There are a few different stretches and exercises you can do on your own.
The first exercise is a good way to assess the ankle as well as a good thing to add to your routine. So get into a half kneeling position next to a wall with no shoes on. What you are going to do now is, keeping the foot completely flat on the ground, push the knee towards the wall. Because most of the motion is coming from the body and trunk, the ankle muscles are fairly relaxed and not a strong component to restricting the motion. As you move your foot back further and further, eventually the heel will come off of the ground. This would indicate the ankle joint itself not being able to go into what is called dorsiflexion, or the foot going up, any further. Once you see the heel come up, that is your ankle joint range of motion. I’d recommend doing this on both sides to see which ankle is tighter and see how they are moving. Then after doing this assessment, you can make this an exercise by doing 10-15 reps of these going back and forth and trying to keep that heel on the ground.
Next grab something that you put under your toes to elevate them. This is going to stretch one of the under layers of the calf called the solues. As you push forward a little, you want to push the heel down towards the ground. You should feel this in the back of the calf muscle, but it is getting one of the layers of the calf a little better than some of the typical calf stretches. As options of how to stretch, as he is doing in the video, rocking back and forth would be how I would recommend you stretch this prior to activity instead of a static stretch or holding a stretch for a sustained period.
Next stretch would be stretching the outer calf muscle. With the knee straightened and the toes elevated, this will stretch the out calf muscle called the gastrocnemius. Both of these muscles attach into the Achilles tendon at the back of the heel.
There you have it. 3 easy stretches/exercises that you can add in anywhere to loosen the ankle and get moving toward better health. I like being able to get as much of your stretching in in one position, rather than moving around to try get the right angles. When the ankle doesn’t move properly, it can make significant differences up the leg and into the back. Let us know if you have any questions. Check out our other “How to” videos on our Blog page.
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