2 Important Fixes To Walk Correctly After An Ankle Injury

Today I’m going to show you two important fixes to your walking that are important after an ankle injury. My name is Dr. David Middaugh, I’m a specialist physical therapist at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile. While avoiding unnecessary surgeries, injections, and pain medications. Please consider subscribing to this channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every single week. Let’s get to it.

The number one fix that you need to start doing in your walking, is using your toes. Specifically using the muscles that flex your toes, you have got a muscle that flexes every single digit in your body. So of course, in your fingers, there is a muscle that bends this knuckle and this knuckle and this knuckle. And it’s the same thing your toes, you have muscles that bend each of the knuckles in the toes all the way into this region.

When you have an ankle injury 99% of the time the toes get affected, the strength of the toe flexors is not the same. And so, you have got to regain good strength of those muscles as well as the use of them during walking. So, the first thing you need to do before you even get up and walk, is make sure that you can grab the ground with your toes properly.

So, you might want to take off your socks and shoes for this so you can see what your toes are doing. And you can compare side to side, what you’re going to be doing is grabbing the ground your toes, she’s already doing it. But try to fly now your toes without curling them. So that the tips of your toes here, blanch or turn a little bit white so that you put pressure on the tip of your toes.

Now if we talk about a scale of zero to 100%, I call hard you could do it you’re doing it like we’re talking like 2030 40%, definitely not more than 50% of what you can maximally do. If you maximally do this, your arch will come up and do it all the way. And the balls of your feet will come up right here, you don’t want to go that hard, where I can slip my hand under here. So do it lighter, where this part of your foot from the toes on stays flat on the ground, and only the arch suddenly comes up.

You just want a subtle engagement of the muscles. Because when you are walking, when you go to take a step and you’re about to push off your foot, when you tighten up those muscles a bit, the way that I’m going to tell you today, you make that foot rigid and hard, which is a good thing for you to step off of. If it’s not rigid and hard, then you start to feed into ankle problems. And this can become a chronic ankle problem. So, all you want to do right now is practice grabbing with your toes and about 20, 30, 40%.

Hold it for 10 seconds and then relax. And just get comfortable with feeling these muscles on the inside of your arch work. Can you angle your feet this way just a bit? And she can see the inside of you want to keep the base of this big toe down. Yep, you engage in your toes are good and get these muscles to fire and work just a bit. Once you feel comfortable doing that, then go ahead and stand up. And do this and standing. Do both sides together. Yep, that’s it, you should feel your foot kind of narrow up a bit, it hurts did that.

When the toes engage in this arch should feel like it just raises up a bigger hole ankle may go outwards just a bit compared to what is relaxed, your ankles might want to collapse and work subtly. But when you fire these muscles, your ankles get more stability. And that’s what should be happening when you’re walking, you’re locking out your ankle joints by using your foot muscles this way.

Once you have done this, you might pause here and hang out here for a while if you have if you have never done this before, you just can’t quite get it down. Because the next step pun intended, is to take steps as you’re doing this. So, it’s going to be a little more complicated. So just you can always go back and practice this foot grab if you need to. But what you’re going to do is, if you just march in place, every time your foot grabs, every time a foot lands on the ground, your toes should grab a bit like I like I was having to do your art should come up, but your toe should be flat.

This is what’s supposed to happen when you walk every time you bear weight through a foot because walking is just picking up one foot, put the other one down, you only really have one foot on the ground at a time. I mean, there are points with both feet on the ground, but you’re bearing weight through one foot primarily. You should be grabbing the foot that you’re standing on every time. Now the left foot is going to grab, and you just have better balance this way.

If you do this somewhere at home where you can grab on to something for balance, you know furniture that counters something like that. Instantly, you should feel like you have better balance just by grabbing your toes. Then you’re going to practice taking some steps like this. You might do this barefoot at first stand right over here. Let’s just walk back and forth here a couple times. And do it a little slower here. Just to emphasize how it works. So just freeze right there.

 

When she steps out right foot, her toes are grabbing, and her foot arch is coming up slightly, then go and take the next step, same thing on the other side. So, grab right foot, grab left foot, grab the right foot, grab the left foot, every time you take a step you should be grabbing without foot, it’s going to feel really robotic.

When you do this, that’s normal. If you have never done this before. The point right now is to learn this, practice this so that you can get good at it and make it more casual one more time. And let’s see. You might do this at home, so you can feel safe. You know, nobody’s going to see you this, some people don’t care. Perfect. And you just need to become more natural doing this eventually gets your socks and shoes on, you won’t be able to do this very well.

If you tend to wear flip flops shoes, you need shoes that have something that wraps around the heel so that you don’t have to worry about it. So, you can freely move your toes, so that you’re not worried about your shoe falling off your toes or be barefoot at home or wherever you like to be barefoot. And this is the best way to get functional use meaning using the toe flexors in your everyday walking, you need to be able to use these muscles, when you’re doing just normal things around the house, cleaning your house making a meal, go to the store.

Of course, if you leave your house at work, if you have a desktop, you tend to sit more, then this may not be something that you can do as much during the day. But definitely when you’re off. When you walk to your vehicle, when you walk around home playing with family, kids, grandkids, whoever it might be, you need to be using your toes like this every single time you walk. That just to stress this point of it. This is how we’re designed to work.

That’s why we have toes as human beings, they’re not just there for show or for nothing for no reason. They are there because they help us adapt to the ground uneven surfaces. Especially if you live in a place that’s carpeted and flat grounded, you don’t have to worry about losing your balance a whole lot. But if you think about prehistoric times, or situations where you don’t have shoes, if you’re going to be walking on uneven ground without shoes, your foot is going to adapt to the ground you’re on and you’re you bet your toes kind of have to grab the ground in order to maintain balance.

Well, that’s how we should be walking all the time. So that’s why you need to restore the ability to do that. So that you can get your joints to work properly in your ankle and get rid of this ankle pain. And the second fix you’re walking is you need to stop limping. And let’s say you try this, and you just thought to yourself, I can’t help but limp it hurts even though I’m trying to grab my toes properly, then you need to really look at how much weight you’re putting on that leg. And you might even need to use a crutch or cane something to lean some weight on in case it hurts to put weight on it.

But you don’t want to avoid putting weight in it completely. If you can tolerate putting 50% or 40 or whatever percentage of your bodyweight through that leg, then you need to practice doing it so that you can use these toe muscles as we’ve described. It’ll help to progress your ankle pain as fast as possible. So, the way that it would look, I would recommend starting out with one crutch or if you need two crutches, you can go ahead and stand up.

Let’s say it’s her right ankle bothering her, then you’re going to twist the crutch opposite the side that bothers us, you’re going to hold a crush on the left hand, if you were to have a left ankle problem, and you’d be holding a crutch on the other side. But since her problem we’re pretending is on this right side, you need to set it up this way. So that when she takes a step forward, when take a small step, putting the weight on, you’re going to, you’re going to be moved the crutch forward, and then you’re going to bring this foot even with the crushed freeze right there.

In this position right here, she’s putting some weight through the crutch and some weight through the leg, you have got to find out at home, what’s best for you find you might lean, freezing this position at home, lean more towards the leg and lean away from it and find when it doesn’t hurt. And just give it a percentage, whatever feels right for you.

If that’s about 50%, then you should be 50% through your leg and 50% of the crutch. Don’t worry about this back leg right now. Just worry about the crutch and this leg. So, 5050. And if you can tolerate that, tolerate that then try 8020 or 7030. You just play with how much weight you can put on it. And if you just take this one minute to do this, you’ll figure out what percentage you can put weight on your leg without hurting so that you can use your muscles, right.

So now it’s a matter of finding out how much weight you can put on it and then how much time you can tolerate doing this. If you have had an ankle sprain or an ankle injury for a while, and you can do this you can tolerate being on your feet, say five minutes, then measure roughly how much time you’re doing in the intensity activity, the intensity of the activity that you’re doing. So, if it’s cleaning the house or walking through a store or just standing around watching some other people or doing something standing, then you can measure it that way. And whenever you take steps, let’s have you face this way.

You’ll want to bear weight like we described on the crutch and on your injured side. So go ahead and move the crutches in his right foot forward. This together, yeah, like that, and then bring your other foot through, okay. Yep. And that’s how to look. And you can even take a bigger step with your left foot here, you can step past the crutches if you want. Yeah, like that. That’ll make it go a little bit farther and faster. But of course, you have got to mind the pain and see what it feels like when you’re doing this to avoid pain.

You don’t want to be in pain every time because you’re just going to irritate the ankle and go backwards, you want to challenge the muscles, but without causing any increased pain the ankle, Yep, there you go. Just like that. And you’re always mindful of how much weight you’re putting through your leg. So, these two fixes are critical to make sure that your walking is improved. And you want to eliminate limping. If you just put yourself walking in the mirror.

If you’re doing this or picking up your phone really fast. To avoid pain, you have got to get on a crutch. You might even use two crutches if you need to, if you really need to take a lot of weight off your foot. And if you are having pain, even putting a little pressure to your foot, you need to go get seen by a specialist. If you had this ankle problem for a while, you need to go get some X rays likely and go get checked out.

You might need to be in a boot or some you might have been you need to have a procedure done. You just don’t want to wait too long before this becomes an even more chronic problem. And you’re headed further backwards. Hey guys, if this video was helpful for you, give us a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos that we post every single week. We’ll catch you in the next video. Bye