Do you suffer from repeated ankle problems? Want to know how you can improve stability to strengthen the area? Well Lindsey is on hand in this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast. He not only gives you the cause of ankle troubles, but the best way to get ride of the pesky problem.

Transcript

Brad Brown: Welcome back to it, you’re listening to Ask Coach Parry podcast and Lindsey, a question in today from, let me see who it was from. Mfenkazi, was asking about ankle problems and I think it’s something that some runners do struggle with.

Particularly if you do feel like you’ve got weakened ankles and you tend to twist them quite often. What can you do to strengthen your ankles to avoid injury, to stop them rolling and that sort of thing? Are there specific exercises and strength training that you can do around those?

Lindsey Parry: So the most important aspect of ankle stability and integrity is actually something we call ‘proprioception’ and proprioception is really just a fancy word for speaking about balance within a joint. In every joint in the body we’ve got muscles which are primarily responsible for moving the joint. We call those ‘prime movers’.

How the ankles are stabilised

We’ve got muscles that are primarily responsible for the integrity and stability of that joint. They tend to be much smaller muscles and they have, they’re attached to tendons and ligaments. Within those tendons, in particular, we’ve got little sensory organs.

Those sensory organs are set up there to detect the level of stretch within that tendon. So when we’re standing, even when you’re just standing still with both feet planted firmly on the ground; there’s a constant adjustment happening between many muscles in our body that literally switch on and off. That’s what allows us to remain upright.

If we’re balancing on one leg, with the ankle, you will notice that it wobbles slightly and that wobbling causes a slight stretch and then a response from the muscles and that’s what keeps us going. Unfortunately, when we injure an ankle joint, so if the force, you step in a hole for example; you’re running and you step in a hole or a big tuft of grass and you collapse over to the side. The force is sudden and too great for that muscle to immediately compensate and to keep us upright. We can then tear muscles and/or tendons, even if it’s just a mild tear and that will then destroy these little sensory bodies.

How to improve your ankle strength

Fortunately, we’ve got many, many, many to replace those that are destroyed. However, we need to wake them up and we need to establish those neural pathways. It’s not so much about doing strengthening exercises to protect those ankle joints. It’s more about providing stimulus to improve the pathways or the communication pathways between those little sensory bodies, the Golgi tendons and the nervous system.

How do we do that? Well, the easiest way, you take your shoes off and you just balance on one leg. In a stork stand and you’ll feel how unstable you are. At first you have like wild swings before there’s a correction. But as you do it more and more and you balance for 30 seconds at a time. Do that every day, you will feel that you become more and more stable.

So, then we add in further degree of instability because your eyes play a really important role in helping you to maintain that balance from the visual cues. So we close our eyes and remove those visual cues and then you’ll feel like you are all over the place.

If you persist at it and you do a couple of repetitions of 30 seconds per day, you will then become very good at that balancing, which point you can then move onto a very unstable surface like a Bosu ball, hedgehog, stability pad, wobble board. One of those things which is actually designed to completely throw that ankle and hip joint complexly out of sync, but over time you will then improve.

Then you will have a really nice, stable joint because the muscles are turning on and off at the appropriate time. During that process you can also do some calf raises, some toe raises, some ankle eversion and inversion. With all of those you can use stretch cords and that will strengthen the actual muscles but until the muscles are switching on and off at the right time, you’re always going to be susceptible to re-injury of that joint.

BB: I heard the funniest little interview with South African golfer George Coetzee at the Qatar Masters just a week or so ago. He’s obviously coming back from a serious ankle injury and he was talking about brushing his teeth on one leg with his eyes closed in the morning. That’s what he’s doing to sort his out Lindsey, so there’s something you can do and kill two birds with one stone at the same time!

LP: Correct.

BB: I love it, Lindsey Parry, thank you very much for that, much appreciated, we look forward to catching up again soon. Don’t forget, if you have a question you’d like answered, the best place to get it answered is in the Coach Parry VIP Facebook group. To get part of that, just make sure you head over to coachparry.com/join, you can get access to that group and a whole lot more as well, go check it out, coachparry.com/join. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.