Dealing with an ankle sprain can be difficult. But whether you want to prevent an ankle sprain or you want to recover from one, there are some ankle sprain exercises that you can try out. It all comes down to knowing what exercises work for you and adapting everything to your needs. This can help you a lot if everything is done right and without any issues.
What are the symptoms of an ankle sprain?
There are multiple ankle sprain symptoms, which include swelling, stiffness, skin discoloration, pain, bruising and tenderness. Normally if you have an ankle sprain you will also be unable to put weight on the affected angle, so that’s definitely something you need to take into account. Your ankle is able to handle minor injuries, but the ankle sprain can be rather difficult.
What are the risk factors for an ankle sprain?
Some of the main risk factors include being an athlete over 30, carrying a lot of additional weight, not warming up before any physical activity, ligament or muscle fatigue and a poor athletic condition. If you want to avoid an ankle sprain, you need to stay away from these as much as possible. You can also try to do some exercises for ankle sprain recovery just to be safe.
What are the treatments for ankle sprain?
There are lots of ankle sprain treatment options. You could go with surgery like reconstruction or arthroscopy. You can also use some home treatments like wearing a brace for ankle support, resting and not adding weight to the ankle, taking acetaminophen or ibuprofen for pain management, elevating your feet with a pillow, using crutches or elastic bandages. All of these are great ankle sprain treatment options you could use.
Exercises for ankle sprain recovery
Ankle range of motion is one of the best ankle sprain exercises designed to boost the range of motion for your foot and ankle. You will need to wrap a theraband at the upper side of your foot. Then you can perform movements like eversion and inversion, dorsiflexion or plantarflexion.
Ankle bounces are great too. You will have to stand upright and then jump straight up. The main focus for these ankle sprain exercises is to extend the ankles. However you want to avoid bending the knees, instead keep the body tight.
4 square drills is a great plyometric exercise. The idea here is that you want to go with clockwise jumps or counterclockwise jumps. There are also front to back jumps or side to side jumps if you need that approach.
Single leg balance is one of the ankle sprain exercises that you can try on a balance pad. Stay on one foot and then balance on a single leg for 30 seconds. You can add 4 cones to the ground and try to reach the cones, then go back up if you need more challenge. 3 rounds per leg will work.
Heel or toe walks are simple. The idea here is that you want the heel off the ground. You want to focus on your balance and taking the steps needs to be a slow process to avoid any problems.
As you can see, physiotherapy for ankle sprain can help a lot. It’s important to understand the process and eliminate issues properly. Make sure that you use these ankle sprain exercises if you want amazing results, and the value can be staggering. It’s going to take a while to get used to this type of exercise, but it’s certainly going to be worth the effort in the end.