![]() ![]() And because your foot and ankle are primarily built of bone, cartilage, and ligaments, this sudden increase in pinpoint pressure is what can cause tightness and potential injury in these tissues over time. Insufficient mobility will end up placing higher amounts of pressure on a smaller surface area in your ankle. If you don’t have enough mobility, your foot, ankle, and calf are unable to properly tolerate load. Maintaining sufficient ROM is necessary for safely loading your tissues during activity. (And while we aren’t using our feet to draw circles all the time, these mechanics are essential for a wide variety of our everyday activities.) Why is Ankle Mobility Important?Īs you can imagine, without proper mobility, either joint (or both) will have restricted movement, thus impacting how well your whole ankle moves through its ROM. This combination of dorsiflexion, plantarflexion, and lateral movement is what lets you draw a circle with your foot, rather than just moving up and down or side to side. Together, these two joints allow your ankle to move through a larger ROM in both the sagittal and frontal planes of movement. In different contexts, this can be referred to as pronation and supination, or medial to lateral tilting in the base of the foot. Your subtalar joint is what allows for inversion and eversion. Meanwhile, the subtalar joint is the part of the ankle where your calcaneus - or heel bone - meets the bottom of the talus. This is the joint primarily responsible for dorsiflexion and plantarflexion (i.e., when you lift your toes up versus when you push them down/forward, like you do with the gas pedal of your car). More specifically though, it’s where the talus bone meets the distal ends of your tibia and fibula. The talocrural joint is what most people think of when they think of the ankle - that is, where your leg (roughly) connects to the foot. And although we refer to it as a singular joint, it’s actually a set of complex joint structures that work together.įor the sake of simplicity, we’re just going to focus on a couple of the major ankle bones and their associated joints, talocrural and subtalar. Just because it’s a relatively small structure doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand! The ankle is an intricate joint: they’re actually made up of 7 bones each. Now, in order to understand what “complete ROM” looks like, it’s important to review the anatomy and functionality of your ankle joint. However, your primary focus should dial into how well you can actively move your ankle (and foot, by association) through its complete ROM. When we’re talking about ankle mobility, you do need a certain level of flexibility. Compare that to mobility, which requires more active ROM to control the directional movement of your joints, like when you’re deliberately lifting your leg to place it on the bar. ![]() That, and flexibility is more passive ROM, like when you prop your leg onto a bar to hold a static stretch. But, flexibility is specific to how well your muscles stretch through your ROM, whereas mobility focuses on how your joints and ligaments achieve full ROM. Okay, before we get into the details, we need to make one thing clear…Ī lot of people treat them as one and the same - and while they are similar (and interconnected), they’re distinct terms for a reason.īoth have to do with your joint range of motion (ROM). Let’s dive into the reasons why you might be dealing with restricted ankle range of motion, plus what you can try to fix it (and fix it for good!). When active individuals experience ankle tightness or stiffness, they don’t usually realize how much that slight limitation affects the rest of their movement… This chain is why so many people who experience hip or knee limitations struggle to get rid of the problem: when just ONE leg joint is restricted, it can quickly impact the functionality of the other leg joints, too. But, almost more importantly, they have a major impact on each other thanks to a little thing called the “kinetic chain” in your legs. The joints in your lower extremities (i.e., the hip, knee, and ankle) are all important to everyday mechanics. Biomechanical or physiological processes connect all your tissues and structures, so when an issue presents itself in one area, it can have a rippling effect on many other areas, too. This is because functional movement is hardly ever exclusive to just one part of the body. When you’re dealing with restricted movement, there’s often more to the story than what’s going on at the site of limitation, pain, or injury… ![]()
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