Top 3 Ankle Mobility Exercises [Strong Ankles]

hey guys I'm dr. and horse agin today I'm gonna show you my top three ankle mobility exercises alright guys so if you have been watching my content for a while now you know that ankle mobility limitations are almost the number one problem that hinders good squat technique now if you want to get into a good deep squat your knee has to move forward over your toe and that needs or requires ankle mobility the movement of this your tibia going forward over your toe so if you have limitations and you can only get that far if

you want to get into a deeper squat what's gonna happen your chest is gonna fall forward so let's talk about how to improve ankle mobility the first thing is we have to figure out is ankle mobility the limitation in what is causing you to have that problem all you're gonna do is get an X to a wall or the end of the rink now if you have a ruler a yardstick anything you're going to look for five inches if you don't have that thumb plus a fist yeah that's gonna be roughly five inches from here

try to drive your knee directly over your second or third toe without your heel popping off the ground and see what happens so as you can see as I go forward I can touch this area right here without my heel popping up but for a number of you you're only going to get to about here and what's gonna happen your heel is gonna pop off the ground or your knees gonna want to cave in in order for you to hit that wall right there so if you cannot get all the way to the wall without

your heel popping off the ground first thing we just uncovered an ankle mobility limitation second thing I need you to do is to figure out what is actually causing that restriction do you have a pinched or blocked sensation in the front side of the ankle and is there tightness in the back okay those are the two things because that's going to differentiate what we're gonna do for fixes so the first thing a pinched or block sensation in the front side of the ankle is significant of a joint restriction basically the way in which the bones

in your ankle are moving over each other is not allowing your to translate over your toe we need to clear up a joint restriction before we go to soft tissue work like stretching the muscles and backs out of the calf so here's what we're gonna do we're going to use a band in order to do a joint mobilization now this is about two and a half or three inch thick band from rogue fitness I'll have a link to this type of band in the description of this video but this is the type of band that

you're gonna want to use it needs to be pretty thick if it's too wide you're not gonna get the specific motion at the angle that we want in the desired force on the area what you're gonna do is you're going to get your foot up here now if we took a screen shot and look deep inside your ankle we're looking to have this band pulling down and back on your tailless bone that's the bone that sits right up here on the top of your foot if you have this band up high it will not be

doing what we needed to do to improve ankle mobility when you move your knee over your toe like this your tailless bone moves backwards so if you have a limitation in the way those bones are moving your tail is bone isn't gliding backwards or posterior like it should it's going to limit how far your knee can go over the toe so what the band is doing is it's helping improve that natural gliding of the joint now if you have had an ankle sprain in the past this is a very common limitation that comes much further

after even after the pain is gone we often find that this is a limitation that occurs so what you're gonna do band on top of the tailless underneath the big ankle bones that's how you know it's in the right spot if there is enough tension on the band and as well when my knee goes over my toe like this that should remove that pinch or block sensation in the Front's of my ankle let's say I go forward like this and I'm still feeling it either the band's not in the right spot or there's not enough

tension pull the band get it a little bit tighter okay sometimes you need a friend to help you with this but get that knee and you're gonna drive it forward over the toe and what we're doing is we're not holding this but we're just gliding back and forth it's called a mobilization with movement now if you want to if this is a little tough to just hold that position you can grab a weight and hold it on top sometimes can help some people feel a little bit more stable but something like this what I'm doing

is maybe 20 reps holding for about three seconds and then back again we're helping improve the motion of the bone the tailless bone gliding backwards against the tibia bone which is your tall shin bone right here and back improving the natural joint movement or kinematics of the ankle so that's the first way to improve ankle mobility now if that was right for you and you had that pinched sensation always test and retest see if that was right for your body and if you made any change get back down to the wall have your fist and

thumb extended can you move that ankle a little bit more did it help decrease that pinched sensation right there that is showing you that it was effective at improving the limitation that you have now that we've cleared up a bit our joint mobilization problem or a joint mobility problem we now have to go to stretching the tissues on the backside of the body so here are my next two favorite stretches for that first one we're just gonna find a bench you can do as a box we're just gonna get up into this position and we're

gonna drive that knee directly over the toe and you're gonna hold this position what I like doing is grabbing down on the box and using my chest to really pull down you can again push down this way if you want to again you could grab that weight stacking on top but I really like almost pulling my chest into this for a really good stretch now when you're feeling the stretch it's usually down in this area it's your soleus muscle there's two muscles of your lower leg you have your gastroc which is the big calf muscle

and your soleus now here's the deal your gastroc muscle crosses two joints crosses the knee joint and it crosses down here when you bend your knee you're taking a little slack off the gastroc up here but the soleus muscle doesn't cross the knee joint it originates up here and then attaches down here so when you're driving your knee over your toe like this we're getting a lot more stretch in the soleus muscle than we are the gastroc so that's often a main limiting muscle and flexibility in limiting our depth whenever we're squatting so again something

like this holding and then back now here's the deal a lot of people have questions how long do I stretch it depends do we hold for long times do we hold for short times it's going to depend on your individual needs some people need longer duration stretches thirty Seconds to even a minute if they have very big limitations and restrictions and mobility now here's the deal with that with really long stretch times like a full minute stretch usually the body will have a decrease in strength and power that it can produce with those muscles directly

after so there's a decrease in performance with long duration stretches thereafter now what that means is that if you're in competition mode right now and you have a really heavy training day you're looking to perform I probably don't want you to do very long duration stretches before him so I'd probably stick with something like ten-second stretches and do a number of repetitions all that means is we need to tailor the duration of your stretch to what your goals are for some people if they have very big limitations and ankle mobility I would rather them improve

their ability to move improve that mobility so they can get into better technical positions and I'm ok with a little decrease in performance in the short term because we're going to long term have much better improvements in mobility so we always have to weigh the pros and the cons and understand that the stretch time has to come from the individual needs of the person now that was - so we did bandage joint mobilizations we then did the stretch on the box my third favorite stretch for ankle mobility is gonna come with a goblet squat now

I'm going to use the plate today about 10 kilos 22 pounds you can also use a kettlebell you could use a dumbbell but what we're doing is we're sitting into a deep squat and stretching our ankles the reason I'd like this stretch so much is it's going to be very movement specific to what we're trying to improve we're trying to improve ankle mobility so that allows us to have a better squat pattern to better clean a better snatch so why not stretch in that exact same position so we're going to get into our squat stance

we're going to squat all the way down the plate is in front of us so it's going to allow someone that has big limitations to sit a little bit deeper because it's offsetting your body weight now in this position right here you're gonna drive swivel hips drive your knee over your toe and I'm feeling a really good stretch in the back of my calf again if you are feeling a pinch or black sensation in the front of that ankle you have to do your bandage joint mobilizations first and then do this so again ten seconds

may be early on if I'm just doing this as a warm-up before training day and I'm looking to maximize my technique but not have any detriments and performance and I'm going to the other side usually my elbow is on top of my knee like it so I can swivel and really push my knee down and then back so over and back something like this I usually do maybe four to five repetitions for about a 10 second hold on each side before standing up now again just like every single mobility exercise that I show on University

you have to have a check in a recheck just like we did with the bandage joint mobilization before don't want check that 5 inch test and try your deep squat again get your stance squat all the way down do you feel any different does it feel like you have a little bit better ability to squat deeper keep your chest more upright if that's your goal because remember knee over toe allows more chest upright position which is helpful if your goal is a clean is a snatch a front squat if we need this positioning we need

ankle mobility so always check and see if the mobility work that you did was efficient and effective at eliciting the improvements that you're wanting in movement so there you go those are my top 3 ankle mobility exercises I hope you guys liked today's video again if you're looking for the type of band that I'm using on the mobilizations check out the description in the video and if there's anything else that you guys want to learn about in next week's video please let me know in the comments section below until next week guys happy squad and

then she flows where attention goes so I pay no mind why waste my time with all these negative cat scratching so caught up in their egos these people