# The disgruntled uncooperative ankle



## PillarofBalance (Oct 12, 2015)

Simply look at a human being as they stand, walk, squat or perform anything in motion or athletic and you will see one commonality among it all. Their entire base of support is the foot. Because of the laws of gravity, that foot is what makes contact with the ground.
Yet look at how we neglect it?

Let’s use an analogy with building a structure, let’s say a new house. You dig a whole and pour some concrete for the foundation. That foundation is inspected for integrity and if poured and cured properly should look like this |__|

The walls of the foundation are perpendicular and the floor is level. That foundation is now prepared to support a mammoth load on top of it and last for a century or more. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this already right? Say it wasn’t poured correctly and the foundation now looks like this / __ \

Now build the structure on that and what do you think will happen? A partial to complete collapse and whoever is inside is probably going to die or be severely maimed.

Now let’s bring it back to lifting. You unracked a 600 pound bar and are in position to squat. Everything looks cool. You’re pushing out on the side of the feet, upper back is locked and loaded; so you go down, and right as you approach parallel things start to go wrong. Your ankle eversion shows it’s pissed off ugly face and you get stapled to the floor. That eversion – a collapse of the arch and a rolling of the foot to midline of the body sets in motion a chain of events that you almost can never recover from.

Say you have video of that lift, and some friends review this and try to find out what the heck went wrong. They will see some things that they believe caused the miss, but they are only seeing symptoms of what actually caused the miss. Because so few are either 1. Good at analyzing human movement; or, 2. Pay no attention to the ankle or anything beyond the obvious symptoms.

Here is the breakdown of a squat where eversion occurs. The arch collapses, the knees come in, the hips go loose, the loose hips which are needed to maintain rigidity in the lumbar spine cause rounding of the low back, which leads to a caving of the chest because the abdominals can’t support the entire load by itself, and down you go. The process is similar for the bench and deadlift in fact.

For athletes outside of the gym, eversion is the cause of the torn ACL, one of the worst injuries an athlete can suffer. So for athletes such as football, soccer or basketball players who must quickly shift directions at speed this is imperative for them.

So how neglected do your ankles actually need to be to get to a point where it affects your lifts? Not that far, only a few degrees range of motion in fact. From my own observations and having worked on a few dozen ankles in the gym I typically see decent enough plantar-flexion (think calf raise), terrible dorsi-flexion (think lifting balls of feet off the ground) and eversion (rolling foot to midline) and inversion (rolling foot outwards) are almost non-existent. 

Well what do we do about it? In this case, I have to just give credit to Donnie Thompson who has put out several really awesome videos on how to take care of the ankle. I would suggest you start with this a few times per week. If you’re already having issues do it daily. It takes 12 minutes in total each day. You have time for this, because if you don’t get ahead of the curve you are leaving pounds on the rack and risking injury.

So watch here for some very simple methods to increase strength and flexion in the ankles:






There, now you have no excuse… Start taking care of your entire base of support!

#strengthfirst and special thanks to SuperD3000 for putting out some of the best content online


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## ToolSteel (Dec 12, 2015)

Where you mention the arch collapsing... What about someone like me who has no arch. I mean near zero.


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## PillarofBalance (Dec 12, 2015)

ToolSteel said:


> Where you mention the arch collapsing... What about someone like me who has no arch. I mean near zero.



You should be doing this stuff as well as smashing the calves fromy ankle to knee.


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