5 Exercises to improve your ankle mobility

Ankles.

We ask so much of them, but rarely give them a second thought.

But if you want to be able to...

- squat,

- run,

- balance,

- or any of a whole host of other things

... then you want stable ankles, with a moderate amount of flexibility in the right movements.

In this post we'll focus on improving ankle flexibility. If you're keen to know more about how to improve ankle stability, then you won’t have to wait long. We’ll have a post about that soon.

Too much (or too little) of a good thing

When it comes to ankle flexibility, there's a sweet spot (as there are with many things). For example, if my ankles are too inflexible then I'll have trouble with movements like squatting. If they're too flexible, or flexible in the wrong ways, they might become unstable and affect my balance.

Types of ankle flexibility

If you take a moment and move your foot around, you can see that your ankle is capable of many types of motion. For example you can:

1) point your foot toward the floor and flex it towards your shin

2) move your foot side to side a small amount (without moving your leg)

3) roll your foot side to side (as you would if you rolled your ankle)

Of all of these motions, the most common one to cause people problems with their movement is their ability to flex their foot upwards towards their shin (or more commonly, if their foot is on the ground, to move their knees forward in front of their toes, without their heel lifting off the ground). This is called dorsiflexion, and it's going to be the focus of our suggestions in this post.

Do I have enough ankle flexibility (in dorsiflexion)

To determine if you have sufficient dorsiflexion for common movements, we're going to perform the 'knee to wall lunge test'.

If you score 12cm or above on this test you likely have sufficient dorsiflexion for most movements (like squatting), but be aware that it varies from person to person depending on your particular proportions. For example:

• A taller person is likely to need a slightly higher score to perform the same movements than a shorter person.

• A person with a long femur (upper leg) and short torso (statistically more likely for women than men) will require a higher score than a person with a short femur and long torso.

Here's how you perform the knee to wall lunge test:

1) Take your shoes off

2) Stand facing a wall in a staggered stance. The tips of the toes on your front foot should be 5 to 10cm from the wall.

3) Ensure that your front foot is perpendicular to the wall (pointing straight towards it). There's a good chance you lined up with your toes pointing outwards a little.

4) Keeping your heel on the ground, move your knee towards the wall in an attempt to touch your kneecap to the wall. Ensure that your knee moves directly forward over your 2nd toe, and doesn't move inwards. If it does, you're probably no longer measuring dorsiflexion, but collapsing the arch of your foot instead.

5) If you succeed in touching your knee to the wall without collapsing the arch of your foot, move your toes back 1 or 2cm and repeat. If you couldn't touch the wall, move in the same distance.

6) Repeat as necessary until you find the maximum distance for you. Measure this distance, from the box to the tip of your longest toe.

7) Repeat on the other leg.

There's more than one reason for a lack of dorsiflexion

When you look at the test that we just did, you might be struck by how it resembles a standard calf stretch.

In fact, many people will initially try to improve their dorsiflexion by stretching their calves. This is logical, but it doesn't always work. And that's because while it is possible that your tight calves are causing you're lack of ankle dorsiflexion, it might not be the only cause.

The challenges with ankles

Improving ankle dorsiflexion is definitely possible, but it can be challenging. To give you the best chance at making an improvement, let's talk about each of the challenges. Then we'll give you 5 exercises to get things moving.

1. Ankles can be tight for multiple reasons. It's easy to look at tight ankles and think "if I stretch my calves they'll get looser". But if tight calves aren't the primary cause of your tightness, stretching them won't be the answer. You need exercises that address as many of the possible causes as you can. The 5 exercises that we've provided below are a good mix to start with.

2. You use your ankles a lot. Let's assume that you take 10,000 steps per day. That's 10,000 times every day that your ankles are being told, "you have exactly the right amount of ankle mobility for what I'm doing". That's a lot of stimulus telling your body NOT to give you more flexible ankles. If you want to overcome that, you need to put in consistent work.

3. It's hard to get leverage. When it comes to improving hamstring flexibility, it's relatively easy to get leverage on the muscle to stretch it. You simply stand up, then bend forwards and use your torso as a weight to apply force to the hamstring. Yes, you can, and should be doing it in a more refined manner than that, but the point is that the leverage works in your favour. With ankles, it's really hard to get leverage over the joint. There's only a couple of stretches that do the job. We've picked carefully in the 5 suggested below.

Ok, now let's get to the 5 exercises.

Banded dorsiflexion

For this exercise you will ideally use a light exercise band. If you don't have one you could use a piece of rope or a belt, but it won't be quite as comfortable or effective. It's still worth trying though.

Here's how you do it:

1) Loop your band around a solid object like a pole.

2) Place one ankle in the band and step forward to get some tension on it. It doesn't need to be excessively tight, but we do need some tension. If you're using a belt/ rope then step forward until it comes tight.

3) Ensure your foot is lined up directly in line with the band.

4) Stand in a staggered stance. The other foot can be in front or behind, whatever feels better to you.

5) Move the knee of the leg that is in the band back and forth to flex and extend the ankle. Focus on being smooth and gentle rather than stretching. The aim of this exercise is to help the ankle joint to move more freely within the range of motion it already has, and hence puts us in a better position to then move into new ranges with other exercises.

Tibial rotations

Tibial rotations are another exercise aimed at creating gentle movement at the ankle joint. This time, we're rotating side to side.

1. Stand near a wall or other object that you can use for support.

2. Stand on one leg, placing the free foot on the side of, or behind, the knee of the leg that is on the ground.

3. Gently rotate side to side, focussing on having the rotation come from the tibiotalar joint. That's the joint between the tibia (one of the lower leg bones) and talus (the top bone of the foot/ ankle).

4. Aim to not rotate from either the knee or hip. The hip is capable of much greater rotation than the tibiotalar joint and hence you're likely to rotate from the hip instead of the tibiotalar joint if you don't move precisely. In the case of the knee, it is a hinge joint that doesn't want to be subjected to excessive rotation, so best to avoid that.

Unfortunately, because this movement is so subtle, it’s really hard to get a good photograph of it in action, so we’re just going to show the general position.

heel drops and raises

This is the first of the exercises that you might consider to be a 'stretch' per se. Having created gentle motion at the joint in the previous two exercises, we're now in a good position to start moving into new ranges of motion. This will be a slow process over time, and consistent work is the key.

Here's how you perform active heel drops and raises.

1) Find yourself a step or low ledge where you have something to hold on to. The bottom step on a set of stairs is a great option because you can hold onto the hand rails.

2) Stand with the ledge in front of you.

3) Place the ball of each foot on the edge of the step such that the front of your foot is supported, but the middle and heel of the foot is not.

4) Shift most of your weight onto one leg.

5) Lower and raise that leg with control. Try and lower as deep as you can, then use the calf to raise up high onto the balls of your feet.

6) Repeat multiple times.

7) Repeat on the other leg.

Kneeling in dorsiflexion and plantar flexion

Sometimes, when increasing range of motion in one direction at a joint, it helps to spend time working into the opposite range. It sounds strange, but it can help.

In this post we have been discussing how to improve ankle dorsiflexion (moving our foot to bring out toes closer to the shin), and thus the opposite movement is plantar flexion (pointing our foot downwards is if you were asked to point your toes).

In this exercise we will be switching between two kneeling positions, one which emphasises dorsiflexion and the other which emphasises plantar flexion. Here's how you do it:

1) Begin kneeling with your toes pointed. This is the plantar flexed position. This will mean that the top of your foot, shin and knee are ont he ground. Your bottom should be resting on your heels or the back of your leg, however if you have knee issues or tight quadriceps you may not be able to get your bottom all the way to your heels. In this instance, simply go as low as you comfortably and safely can.

2) Squeeze your bum and engage your quadriceps to raise up to a tall knee. Your upper leg and torso should form a straight, vertical line.

3) Maintaining the tall kneeling position, tuck your toes under such that the bottom of your toes and some of the ball of your foot is touching the ground.

4) Lower back down as far as you can, aiming to get your bottom to your heels. As before, if you can’t get this low, simply go as low as you comfortably can.

5) Return to tall kneeling and point your toes.

6) Lower back to the starting position.

7) Repeat

Note. If you find it uncomfortable to kneel with your toes tucked under (dorsiflexion) then you could modify this exercise as follows to make it more comofrtable, while still making being consistent with the pricniple of moving between dorsiflexion and plantar flexion. For example you could:

1) Spend 10 seconds kneeling in the plantar flexed position (toes pointed)

2) Stand up and move to a step and spend 10 seconds on each leg in a heel drop position (working on dorsiflexion)

3) Return to kneeling and repeat

Zero drop footwear

Ok, this one isn't actually an exercise, but it's important so we snuck it in.

One of the reasons that so many of us lack ankle dorsiflexion is that we simply don't ask our ankles to move in that way regularly enough. This can be because we haven't recently performed movements that require good amounts of ankle dorsiflexion, and hence our ankles have gradually become tight, but it can also be because a lot of modern footwear does some of the job of dorsiflexion for us.

We'll explore this using the squat as an example, but it applies to any movement that incorporates dorsiflexion and where the heel is on the floor for at least part of the movement (e.g. walking).

In the first photograph below Jack is in a deep squat. Notice how much his ankles have moved into dorsiflexion. That is, look at the angle between his shin bone and his foot. It's much less than 90 degrees.

Now let's pretend that Jack is wearing high heeled shoes. We'll do this by getting him to squat on a slant board. The angle between Jack's shin and foot is less than it was before, because the angle of the slant board is doing some of the work for Jack. The difference is subtle, but it’s real. This is exactly what happens in any shoe that you wear that holds the heel higher than the toes.

It's fairly obvious that high heeled shoes do this, but you might not realise that almost all modern footwear that isn't specifically designed to be flat, has a raised heel. It's not as extreme as a typical high heeled shoe, but it's still there! Go take a look at your dress shoes and sneakers.

If you wear shoes with a heel drop (that's the short hand name for a shoe with a heel that is higher than the toe; it stands for 'heel to toe drop'), you're constantly sending a signal to your body that you don't need very much dorsiflexion, and your ankles will become tighter. You can definitely overcome this with the exercises we have listed above, but it's harder than it otherwise would be. It's a bit like driving your card with the handbrake on. You can still go fast, but it's be better is we took the brake off! Your heel drop shoes are the handbrake.

The solution to this is zero-drop footwear. Zero-drop footwear is simply shoes that have the heel and the toe at the same height. This can come in the form of minimalist shoes, but there are also brands who make shoes that are a little bit more supportive.

If you're serious about improving your ankle dorsiflexion then you should at least consider moving to a zero-drop shoe. It's not mandatory, but it can help.

Having said that, you need to realise that if you've been walking around in a thoroughly supportive shoe with a heel drop, then changing to something zero-drop (particularly if you go the whole hog and go to a minimalist shoe) is a big change for your foot. This needs to be done gradually.

How to switch from shoes with a heel drop to zero drop shoes, and particularly minimalist shoes is beyond the scope of this blog post, but you'll find lots of information online to guide you. You could for example search "safely transitioning to minimalist shoes" to get started.

A quick note about safety

As with any exercise, movement, stretch etc, you need to listen to your body while you perform it. The 5 ideas that we provided here can be really valuable, but at the same time, everyone is different, and how you perform them matters. If anything doesn't feel right while performing the exercises, or your in any way concerned then take a break and get help from someone experienced and local to you. If you happen to be local to us in Brisbane, you're more than welcome to reach out and we'll give you a hand.

Conclusion

Well that brings us to the end of the post. Well done for getting here!

If you want to be able to move well, then you need at least a moderate amount of ankle flexibility, and in this post we've specifically been talking about dorsiflexion.

We provided 5 exercises to get you started. What you might find is that some of the exercises are more effective for you than others. That's entirely to be expected. We are after all unique people, and our ankles can be tight for many different reasons. The reason your ankles are tight will influence the exercises that help you out the most.

If you do notice that one type of movement is more effective than the others for you then by all means use this as a starting point to find more similar exercises and progress with those. If the gentle movements that we started with work best for you, then there are others that you can try. If the stretch worked best, then there are other variations that will provide a stretch in a slightly different way.

But that's enough for now. We hope you have a wonderful day!

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