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You are here: Home / NMS Rehab / The Ankle Mobility Audit

The Ankle Mobility Audit

Runners need an efficient gait to stay injury free and perform at their best. A relatively minor imbalance of joint motion is enough to cause a big problem after thousands of footfalls. On the other hand, the same problem may be completely irrelevant for someone who only plods from the couch to the refrigerator. That’s why so many people develop “running injuries” after starting a new program.

Ankle mobility.

To be able to properly perform any standard of athletic movement (eg. squat, lunge, Turkish get-up) a certain amount of ankle motion should occur. Dr. Greg Rose at the Titleist Performance Institute suggests having 4″ of travel of the knee over the 2nd toe. This 4″ standard for ankle dorsiflexion is easy to measure and consistent with what we know about biomechanics.

closed chain dorsiflexion
See, no foot pronation and the knee doesn’t dive inward.

You can audit this with your toes 4″ from a wall and lunging the knee toward the wall and directly over the 2nd toe. Bad compensations include foot flattening/ rolling in and the knee arching inward.

valgus knee and ankle pronation
Knee’s in, foot’s out, arch’s flat. All bad things in life and sport.

If you don’t have 4″, then you need to get it. Stretch the calves and mobilize the ankle. Once you get the 4″, perform a movement audit as a warm-up before training(eg. squat, lunge, Turkish get-up).

Mobilize the ankle as demonstrated in the pictures below.

Start position. The stick, held straight up and down, provides a target with the knee to the outside of the stick.

The ending position. Slowly oscillate back and forth every several seconds.

Filed Under: NMS Rehab, Self Care Tagged With: #nmsrehab, ankle, ankle sprain, audit, correction, mobilization

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Dr. Bradford Cole Memphis Chiropractor

Bradford Cole, DC, MS

I'm a rehab physician treating functional, musculoskeletal pain with manual therapy, corrective exercise, and other rehabilitative techniques.
I practice at Cole Pain Therapy Group with a professional degree in chiropractic (DC), master's degree in sports rehab, and bachelors' degrees in life science and in business administration.
I strive to integrate the scientific principles of human functional performance to improve the life of any musculoskeletal pain sufferer.

Selective Functional Movement Assessment Certified Professional
Functional Dry Needling Level 2

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Bradford Cole, DC, MS
Cole Pain Therapy Group
2845 Summer Oaks Drive,
Memphis, TN 38134
901-377-2340

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