What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're going to talk about the ankle and how it could be preventing you from having
normal biomechanics to do big exercises.
Things like the squat and the deadlift because you know, you try to get down into a squat
or a deadlift and all of a sudden your heels pop off the ground or you feel pinching in
the front of your ankle, or you just feel tightness that doesn't allow you to get any
lower.
Those can cause problems and we know that since this is a kinetic chain, the problems
move up into the knee, or up into the hip and we don’t want that.
This is particularly useful if you are a chronic ankle sprainer; someone who's sprained their
ankle before or maybe you just had an ankle sprain recently.
What I'm going to show you here today is going to help you actually get more movement.
So what we do is, we look here at the ankle and we have to understand what we're trying
to fix in the first place.
I'm not talking about tightness felt on the backside here in your calf region when you
try to go down into a squat.
If that's just muscle related we can work on that through stretching.
What I'm talking about is that pinching feel, or that tightness feel, or that jamming feel
that you feel in the front of your ankle.
You can kind of identify if because it's the part that moves on the fixed bones here and
it's somewhat positioned in between the two bumps on the side of your ankle that you can
feel.
Those two big bumps are the fibula and the tibia, what they call the malleoli.
We know that this thing moves right in the middle of those.
It has to be able to movie backward.
It kind of hides inside and behind the tibia as it moves up and that's what gets us into
dorsiflexion.
As we lower down you need to be able to get dorsiflexion to get your heel on the ground.
If you're a chronic ankle sprainer, what happens is two things.
Number one: you either lose the ability to have this move in this joint; it doesn't go
backward enough – and we can fix that in two ways like I'm going to show you.
Or what happens is the fibular head, because of all the sprains, actually gets moved forward
too much.
It gets in the way.
So you can see that if this bone right there gets jammed forward a little bit too much
then it's going to get in the way of this moving freely.
So it's going to kind of jam into it.
You could do this two different ways.
Firstly, you can try to bring the tibia forward on a fixed lower joint.
If you do what I'm showing you here, you place the band around the back of your tibia, clearly
higher up above this area here – above the ankle, 2"-4" above the ankle – you anchor
it behind and you step away.
Now when stepping away, the force is that it wants to pull your tibia forward.
We know if we bring the tibia forward, that's actually making the joint in relation to it
go backward, which is where we want it to go – back.
So you get into this position, the band is pulling you forward and now you just lunge
yourself down and all you're focusing on doing is driving your knee forward here – like
this – driving forward to get more into dorsiflexion.
You just keep working on that and you'll feel that it loosens up.
Maybe do it about eight to ten times.
You step out, get out of the band and you'll notice right away you should have more freedom
of motion here to be able to go lower and still keep your heel on the ground.
The other way to attack this is to go after the sub patellar joint itself.
So you can see now I turn around and I go the other direction and I really want to make
sure that the band is low enough on my foot.
So see as I place this band, I'm going below my ankle joint.
I'm going right here on the skeleton, down here.
Then I step away and I use my other foot to anchor the band downward sloping angle.
You can see that the pull force is now going to be this way; down like this.
Now when we go and angle out and drive our knee forward and down you can see that we're
actually pulling this, again, down into a posterior glide.
So we're using the sub patellar joint and pulling down this way, which is the direction
we know it has to go in, in order to increase that motion.
Now, if all that doesn't work, the next thing you can do is work on that fibular head.
Again, as a chronic ankle sprainer I will tell you, almost 95% of the time I find that
the fibular head gets displaced a little bit too far forward.
So you do what I'm showing you here.
You put your ankle up onto a bench.
You grab the band, you wrap it around itself, and you place it around the back of your ankle.
Now, you can see here I'm being very particular to make sure I overlap that fibular head – the
bony area – and I take the band, showing you here first with my hands outside and I'll
show you again as I demonstrate actually going.
I'm trying to take the band, I wrap it around, I'm holding, I grab the band really tight
right here – because I want to grab onto that little bone, that little malleoli on
the outside – I want to grab it and then pull really hard with my right hand as I wrap
around, put them both into this left hand, and then glide back.
So now, what I'm doing is creating this posterior glide.
I put my foot up on the bench and I lean my knee in to try to get a lot more dorsal flexion.
See, as I do it, I'm doing the same thing here and now as I just told you.
I'm wrapping it around, I'm grasping with my right hand, in this case, and I'm really
trying to do that – focus my force on the posterior glide of that fibular head.
I can guarantee you if you do that a few times and then step out and get down onto the floor
you'll notice you have much more motion in that ankle joint, especially if you have someone
that's a chronic ankle sprainer that has a lot of cracking and popping in the ankle.
You're going to notice that you're really getting rid of a lot of that, if not all of
it.
It's temporary.
You have to do it frequently throughout the week – maybe two to three times – but
over time, when you reposition and then strengthen in that new position, you'll have a much better
chance of keeping it like that forever.
So, guys, I know this is a little technical, but I think it's going to help you out a lot
in terms of gaining more mobility so you don’t screw up the rest of your body here when you
go to do those big lifts like squats and dead lifts that require you to go down low.
So make sure that you work on these and I guarantee that you're going to find more mobility,
less pain, ad hopefully an end to your chronic ankle sprains.
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All right, guys.
I'll be back here again soon.
See you.