Treating Ankle Sprains with Insight, rather than Assumptions.
Every therapist has seen it: the classic “ankle sprain.” Your client limps in, insists it’s nothing serious, and wants a quick fix so they can get back to training, work, or life. Or gets wheeled in, claiming it’s the end of the world and their ankle will never be normal again! The thing is; no two ankle sprains are the same — because no two bodies, lifestyles or histories are.
Anatomy Is Only the Beginning
An ankle sprain might involve the ATFL, CFL, or even the high ankle ligaments; but what matters more is what that injury means to the person in front of you. A dancer or weekend hiker’s sprain is not the same as the sprain granny got while playing with her grandson. One may need proprioceptive retraining and deep fascial release, the other strength support and ankle taping.
What I Look For:
– How they tell their story…what emotion guides them while they tell me what and how it happened. What’s been going on in their lives recently.
– What they’ve done this far, what has helped, what hasn’t and how long it’s been.
– How they move before you touch them. There’s a gold mine of information hidden in compensation patterns…
– Muscle firing patterns. Are glutes, hamstrings or deep stabilizers inactive?
– Re-injury risks: unstable hips, tight calves or poor proprioception? And I check the OTHER ankle too, range of motion, weaknesses AS WELL AS strengths.
– Pain tolerance levels, bruising, tissue damage and where inflammation pools.
Sometimes an injury needs our anatomical expertise and knowledge, other times our clients need our intuitive wisdom to help relay a message. The body talks, a great therapist can hear, understand and translate what’s it’s trying to say.
Treat the human, not just the injury. Protocols are guidelines, not gospel. Personalize everything!
MikiK