How To Improve Ankle Mobility

“Hi everybody. This is Sam from EarthFIT you may notice when lunging or doing squats that your foot, you have a difficulty keeping your foot straight, no matter how hard you try. It could be your foot goes out to the side of pronates or it goes in. This could be a sign that you have limited ankle mobility. Now I’m going to give you a quick test, how to test for if you have sufficient ankle mobility. So what you want to do is grab a wall. I’m going to use the ramp right here. You just basically need something that’s flat all the way down. You’d be about 4-5 inches away. A good way to do this is you can take your fist, stick out your thumb. That’s usually generally about four to five inches. You want to take your shoes off so you’re either barefoot or in your socks and you just want to try and push your knee to either that wall or in this case, this rack. As you can see, I have some limited ankle mobility, due to ankle sprains that I’ve had previously.

So a good way to fix this is you get a band. If you’re at home, you could wrap it around a couch. Right here we’re just changing the rack right up a little bit…put it around your ankle. Just on or right above the bony part, those two bones that stick out in your ankle and you want to get a good amount of tension band so it’s really pulling back. You want the band to pull back and down. And then arch you’re back in this position, you’re just gonna push down on your ankle and try to really, really stretch out there and you should feel it right away. And then back, typically you do this about, for 20 repetitions, 5 sets throughout the day. If you’re preparing for a squat warmup, you know, you could do it 3-4.

So if that doesn’t, that doesn’t seem to help, you may have some tightness in your calves or around your Achilles. So you can get a foam roller and you really want to work these areas here and you want to take your time. A lot of people when they foam roll goes too fast. You just want to kind of work in there, find a tender spot, and you could flex your foot up and down or side to side. And roll in that out there.

Another thing you could do is get in a good stretch. I prefer the Combat Stretch. So you just keep this foot straight here. Take this knee brand behind and what you’re gonna do is you’re going to grab your toes and push your knee forward while I’m grabbing my toes. This is something you could do again, probably five sets, about 20 seconds. You really want to pull up on those toes and drive that knee forward. After you do these things. I would retest. See how my ankle mobility is improved. Like I said, this is something you could do daily or specifically before you squat or lunge.”

-EarthFIT Coach Sam