Hi I'm Dr. Brittany Bankson with Airrosti Rehab Centers. We're here with CrossFit
Games athlete Stacie Tovar in San Antonio Texas at King Williams District
Crossfit. In this episode of Mobility Monday we're going to work on a couple
of cool tricks to increase your ankle and foot stability and mobility to help
you be a better athlete. So a fun way to tell if you have good ankle range of
motion is this test
so put your toes together your heels together and keep your knees together
and then simply squat. If you don't fall backwards
you have pretty good mobility in your ankles. To ensure proper form and a lot
of different movements we have to have great angle range of motion so what foam
rolling the calves is a good way to ensure that we have full range of motion in our
tissue
so what you're going to do Stacy is I want you to cross one calf over the other and
you're going to start lifting your self up to roll from the ankle
to right below the knee and you're going to do this for about six or ten passes so
you're going to do it straight and then you're going to turn your foot out
you're going to do the same thing about 6 or 10 passes and then you're going to
turn your foot in and do about 6 to 10 passes if you find a really tender spot
you're going to slow down on it you can also wiggle the bottom foot to kind of
floss that tissue and get everything out
so when you take a lot of pounding from box jumps, running and double unders
we need to take care of that ankle range of motion and we need to tackle the
retinaculum which is an ankle bracelet of fascia so we're going to go to the
tibialis anterior which is on the outside of the shin
you're going to cross the ankles over each other and we're going to roll down
to the top of the ankle and then up to the bottom of the knee
again 6 to 10 passes is pretty good and then at the end of those passes
you're going to come back down to the ankles and you're going to sit back and
put your weight on the ankles and you're going to move that that bottom ankle
into circular motions counterclockwise clockwise and loosen all that fascial
tissue up so things glide better
Ok the next one is a dynamic stretch of the calf and Achilles and this is really
important for crossfitters especially with box jumps and running
If you want to protect that posterior quarter of the Achilles from a
rupture, then we definitely need to have not only good mobility but
stability as well and eccentricly loading or putting a lengthening load on
that tissue is really important to not only get it lengthened out but to
strengthen it as well. So we're going to have Stacie go into a plank position and
then what she's going to do she's going to pump her ankles and she's going to
drop that heel down past that neutral zone and then alternate. This is putting
a lengthening load on the tissue which strengthens it as well as lengthens it
and that's going to help warm up so that when she does go through those
repetitive motions she's less likely to tear something
So not only is ankle mobility really important but stability is as well
so in theory we want the ankle to be really stable and the forefoot to be a
little bit more mobile and so what happens when that doesn't happen
the big toe joint gets really really stuck and we start to get a lot of
weakness on the inside of the foot which can cause a lot of problems with ankles
knees hips and all the way up.
So what we're going to do to ensure that we can use our toes independently kind
of like our fingers for stability
we're going to get this big toe moving and not only moving an extension but we
want the path be nice and straight
so what stacy is going to do is she's going to loop this band underneath her
big toe and she's going to pull not only up but she's going to pull a little bit
to the outside to get that tow tracking a little bit better as she clamped down
with these toes
so we want that big toe extension so that we can go through heel-toe heel-toe
like a normal foot should
and this is going to
help all the way up the ankle and the knee and hip like I said after she does
this
if she's a little bit stuck she can also do the same thing with lifting up the
four toes and clamping down on that big toe.
Thank you again for joining us for another Mobility Monday episode and a
special thank you to Stacie Tovar for helping us out
and for King Williams District Crossfit for having us here. If you want to check
out any more Mobility Monday episodes
just click on the link right up here and we will see you next time