Recovering From Ankle Injury

Unless you have a blunt force trauma, like say being in a car accident or something like that, many of our injuries are preventable, so I'm learning the hard way.  As a kid, I was constantly spraining my ankle like every other year.  It wasn't even funny.

A couple years ago I sprained my ankle (or twisted it) while I was walking.  For about 3 months, I had been gradually increasing my walking distances from 1 mile to 7-8 miles at a shot.  Was too lazy to properly stretch out AFTER my walks and on one early morning as I walked on this path that had been muddy, but the mud dried out, my foot hit an very uneven place in the dried mud and twisted.  Ugggh.

At the time I was dating this guy and he was walking with me.  He offered to carry me back, but I didn't want to break his back and limped all the way back to the car, which was close to 1/4 of a mile.  Where we were, you could not drive your car, otherwise he would've went to get the car and then pick me up.  My ankle was so swollen and I was in such pain.  Even after icing it, wrapping up my ankle, elevating it, rest, and a lot of Alleve, my ankle was not getting better.

I saw my dr and she sent me to a physical therapist and I learned so much.

Here are some videos off YT of some similar exercises I did that can help you avoid ankle injury and to strengthen your ankles;

This is using a thera band for lateral foot strengthen.  I do this with my leg completely extended on the floor or bed.

This particular video shows how I actually used my theraband with my leg extended.

Doing the towel scrunch.

Picking up marbles.  I would use more different sized marbles, including flat marbles.  The first time I did this, my feet got so tired.  But, the more I did this, the stronger my feet became and the easier.  I could pick up faster, too.

Some standing exercises - When your ankle gets strong enough, you should be able to do the heel raises on 1 foot without pain.

She has some redundancies of the others, but one of the things I did use was an air cushion like this in my PT.

This is a great one.  I did it with both legs.  The one that you're standing on was hard for me to stand there on my hurt ankle before.  Great exercises.

Love the wobble board.  If you don't have one and don't want to buy one, you could go to Home Depot and have them cut a board for you.  Anyway, they tell you how you can make it just before 4 min. into the video.  I have one of these boards and it costs me about $60.  You can make one for way less.  What they did 4.5 min. into the video, my therapist did with me.  It was FUN!  This video is really informative.