Injury Prevention Part 1 – The Ankle – Testing Dorsiflexion range

So, what I thought I would do in the next few posts is discuss ways of assessing and managing your risk of being injured.

How many of you check yourself for joint stiffness or muscle weakness? There are many common injuries that can be prevented by knowing your body and managing niggles before they become more serious problems that stop you training.

Firstly we are going to look at the Knee to Wall or Lunge test.

(O’Shea & Grafton, 2012)

This test is a simple, easy to complete measure of ankle movement and stiffness. There are many reported ways to complete this and a google image search will give you many more ideas, thought the one in the picture which I will describe has been shown to be reliable and easy to complete.

Why is this important?

A lack of ankle dorsiflexion(toe to shin movement) of the ankle has been shown to predict many potential injuries including tendonosis, fractures, knee pain, inneficient walking and running.

It will also limit your ability to complete simple tasks and exercises, such as squatting, walking up and down stairs, walking and running.

So how do I test it?

1. place a small table or movable piece of furniture in front of you

2. Line up your heel and toe perpendicular to the table

3. Lunge forward and push the table as far forward as possible without raising your heel

4. Keep your knee in line with the 2nd toe

5 Measure the distance from big toe to table

Repeat this 3 times on each leg with a 15 second rest between each attempt and record the average of the 3.

What does this tell me?

You are comparing left with right, there should be no more than 1.5cm of difference between each ankle.

If there is a bigger difference, you have an imbalance in ankle mobility and should be trying to even this out by mobilising the stiff ankle.

The relative distance is important as well, most literature seems to suggest about 8-10cm as normal range, if you have less than this you may want to work on increasing your ankle mobility.

I have a stiff ankle – What do I do?

My next post will look at a variety of methods of increasing ankle dorsiflexion, from simple stretches to some more advanced mobilising techniques you can try.