![]() ![]() Emotional drain from not seeing progress can affect both the therapist and athlete alike.Īnkle dorsiflexion can differ in two situations, one weight-bearing and the other unweighted. Support staff members need to understand anatomically available range of motion first before athletes initiate a mobility program. ![]() Medically, some athletes struggle with extending their foot in a plantar motion, but that is way beyond the scope of this article. Plantar flexion matters, but most sports outside of swimming care about the range of motion the other direction. The ankle is a mortise joint, so it does move anteriorly and posteriorly in a sliding manner, but we will cover the most widely known motion, gross dorsiflexion of the ankle. Other motions such as inversion and eversion happen in the frontal plane, and abduction and adduction in the sagittal plane. For the purposes of this article, I will focus primarily on dorsiflexion, the main quality coaches and sports medicine professionals work on improving.Īnatomically, the foot and ankle system is extremely complex, and should not be boiled down to plantar flexion (pointing the toes) and dorsiflexion (bringing the toes up). Just to make sure we are on the same page, ankle mobility is not just dorsiflexion of the joint, but the available range of motion in all three planes. On the other hand, the preservation or conservation of joint range is important and must be guarded carefully, as cascades of injury could happen when athletes are “not themselves.” What Is Ankle Mobility Scientifically? Even if you can actually make a difference, it’s just wishful to think you will see dramatic changes in performance and injury rates from mobility training. In short, restore what nature has given your athletes, but don’t blindly run in and add exercises. I know some programs really do a nice job developing joint range of motion, but those programs are usually conventional and use heavy strength training and manual therapy, not a few corrective exercises at the end of a workout. ![]() I believe some of the videos have merit, but I am not convinced of an exercise’s benefit unless the evangelist has data to back up their claimed changes. I also devote one section to the marketing hype of ankle mobility, and I want to make sure we are constructive and not just critical. Evaluating intervention strength to see if anything is worth adding to a program.Learning how to measure dorsiflexion reliably and precisely for monitoring purposes.Exploring whether ankle mobility really helps reduce injury or helps with performance.Clearly defining ankle mobility, specifically weight-bearing dorsiflexion.In this article, I lead you through the logic of the following: If a test shows an athlete has sufficient range of motion or is anatomically restricted, we need to leave the athlete alone and train them with what nature gave them. This article makes the simple case that athletes who do have a need to restore their natural range of motion should invest in sound therapies, and those with no issues or room left to move should continue to skip the endless drills and use weight-bearing exercises with full range to maintain what they have. Most mobility exercises are underpowered or simply only appropriate for injuries, not for healthy athletes who have maxed out their anatomy, explains Click To Tweet Again, ankle mobility matters, but the unfortunate reality is that many corrective exercises waste time and give false hope to athletes. In this article, I will cover the details of ankle mobility, and review what potentially works and what might just hemorrhage time from training. Most mobility exercises are underpowered or simply only appropriate for injuries, not for healthy athletes who have maxed out their anatomy. I want to make myself perfectly clear: I do value ankle range of motion and I actively respect efforts to restore it, but many of the drills we see in instructional videos are clickbait or misinformation. It’s perfectly natural to find unpleasant the notion that some things we do on a daily basis don’t work, but for us to make progress, we need to look honestly at the topic and ask the tough questions. It may be uncomfortable to admit that ankle mobility is strongly tied to genetics, but we need to embrace the evidence and logic that is available today. ![]() If I had to pick one of the least efficient training approaches to improving athletes, it would be working on ankle mobility to increase dorsiflexion. ![]()
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