Rolling your ankle while you’re running is annoying. Whether you’ve rolled your ankle once this running season or this is the fifth time, I’m sure you’re looking for videos online that’ll tell you how to not keep rolling your ankle while you’re running. If that’s the case, this is the perfect video for you.
Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical therapy and I help active adults overcome their aches and pains to keep them doing their favorite activities without injections or surgery.
In this specific video, we’re going to go over things that you can do to prevent rolling your ankle in the future. Even if you’ve been rolling your ankle since birth, it feels like. You just have weak ankles that are just your problem child.
If you practice the principles I talk about and here, your ankles will get stronger and if you wait till the end of the video, I’m going to talk to you about the fastest way to get back from a rolled ankle to running the way that you want to without fear that you’re going to keep rolling in the future. I’m going to go over a few of these principles now. Are we ready?
We’re going to talk about your shoes.
Shoes are very, very important. They’re obviously the first thing that contacts the ground. One thing we never really think about is well, I guess nowadays we really do think about this because so many people buy shoes that are low profile that don’t have any lift at all, or maybe even are a little bit on the negative side.
People really do think about this, but one of the reasons the soles of your shoe matter, not only are they what ends up functionally giving you more support while you run.
If you need that extra support, that is very, very important. The other thing that happens is depending on the maker of the shoe and the style of the shoe, they have built up the soul very thick.
Ultimately most people would just think that that’s just more cushioning, which is better and all those things. That’s still true.
Which could happen when you’re on an uneven surface, it could happen if you hit a crack in the cement or if you just don’t place your foot exactly right, you can end up on the outside of that shoe, (on that edge of the shoe)
It’s so much harder the higher this is, the thicker this is so much harder to recover from that to get back to flat-footed. If you are somebody that rolls their ankle quite a bit, I would just take a look at that because you may want to find shoes that don’t have as much of a buildup of a soul.
One of the great ironies of the high top was they assumed that with the higher heel and the higher top built up over the ankle, that would end up giving people stronger ankles and more support. What they found is almost the exact opposite where people ended up with as many, if not more ankle injuries after wearing high top shoes. If your shoes are perfect for you, we’re going to move on.
You need to have really good ankle strength and ankle flexibility.
I’m not just talking about your ability to point your toes or pull them, it’s also being able to move your ankle side to side. For the most part, that all should be a balanced strength, right? If you find that one direction, you’re super weak in that direction, that’s the side that you need to strengthen.
You need to make sure that you have stability and strength in all four sides of your ankle because you use all four sides while you’re running. Every time you’re on one leg and you’re trying to propel yourself forward, you need to have all four sides of your ankle able to work together with the same amount of strength. If one side overpowers the other, that can be a problem.
The same thing goes with flexibility. If one side is super tight, that’s going to cause the other side to do more work because you’re not going to be able to move into that direction.
Another thing to think about is your foot strength. I know that’s really weird to think about because who thinks about how strong their feet are? Now what I mean by that also is the stability of your foot.
If you are a pronator by definition, that means you have a very mobile foot because the way that you’re going forward is typically with your feet turned out a bit and you’re actually stretching the bottom part of your foot.
That would make the bottom part of your foot a little bit weaker because it’s being stretched out all the time compared to a supinator, which is somebody who’s so rigid that they in some cases just stay on the outside of their foot. It just stays so stiff on the outside.
Sometimes you can get shoes to fix the imbalances. You can have people correct that, but sometimes that needs to be corrected by intentionally strengthening the muscles to help you be more balanced than you naturally want to be.
If you supinate it makes perfect sense that if you caught the edge of a rock and your foot’s already kind of half out anyway, it’s going to be real easy to fall the rest of the way.
Same thing goes with pronation though, because if you excessively pronate, then that means that you don’t have enough foot strength or ankle strength to control for that either.
If you do by any chance end up on an incline or a rock or something that sends your foot over, you’re not going to have enough strength to pull you back in.
Foot flexibility and strength, who would’ve thought you had to train your feet? There we are. The way that you train is by single leg balance activities. If that’s how you would force that issue, to balance that out, is to start doing activities that are on one foot to help you train out where that weakness is.
That also helps with the range of motion and the flexibility also because it’ll draw attention to where you’re having the most problems.
One of my suggestions is if rolling your ankle is a big deal and does happen frequently, the stronger you are doing single leg activities, the better that will be for you.
Another thing that we don’t quite think about often is you could have all the strength. You could be like, “Dr. Molly, I can lift 150 pounds with my calves. I have super strong calves, everything’s good, my feet are super strong”.
If they’re not quick on their feet, if their reaction time is slow, then all that strength is for nothing because while you run, everything has to move quickly. You hit that rock and you have to quickly recover. If it’s slow, then you’ll still roll to the outside, right?
How do you train quickness on muscles? That would be plyometrics.
Practicing jumping, leaving the earth and then landing, leaving the earth and landing in a different variety of motions is really how you make sure that all the strength gains that you’ve made are able to react in the timeframe that you need them to while you’re running.
Now we’re going to go down to a part that we really just don’t think about.
If you always roll your right ankle, you may have something going on with your left hip because we have this crossbody thing.
If we’re not addressing what’s happening at your pelvis (as in how stable your pelvis is) or where your hips are, your glutes, hamstrings, quads, how all of how of all of those muscles react along with your core muscles, they’re then that could be what’s also driving your ankle instability.
When you’re running that is something to pay attention to. Having a friend watch you run and see what’s happening at your hips, if there’s a whole lot of movement you want to practice controlling that you really shouldn’t have a lot of up and down with your hips and you really shouldn’t have a lot of side to side, you should pretty much be moving straight.
There really shouldn’t even be a whole lot of up and down because you’re wasting a lot of energy going up. You’re trying to go forward.
Those are some of the principles that I think you should practice. Check out your shoes, check out your ankle strength and your ankle flexibility in all directions. Check out how strong your feet are simply by standing on one foot.
You’ll figure out that you don’t have to go picking things up with your feet if you don’t want to. Just standing on your foot will do it. Then practicing reaction time. Ie: plyometrics, the fancy term for jumping.
Whether you pick up a jump rope, whether you do jump squats, just practice jumping and having your ankle have to build up that strength and that agility, then check out your pelvis and see how stable it is.
Have somebody videotape you running if there’s a lot of movement side to side, up and down.
One hip dropping a lot of rotation, there’s a lot of movement. There shouldn’t be really much movement that is the foundation for your running. There really shouldn’t be much movement there. Those are the general principles for how you prevent rolling your ankle frequently.
Now the fastest way to go from rolling your ankle to knowing how to do all those principles well is to work with a movement specialist like myself, somebody who can take a look at how you’re running, what your foot is doing, how flexible it is, how flexible your ankle is, checking all the strengths, seeing what happens when you do the plyometrics to make sure that you’re landing correctly and that your timing is on.
That’s a lot of data to collect. It is a lot easier if you work with somebody who sees that all day and understands what it will take with your specifics, like your strength and what your goal is in running and how often you’ve rolled your ankle and how to compile all that information into a specialized program just for you. That’s what I do all day. I watch people run and I figure out how to make them run better.
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Okay, until I have time to talk to you or a chance to talk to you I hope that you’re having a great day and enjoying this lovely weather for running.
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