Collapsing ankles during squats often come from weak foot muscles or tight ankles. Try towel-grip toe scrunches to strengthen your arch and banded pause squats that lock your big toe, heel, and pinky toe into the ground. Retest after to see if your arch stays stable.
Today we're going to talk about collapsing ankles, or if you feel like when you squat or lunge or run, there's no arch, and maybe you've even been told that you need insoles. We're going to show you how to fix that today. So let's talk about it. The arch of your foot, think of it like webbing or a construction or a bridge. It's got musculature around the foot. It's got tendons inside of the foot. There's so much that goes into it. To create structure and stability. It's not something that you need a brace for necessarily. What we're going to go over are the 3 points of contact that you want to make on your foot. And if they're not making contact and they're not strong enough, you're not going to get the results you want from your squats. You're going to have more pressure on your knee, more pressure on your hip, your lower back, literally everything. So this top part of your ball of your foot and where your big toe is, is one anchor point. Your heel is another anchor point and your pinky toe is another anchor point. This is like a tripod of stability. This little triangle here is going to keep you stable in every single movement. Now, if you can't grip the ground like a monkey paw, you are not going to get the results that you want. First things first, let's identify the root cause. If you have these 2 bones in your shin, your tib and your fib, if they're not rotating correctly, you're going to collapse your ankle. If you're not strong enough in the foot, you're going to collapse your ankle. What we want to do is do an ankle mobilizer to figure out where the tension is, if it's in the front or if you just have a weak ankle to begin with. So as you do this motion, if you rock your knee back and forth, trying to keep your knee outside of the big toe, does your foot collapse or do you feel like you're hitting a brick wall in the front? If you feel like you're hitting a brick wall in the front, we need to mobilize that front part of your ankle. If you don't feel that, You just have a weak foot. Now, for those of us that have this tension here, what I want you to do is you're going to lift your big toe and find this tendon here. You're going to stick your finger or thumb into that little hole on the outside of the tendon and then try to drive your knee forward again, back and forth, using that to reduce the friction. So there's that shipping friction point where you Your talus, the foot bone, and your shin bone are kind of grinding. If you can put your thumb in there, you can get rid of the grinding. You can move the knee back and forth. Do that 5 to 10 times. The next thing we want to focus on is 2 strengthening exercises. The first one is just gripping a towel, hand towel, with your foot so you can create friction there. And I like to use the towel that my wife will not yell at me for. So whatever one your significant other won't get mad at you for, because you're going to be putting your foot on it, it's on the ground, it's going to be gross. All you need to do is step onto the towel, extend all your toes, stretch them, stretch them, stretch them, grip and pull. Stretch your toes, grip and pull. You could even do this while you brush your teeth. Grip and pull, grip and pull, grip and pull, grip and pull until you get to the end of the towel. And then do it again. If your foot is cramping when you do this, you got weak feet and you're probably dehydrated. So you would want to do this for both feet. Next, we're going to do a banded pause squat. We're going to band around our ankles. And when you do this, I want you to focus on your squat. Maintain a neutral spine. So don't go all the way down. If you start rounding your spine in your squat like this, Don't go all the way down. Only go down as far as you can with a neutral spine. So for me, that's like right here. Once I round my spine, I'm losing the stability in my spine. With your feet, you want to plant them perfectly straight forward and focus on drilling your feet into the ground or tearing a piece of paper by pushing them apart and using your knees to push the band apart. And see how the band is trying to collapse my ankles, but I'm not letting it. That's where we're going to get to. So you're going to do a set of pause squats. Now that's going to look something like this. Hold here. Squat, drive your knees apart, grip the ground, and then come up. Squat, feet apart, grip the ground, and come up. Now notice every single point of contact on my foot is engaged and there's a massive arch here that is gripping the ground, training that arch in. You do those things, then retest. You should see it's a lot easier to maintain this ankle without dropping, and you have a stronger arch, a more strong ankle, more stable ankle that's now mobile, and it's easier to squat, run, jump, skip, like literally anything you do with your feet. Oh, make sure you subscribe so you can get more cool info like this. And if you want a video, comment the type of video that you want or what you're struggling with, and we will make a detailed breakdown for you.
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