[RECOVER FASTER!] How To Treat Your Ankle Sprain At Home!

Hey it's Dr. Jared and these are five things that you must do for your ankle sprain to eliminate pain and recover faster.

Now the majority of ankle sprains happen in what we call an inversion injury.

That means your foot was probably tucked to the inside as you landed or cut and the result was stretching or even tearing

to the ligaments on the outside part of your ankle.

This stretching or tearing is what causes that limited mobility, that decreased strength and ultimately pain on the outside part of your foot.

In this video, I'm sharing with you five things that you must do to help eliminate this pain and recover faster and ultimately return to doing those things that you love.

Now, before we jump right in, I would love to hear from you.

How did you injure your ankle?

I've heard some pretty great stories.

Leave a comment down below.

Also, if this video does help you out, be sure to hit the thumbs up button.

That helps YouTube to put it in front of more people who would benefit from it as well.

And so thank you so much for doing that.

Now, first on our list is that we want to control inflammation and pain.

This is especially true if your injury is relatively acute, meaning if it happened within about two to four weeks, this is gonna be relevant for you.

The easiest way to think about pain and inflammation control is with the acronym RICE.

R stands for rest.

Don't do activities that aggravate your injury.

I stands for ice.

You want to put ice on it for about 15 to 20 minutes and you can do that about three times a day.

C stands for compression.

This is a great way to add external support to the injury and also control swelling.

I've got a nice brace that I used a lot when I sprained my ankle.

I'll go ahead and link that in the description down below.

It really works well.

And then finally, the E is elevation.

Elevation means it has to be above the level of your heart.

So lay down flat with your feet elevated, with your feet propped up.

Bonus, you can actually just do your ice at the same time.

So about 15 to 20 minutes, three times a day.

Now, the second thing we need to do is promote healing.

Most likely, when you injured that outside part of your ankle, you injured what we call the anterior talofibular ligament.

That's a huge mouthful, the ATFL.

Basically, it's this ligament right here.

Because it got stretched or torn, your body comes in and starts to lay down scar tissue to help it to heal.

We want to help that scar tissue to lay down stronger so that it heals stronger.

A great way to do that is with some cross friction massage.

So again, that's about right where that ligament is.

That's probably where you're painful.

What I want to do is with two fingers, just push kind of hard, come right off the edge of your ankle bone and push and mobilize and massage that area.

So you'll see that I'm actually moving my skin.

I'm not rubbing on the top of my skin, but I'm rubbing the ligament that sits right underneath my skin as I massage back and forth.

And again, that's going to be a little tender at first,

But what you should find is as you continue to go after about 30 to 45 seconds, the pain starts to decrease and you start to feel better.

Look at that, I rubbed my ligament off.

What we're gonna do there is about three to five minutes of that cross friction massage to that ligament.

Number three on our list is we need to increase active range of motion.

Ankle ABCs are my favorite way to do that.

What you wanna do is sit with your ankle unsupported.

We pretend like our big toe is a large marker, and what you're going to do is just draw all capital letters.

There's an A, there's a B,

There's a C. We wanna go through the entire alphabet, performing all big capital letters, moving as much as we can right at our ankle joint.

You'll see that that motion's not coming from my hip.

Rather, it's coming from my ankle.

And what that does is that's going to hit all available motions and all available angles.

It's just a great way to work on control and to get your ankle further warmed up for some of the other stuff that we have in store.

And typically on that, I recommend that you run through that entire alphabet two or three times.

After that, we're going to jump into number four, which is stretching.

Now, I've got a couple of stretches that I like.

I always like to start with a seated calf stretch just because it's not as aggressive, but still a great stretch.

You're gonna come into this position.

Your bed or a kitchen table kind of work well just so that you have this other leg down and it can support you.

You're gonna grab a belt or a towel or a sheet or a rope.

Dog leash also works well.

And we'll just loop that right here around our foot.

Sit up with really good posture and now with my arms I'm going to pull on the tails of this stretch out strap to pull my foot closer towards me.

So I'm pulling in this direction just until I get a good comfortable stretch.

Hopefully you feel that well behind the knee, up in the calf, kind of through the achilles and then down into the ankle.

If it pinches or if it hurts the top of your foot, try to find a happy medium, try to find a range where it's not painful but you still get a comfortable stretch and then that's where I would have you hold it.

You're gonna hold that about 20 to 30 seconds and then repeat that three times.

Now, if you can tolerate weight bearing, the stretches that I actually prefer would be right here.

I'll show you on the edge of my table.

You can also do these up against the wall as well.

You've got two muscles that make up your calf.

We're going to stretch them both out.

First is going to be the gastrocnemius stretch.

So bring your foot behind you as far as you can.

Keep your knee straight and then shift your weight onto that forward foot.

And again, if you lean on a table or something like this, or if you're pushing on a wall, that's a good way that you can enhance that stretch.

If your ankle's really painful, bring it closer to the wall so that it's not quite as significant a stretch.

If you can tolerate it, the further back you go, the more it's going to stretch through your ankle.

Find a comfortable range, hold it for 20 seconds, and repeat that three times.

And then the other muscle, the soleus, we would do with a soleus stretch.

and how we stretch that one out is we're just going to unlock our knee so with the knee straight we stretch the gastroc with the knee bent we stretch the soleus so get into that same position until a comfortable stretch is felt and then just unhinge your knee so i've got this slight bend in my knee now most people are going to feel that a lot lower in their leg down here in the achilles tendon that one does has potential to kind of pinch through the front so keep that in mind we don't want that pinching to occur

Try to find that happy medium between how much you can stretch and how much that pinch happens right there in the front of that ankle.

But you would hold that for about 20 to 30 seconds and repeat that one three times also.

Which brings us to the last thing that you have to do for your sprained ankle injury, and that is strengthening.

Strengthening is a great way to improve stability in your ankle.

and prevent future injury from occurring.

These are the exercises that I like to do that.

Now you will need some sort of resistance band for this.

I've got this small loop.

I do have these linked in the description down below.

You can also use larger loops or TheraBand or the tubes.

All will work well if you just get a little bit creative.

now the three motions that i like to do with the band we're gonna go up we're gonna go out and we're gonna come in this is how we're gonna do it so i've got my band i'm gonna loop it right around the toes of that injured foot pull it over here to the inside and then step on it with my other foot other foot so i've looped it around my left i'm stepping on the band with my right

Now in this position, I'm gonna keep my heel on the ground and then just lift my toes off the ground as high as I can, and then right back down.

I'm gonna repeat that for about 10 repetitions.

This is the motion that we call ankle dorsiflexion.

Next, we're gonna go out against the resistance of that band.

So again, keep your ankle down on the ground, let your toes drift to the inside, and then use the muscles on the outside of your ankle to pull it out and away in this manner right here.

So we're gonna pull out,

and we're going to repeat this about 10 times as well.

Inversion, or pulling in, is a little bit trickier to get into.

Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to cross my legs so the injured leg is on top of my non-injured leg, and with that right foot, I'm going to anchor that, I'm going to hook that right around the band so it looks just like this.

Now what I can do is pull those toes in away from my foot in this direction right here to work the muscles right here on the inside part of my leg.

And then you're going to repeat that one 10 times and then I would repeat that whole series three times.

So three sets of 10 in each of those directions.

And then the last motion that we need to work on would be a plantar flexion motion.

The simplest way to do that would be with heel raises.

I'll always start right here on the ground.

So we're going to stand, we're going to lift our heels off the ground, contract our calves, and then return back down to that starting position.

And again, this is a great way to improve that, what we'd call plantar flexion motion.

It's nice and safe.

You can weight bear as much as you can tolerate on this.

And it's just a great way to start that motion.

If you're looking for the next level on this, what we would do is do those ankle or those heel raises on the edge of a stair.

and so if you come to a stair now all of a sudden what we can do is get into what we'd call a negative range of motion or we can take it through its complete entire range of motion it has potential to be a little more aggravating but also results in better healing better strengthening and so

If you can, this is a great progression.

And then it looks just the same.

So the balls of my feet are up on a stair.

I'm gonna lower my heels as low as I can comfortably, and then use my calves to pull my heels up and above the stair.

And what I would go for there is about 10 to 15 repetitions, and then repeat that three times.

Now, I mentioned earlier if you have pinching in the front of your ankle with any of these exercises, I would recommend a little bit different exercises for you.

Check those out right here.

If you want the next level strengthening on your ankle, check this video out right here.

It's really going to help.

If you haven't subscribed to Tone and Tighten yet, I wish you would.

Hit the circle right here to do that, and I hope to see you again soon.

Hope you feel better.