Tuesday, September 2, 2008

3D Ankle self mobes



If you see me doing my pre game taping before a football game, you will see the "on deck tapee" in the corner doing the exercise above. The slant board will be placed about 18" from a wall or fence, in three different positions: frontal plane neutral, " " everted, " " inverted; at 20 degree angles. The athlete does this by turning the board sideways, then placing a few rolls of tape or weight plates on the wall side to get the sagittal plane angle. The athlete will stand on the board with his foot/knee/hip in 0 rotation. The contralateral LE will be flexed to maximum, hands as high as you can reach on the wall, hip pushed toward the wall as ROM permits. From there, the TP element is added in by horizontally abducting/adducting the thigh as ROM permits. 1 set of 20 reps, each foot, in each position. Or as long as it takes you to tape a set of ankles!


Not only is this a terrific three dimensional mobilization for the ankle, but also for the hip! They are functionally & anatomically linked together by the way- a topic for another blog.


If you are trained in joint mobilization, it's easy to squat down & use your hands to accelerate or decelerate one segment on another as you see fit. Again we see the athlete is correcting his own dysfunction, with the ATC in the secondary role as a scaffold to healing.

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