improve our range also.

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📋 ASSESMENT:

Scroll across ➡️ to the second image to see how to perform the assessment.

⚠️ We do not exceed past 3" max on both the test as well as the drill itself as there is very little need for the knee to track so far over the foot. There may be sport specific reasons this isn't the case - but generally up to 3" is more than enough mobility!

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👍 Once you have established a baseline assessment score, you can start to work on your ankle mobility using the exact same drill.

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🏃‍♂️ EXERCISE:

- Set up in the same position as the test. We usually advise for the first set to start against the wall or at least 1 step previous to your maximum.

- Aim to complete 2-3 sets/positions and 5-10 repetitions in each position.

- Slow controlled movements and feel the mobilisation in the front of the ankle and the stretch in the back of the calf/achilles.

- This is a great drill to do pre-activity, for example, before a walk, run, when you’re doing any lower body gym exercises or plyometric drills.

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‼️ RE-TEST:

- After a few weeks of including this drill to your regular mobility and exercise you should start to feel the benefit.

- Then we can perform a re-test of the assessment to see how you are getting on.

- Record and make a note of this for future reference.

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🙌 Give this a go and tag someone that needs to improve their ankle mobility. Let us know how you get on!