Hey guys, have you ever injured your
ankles in your movement practice?
Whether it's parkour or natural movement,
acute ankle injuries are one of the
most common things that we face.
Today we're going to be taking you through
the drills that have really helped me overcome
a history of massive chronic ankle problems.
I've had over eight severe ankle
sprangs on each ankle, I've torn my
Achilles tendon and I've had a high ankle
sprain, but over the last seven years I
haven't had any ankle injuries and so
this is what I've been doing to keep my
ankles healthy and I'm sure it will help
you as well.
As with any joint,
with the ankle we need to make
sure that we have sufficient range of
motion and that we have motor control
and strength throughout that range of motion.
For functional a lot of times
what people are missing is this
dorsiflexion aspect.
We need to be able to be open and mobile
but we also need to be able to be stiff
and explosive. The same is true
through all these ranges of motion.
The most common injury we are going
to face is this eversion sprain.
And then second for parkour athletes and
more natural movement athletes
This going to be that,
um,
that hyperflexion injury we're getting
pinched in the front of the ankle.
It's called an ankle thing
in the parkour community.
That happens a lot when you're jumping
and landing on specific surfaces.
So then we have the inversion injury. 
We have torque that can separate the
membrane between the tibia and the fibula,
which is called the
interosseous membrane.
And we have a hyperextension injury,
which occurs a lot in team sports or
combat sports when someone rolls onto
your ankle or hyper extends your ankle.
So we want to make sure that we're
attending to and making stronger,
more mobile and more capable of the
elasticity and stiffness.
The posterior of the ankle
strengthening the anterior of the ankle
the lateral side of the ankle and the medial
side of the ankle and then the
torsion around the ankle.
And so we're going to take you through
all the drills that we do to achieve
those purposes.
Our first drill is just going to be
an open chain ankle circle.
This is just about building the range
of motion and motor control through the
entire ankle.
As we're doing this,
what we want to do is notice anywhere or
the ankle is jumping in it's motion,
a tendency to ratchet and you'll see
a lot of it in my ankles because of my
history with and close friends when
we're trying to do is get that to be as
smooth as possible, not chunk,
chunk, chunk, but smooth.
I want to do that in both directions.
You can do the standing.
I'm demonstrating sitting
just for camera reasons.
This is an open chain ankle circle.
You can do this with your toes pointed
down the whole time, with toes pointed up
the whole time.
Lots of variations.
So for our second drill now we're going
to take that open chain movement and
make it a closed chain movement.
And the closed chain is where
almost all of our injuries are going to happen.
So it's important that we work
this range of motion in a closed chain.
So I'm going to stand with my weight on
one leg and then I'm going to take this
other leg.
Now put my weight on it as much as it
can handle and take it through its entire
range of motion.
That's going to be our close chain ankle
circle, and you can put more weight on
that or less weight on that depending on
how ready you are for the drill and how
prepared your ankle is.
A lot of times dysfunction in the ankle
though actually starts with lack of
dorsiflexion
So we're going to work on that ability
to flex the shin forward over the ankle.
When we don't have good dorsiflexion ability,
our body will route around
the ankle in different ways,
which puts us in a dangerous position
to potentially injure ourselves.
So not only does dorsiflexion make
us better athletes and performance, also
makes us more likely to avoid injury.
So one of the really basic ways to work
on dorsiflexion is to set yourself
up in front of a surface and see how
far you can get your toe away from the
surface and effectively touch your knee.
So now you can do this,
and you can do this by just resting
here and doing a passive stretch.
I don't do that very often,
what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do
an active moving into this space
repeatedly.
And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going
to press down with my foot as hard as I
can, as if I'm trying to drive my knee
through this as hard as I possibly can
and i'll hold for about 20 seconds there
Now, so that's firing and strengthening all
these muscles in their most lengthened
position.
Now I'm going to do the opposite and
strengthen the interior compartment in that
most shortened position.
So what i'm going to do is try to pick my foot
up off the ground and holding my foot
up off the ground i'm gonna rock back
so all of these muscles are
firing as hard as possible.
So this is my basic routine that I
try to do everyday for dorsiflexion.
Touch my knee 10 times, 20 seconds,
driving my knee into the wall.
And then 10 lift offs of my toe.
And that'll help a lot of you guys,
but if you really have tight ankles with
a bunch of the history of
ankle sprains like I do,
you actually go even further and you can
bring in something like a kettlebell
to help press your knee into the wall.
So I'm going to come in
here and do a little squat,
put this kettlebell on my knee and I'm
going to do the same exact exercise,
but now I can overpress using
the weight of the kettlebell.
So now this is pretty easy, so I
move my toe back a little bit.
If I want even more weight, I can kind of
take some of my weight off my back leg
really sit in here and mobilize, 
move my knee around,
I'm gonna press down, same way. Push my
heel up off the ground as hard as I can.
I'm going to drive, like I'm trying
to, you know, push the pedal down,
drive my knee through this wall
and now
I can go back and work on lifting that
foot up.
So this is how I work on
my ankle dorsiflexion,
which is a huge key to performance.
The better your ankle can dorsiflex,
the better you can accelerate, the
better you can cut and change directions.
Better you can create power.
It's a really key composition, and also
makes your ankles more resistant
to injury.
So in general with a
joint or with a muscle complex,
there's always a relationship between
the mobility or ability to move in the
space of a joint, and stiffness
or its ability to resist a movement.
So often an ankle that is stiffer is
less mobile and an ankle that is more
mobile isn't a stiff,
but you need to actually have both.
If you are lacking ankle mobility,
you can't optimize your positions and
you're going to tend to move your feet in
ways that are gonna make you more prone
to injury at the ankle or at the knee,
or even at the hip. So you need this
dorsiflexion, but at the same time
you need the stiffness to prevent
your ankle from moving a lot.
So during a sprint, as you're
accelerating the ability to dorsiflex
is really important.
But as you reach peak speed,
the ability to have a completely stiff
foot that moves very little when it hits
the ground.
That's what's gonna
transfer force the best to the ground.
So I like after working on the mobilization
of the ankle to work on a little bit
of stiffness drilling,
which is just bouncing in place and
trying to bounce as high as possible,
by bouncing off of the stiff foot.
So that looks like this.
You can stay on my feet.
So I've got like a 30 inch vertical leap,
but that comes mostly from my hips,
which are really powerful.
Strictly my feet and ankles
have been kind of weak.
She can see you when I'm just working on
my feet, I'm not getting a ton of height.
But as we work on this and drill this,
that foot will develop and having a
stronger foot as an athlete is one of the
most powerful things you can possibly have.
So next we're going to be looking at
the classic eversion ankle sprain.
So this happens in life.
This is going to happen to you if you're
not training your ankle to be able to
support you in this position, you're
just setting yourself up for injury.
So first we can just
do it, right, and I like to wear shoes
and notice I put my shoes back on for this,
it just takes a little bit
It's a little bit less painful
on the outside bones in my feet.
Also if you wear a thicker shoe it creates
more tension on your foot, and you can
get a little bit of a training effect by
increasing the lever on that's acting on
your foot.
So I'm on the outside edge and my foot
and I can just stretch a little bit
here and then I can work on
strengthening that as well.
So I can try to push my foot down
just like I tried to push in the other
position or just use my weight to stabilize
and I'm just firing all the muscles
over here so I can just do that isometrically
or I can go and bring my foot
back in
Eventually I want to be able to push into
my foot dynamically,
cause that's the way the injury happens
and we can even turn our feet out
and jump and land
on the outside of our ankles.
This is of course the more advanced
version of the drill.
If you're uncomfortable as soon as you
put your foot out here, don't even think
about jumping yet,
but I want you to get the idea that
eventually that's how stable and strong
your ankles need to be. They need to
be able to go onto the outside,
jump on them, and not get injured.
Next we're going to be looking
at the inversion sprains,
so the inversion sprain is difficult to
train because if we just drop our foot in,
we're dropping our knee in.
A lot of times we're going to
get more stress on the knee
then we are going to get on the foot.
So it took me a long time to figure it out,
but I figured out that the best
way to train that interior ankle sprain
is to use an elevated platform,
stick your foot on the edge
of it and then lean away.
So now I can stretch that,
inversion action on my foot.
Now I can start,
isometrically pressing against the weight here,
and I can start rolling through
and pressing my foot out of that position.
And obviously I can do this
with my foot off the ground too.
This is a little bit too far for me
so I'll move it in and show you that.
Here's my foot on the edge.
Pick my foot up.
So currently I'm working on corkscrews
and frequently land kind of way over here
and pushing into that ankle into
this compartment of the ankle.
And this has been amazing
for strengthening myself,
to prevent that from
becoming an impingement.
So this is the way that I'm working.
Opening up all of these tissues and
making them stronger
and just like, we can start then
becoming more dynamic with it.
Opening that ankle up
opening that ankle up
With any of these ranges of motion,
we want to start with first establishing
the pain free range of motion, right?
How far can we go? Can we open that up?
Can we get better relaxation into it.
Then we want to start developing
strength and motor control.
Can I get in there and
produce tension effectively?
Then can I start moving around it eccentrically
and concentrically and only once
we've established all of that,
are we going to move into dynamic actions
so the kicking of outside of the ankle,
the kicking and be inside of the ankle,
the jumping
all of that has to be done on top of an
ankle that already has established
motor control,
strength and range of motion.
I wanted to show it to you just so you
realize that we have to go all the way to
this level of pressure testing
our ankle if we want an ankle.
that's truly bulletproof
when we take it out there to train.
The next thing we want to look at is
really preparing for that interior ankle
dynamic movement. It gets a lot
of, interior ankle injuries.
So we want to be on top here and
learning to overpress dynamically.
Okay? Again, we want to establish
strength range of motion somewhere else,
but now I'm going to stand on the
edge here and I'm going to bounce
and expose my ankle to the type of tensions
it's going to experience in my jumps.
I like to do this until I actually feel
just the tiniest little bit of discomfort
beginning in the front of that ankle.
So I know I've exposed it
to what will injure it,
but I stop before it's going
to hurt me going forward, right?
I'm not going to feel worse later today.
I just know that I've exposed it to enough
that's its gonna adapt and get stronger.
So the last thing we're going to look at is
strengthening and preparing your ankle
for going into extension. So the first
thing is actually what I'm doing.
It's just kneeling.
A lot of people are not comfortable
kneeling that their ankles can't tolerate
this position.
This is a basic human mobility position.
Everyone should be able to do this.
So if this is uncomfortable for you,
start with a blanket under
your feet or rolled up towel,
and slowly get yourself comfortable
just in this position.
Once you're comfortable in this position,
you can move into adding some
tension or increasing the weight.
So now the weight is
distributed across my shin,
but I can press my shins up and
start stressing my ankles more.
From there I can then start moving
more dynamically
or I can start using an isometric.
So I'm gonna just try and
press my toes forward
try to press my feet forward like
ripping the ground up with my feet.
That's going to strengthen this whole interior
compartment it's relationship to that
to that extension.
Once we're there,
we can start working on a
little bit of explosives,
kind of come down and land
and stretch those ankles out.
Can I jump out of this position?
So here we've got again,
the same progression from
opening the joint up,
increasing its motor control,
increasing its ability to have strength,
and eventually we work on
elasticity and dynamics.
So this is our system for how we're preparing
the ankle to be as bulletproof as possible.
There's lots more details of course,
but this should give you a nice guideline
to start your journey in building the
most powerful ankles you can.
