Mark and Brian coming at you for Fitness4Life. Happy holidays to you all. What we’re going to talk about today is ankles, and the reason we’re going to talk about ankles is because the research shows that a lack of ankle mobility can cause all kinds of problems from your foot and ankle, to your knee, to your hip, to even your lower back. This can stem from not having enough movement in your ankle, so it affects your walking, how you go up and down the stairs, and your exercises. One reason why a lot of people will walk with their feet pointed out is because they don’t have enough ankle mobility for them to point it straight. So for their body to make up for that, they turn their feet out because then they don’t have to bend their ankle as much.
It’s also been linked to injuries in athletes with knees, hips, and lower back. What a lot of people don’t realize is how important the ankle is to everything else because when you stop and think about it, the only thing touching the ground is your two feet. So if your feet go, and the mobility and stability in those joints go, the rest of the health of the body is going to be determined by that. What we’re going to do today is give you some exercises to do if you are lacking that mobility in your ankle, but we’re going to show you how you can determine if you are lacking in ankle mobility first.
We’re going to have my colleague here stand over here, and we use his right foot. I made a line on the ground so this would be a wall typically or a box like this, but you’re going to come four inches out from the wall.
His toes is going to be right on that line, foot straight and keeping his heel down. All he’s going to do is bend his knee and see if he can touch his knee to that wall. At a normal range, he should be able to touch his knee to the wall For those of you who like numbers, 40 degrees is what’s considered normal.
That’s a simple way to measure and you need to do both sides because there can be discrepancies. Measure it, see how you do.
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