Foot and ankle pain can be a huge problem when you are an athlete. Your feet are the first body part to come in contact with the ground while running. When your foot and ankle health begins to deteriorate, it creates issues in other places. Problems tend to work there way up the body slowly. Here are some things all people can do on their own to maintain their foot and ankle health.
The ankle is one of the most commonly injured places among athletes because of the amount of work that it needs to do. It needs to have a certain amount of mobility, stability as well as having the ability to transfer forces from stronger muscles like the quad into the ground. That is a lot of responsibility.
What you often see with ankles among athletes is those old injuries are not taken care of properly. Too many athletes get hurt and assume rest will heal them. Rest does make the pain go away but if a ligament has been stretched you need to do some exercises to bring stability to the area.
Full Back Line Stretch for Foot and Ankle Pain
The backline runs from your forehead, down your neck, all the way down to the bottoms of your feet. The fascial line can easily be wound up with athletes. The issue with this is that if the hamstrings are tight, they can affect the calves and the calves play a considerable role in the foot, Achilles tendon and ankle health. This stretch is meant to open up the entire back side of your body. There is no way to maintain proper foot and ankle health without first taking care of your back line.
The focus with this stretch is on the contact points with the ground. Focus on putting pressure through your palms, and the balls of your feet. As you drive pressure through your palms, it will also work the shoulders and keep your head in alignment, so you do the whole stretch correctly.
Mobility Work to Improve Foot and Ankle Pain
Limited ankle mobility means that your body will search to get that extra mobility needed in other areas. To run and jump correctly, you need proper dorsiflexion and plantar flexion. The stretch above will help you with your plantar flexion, quad flexibility and stretch your tibialis anterior which a contribute to shin splints. If your foot and ankle health continue to deteriorate, you should see a bodywork specialist you find through Kho. Getting a basic understanding of your own body is always a great idea at this point.
If you apply the following information to your daily and weekly routine, you will see an improvement in your foot and ankle health. The key to this is to do as much on your own for the little things and see a 9INE POINT health care provider for the significant problems. Click here if you need help developing a full stretching routine. Lastly, check out this infographic on athletic injuries.
Rolling your feet on golf balls is vital to athletic health. If you are an athlete, you should not skip this, and even nonathletes can benefit greatly. The foot is made of a bunch of tiny bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. There is a lot of soft tissue in there that can get tight, strained, stretched, torn or broken.
To help keep these structures healthy you need to treat them. By rolling over a golf ball, you allow the pieces of the foot to move as individual structures as they should. You do not want your whole food operating as one big stuck together structure.
When The Foot and Ankle Pain Persists
If you are continually doing these home remedies and still experiencing foot and ankle pain, then you need to do something else. The next best step is to work with a sports medicine healthcare provider. They will be able to analyze your medical history, current activities and injuries and figure out the best way to get you to be pain-free.
The more you get in the habit of working with healthcare providers the healthier you will be. The body was not meant to be trained as hard as many athletes push it. You don’t need to see a healthcare provider every day to be healthy, but regular maintenance is always proper.
Think of a car, can a car go months without any maintenance work? Of course not! Things naturally begin to break down, and they need to be changed, fixed and rotated. The same is true for the high-performance machine you call the body.
Where Do I Start The Search for a Healthcare Provider to Help With Foot and Ankle Pain?
9INE POINT Health makes finding a provider simple. You don’t even need to know what you are looking for. 9INE POINT Health will guide you down the path to the best local options. If you do not know who to choose, no worries, look at the providers 9INE POINT GAP Number. The number is out of 100, and it shows how much respect they have for other athletes, therapists and what their engagement levels are like in the platform.
9INE POINT Health was created by 9INE POINT in '19 as a means to provide athlete-driven resources to "Protect Athletes' Minds, Body and Belly". As well as be a platform for healthcare providers and other specialists to display their knowledge.
