Squat University - Top 3 Ankle Mobility Exercises [Strong Ankles]

Hey guys, I'm Dr. Andy Horschig, and today I'm going to 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 requires ankle mobility: the movement of 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 going to happen is your chest is going to fall forward.

So let's talk about how to improve ankle mobility. The first thing we have to figure out is whether ankle mobility is the limitation and what is causing you to have that problem. All you're going to do is get an X-to-the-wall setup, 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 going to 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. 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 going to happen is your heel is going to pop off the ground, or your knee is going to 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, the first thing we just uncovered is an ankle mobility limitation.

The second thing I need you to do is figure out what is actually causing that restriction. Do you have a pinched or blocked sensation on the front side of the ankle, and is there tightness in the back? Those are the two things, because that's going to differentiate what we're going to do for fixes. The first thing, a pinched or block sensation on 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 knee 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 of the calf.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to use a band to do a joint mobilization. This is a 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 you're going to want to use. It needs to be pretty thick. If it's too wide, you're not going to get the specific motion at the angle that we want and the desired force on the area. What you're going to do is get your foot up here. Now, if we took a screenshot and looked deep inside your ankle, we're looking to have this band pulling down and back on your talus 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 need to do to improve ankle mobility. When you move your knee over your toe like this, your talus bone moves backwards. So if you have a limitation in the way those bones are moving, your talus bone isn't gliding backwards, or posteriorly, like it should, and it's going to limit how far your knee can go over the toe. What the band is doing is helping improve that natural gliding of the joint.

If you have had an ankle sprain in the past, this is a very common limitation that often persists even after the pain is gone. So what you're going to do: band on top of the talus, 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 when my knee goes over my toe like this, that should remove that pinched or blocked sensation in the front 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, so pull the band and get it a little bit tighter. Sometimes you need a friend to help you with this, but get that knee and drive it forward over the toe. What we're doing is not holding this position but gliding back and forth. It's called a mobilization with movement. If this is a little tough to just hold in that position, you can grab a weight and hold it on top, which can sometimes help some people feel a little more stable. But with 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 talus gliding backwards against the tibia, which is your tall shin bone right here, 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 to see if it was right for your body. If you made any change, get back down to the wall with 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 it was effective at improving the limitation you have. Now that we've cleared up our joint mobilization, or joint mobility, problem, we now have to go to stretching the tissues on the backside of the body. Here are my next two favorite stretches for that. For the first one, we're just going to find a bench, or you can use a box. We're going to get up into this position and drive that knee directly over the toe, and 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. You could grab that weight, stacking it on top, but I really like almost pulling my chest into this for a really good stretch.

When you're feeling the stretch, it's usually down in this area. That's your soleus muscle. There are two muscles of the lower leg: the gastrocnemius, which is the big calf muscle, and the soleus. Here's the deal: your gastrocnemius crosses two joints, the knee joint and the ankle. When you bend your knee, you're taking a little slack off the gastrocnemius up here, but the soleus muscle doesn't cross the knee joint. It originates up here and 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 than in the gastrocnemius. That's often a main limiting muscle and flexibility factor limiting our depth whenever we're squatting. So again, something like this: hold, and then back.

Now, a lot of people have questions: how long do I stretch? It depends. Do we hold for long times or short times? It depends on your individual needs. Some people need longer duration stretches, thirty seconds to even a minute, if they have very big limitations and restrictions in mobility. Here's the deal with really long stretch times, like a full-minute stretch: usually the body will have a decrease in the strength and power it can produce with those muscles directly afterward. So there's a decrease in performance with long-duration stretches thereafter. What that means is that if you're in competition mode right now and you have a really heavy training day where you're looking to perform, I probably don't want you doing very long-duration stretches beforehand. 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 your goals. For some people with very big limitations in ankle mobility, I would rather they improve their ability to move, so they can get into better technical positions, and I'm okay with a little decrease in performance in the short term, because we're going to have much better improvements in mobility in the long term. So we always have to weigh the pros and cons and understand that stretch time has to come from the individual needs of the person.

So that's two. We did banded joint mobilizations, then the stretch on the box. My third favorite stretch for ankle mobility comes with a goblet squat. Today I'm going to use a plate, about 10 kilos, 22 pounds. You can also use a kettlebell or a dumbbell, but what we're doing is sitting into a deep squat and stretching our ankles. The reason I like this stretch so much is that it's very movement-specific to what we're trying to improve. We're trying to improve ankle mobility, so it allows us to have a better squat pattern and a better clean and snatch. So why not stretch in that exact same position? We're going to get into our squat stance and squat all the way down. The plate is in front of us, so it allows someone with big limitations to sit a little deeper because it's offsetting your body weight. In this position, you're going to drive, swivel your 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 pinched or blocked sensation in the front of the ankle, you have to do your banded joint mobilizations first and then do this. 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 without any detriment to performance, I'm going to the other side. Usually my elbow is on top of my knee so I can swivel and really push my knee down and then back, over and back, something like this. I usually do maybe four to five repetitions with about a 10-second hold on each side before standing up.

Now, just like every single mobility exercise I show on Squat University, you have to check and recheck, just like we did with the banded joint mobilization before. Do the five-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 better ability to squat deeper and keep your chest more upright, if that's your goal? Remember, knee over toe allows a more upright chest position, which is helpful if your goal is a clean, a snatch, or a front squat. If we need this positioning, we need ankle mobility. So always check and see whether the mobility work you did was efficient and effective at eliciting the improvements you want in movement.

So there you go, those are my top three ankle mobility exercises. I hope you guys liked today's video. If you're looking for the type of band I'm using for the mobilizations, check out the description. If there's anything else you want to learn about in next week's video, please let me know in the comments section below. Until next week, guys, happy squatting.