Have you been affected by an ankle injury? Has this stopped you doing what you love? Are you unsure how to get back into your exercise routine? This article will explain our 6 top tips to help you recover after an ankle injury.
“Do not stay in that recovery phase for too long, because you’re just prolonging the time before you go back to doing what you love.”
Coming back to training after an ankle injury? Are you in the final stages of your rehab or have you already finished rehab? We normally see two types of clients afterward in training; the ones that are super eager to go back to training or the ones that are really cautious about getting another ankle injury.
Here are 6 top tips to help recover from an ankle injury: (Watch the video to see the exercises for each step)
- Firstly, assess the strength of the injured area, that being, in this case, your foot or your ankle. An ankle injury assessment that you could do at home, for example, is the single leg calf raise. It’s quite simple, the only thing you might need is another person to help you see the difference between the injured and uninjured area.
- Secondly, assess the imbalance between each side. One way to assess the imbalance between your injured and non-injured side would be a simple bodyweight squat. Post ankle injury, what we usually see is a tendency to lean to the side that wasn’t injured therefore that side becomes very often stronger and sometimes even larger.
- Assess is your balance. It’s really important to see whether your mind and body coordination has changed to understand how your ankle injury has impacted it. You can start very simply by seeing whether there’s a bit more wobble on one side than the other.
- Once all the assessments are done and you’re ready to come back to training. So one of the biggest tips is to plan your training. Have a clear structure of what you’re doing and that will guarantee a faster progression.
- The first few weeks, you’ll want to concentrate on balancing out any muscular weaknesses. After your assessments, you should have a good indication of whether an area is stronger. So now is the time for you to improve its strength.
- Finally, remember flexibility is equally as important. So if one side has become tighter, work on that as well, and you’ll be able to progress sooner.
Above all do not stay in that recovery phase for too long, because you’re just prolonging the time before you go back to doing what you love. After you start feeling less of an imbalance between your right and left, it’s time to move on. It’s time to add more compound movement, bigger movement, more challenging weights, and get your strength training to that next level.
When you recover from an injury and embark on a new training plan, you very often get some minor pains. So you might feel a bit stiff around the injured area or on the other side. Don’t be scared, if it isn’t a sharp worsening pain, it most likely is just a muscle that’s being worked and, as a result, the muscle that fibres are being broken down and rebuilt to make you stronger.
. Take a look at our video Are you coming back to training after an ankle injury? created by Monika Sikora for more information on tips to recover from an ankle injury.
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