5-Minute Ankle Mobility (For Better Squats)

Hi, I'm Lindsay Baumgren of NourishMove Love, and I'm walking you through a quick ankle mobility routine at home. If you love exercising at home, hit subscribe to my YouTube channel. Or better yet, click that join button and become part of my YouTube community. All right, you guys, I am walking you through five of my favorite ankle mobility exercises today. Why do we need ankle mobility? So we can get deeper into those squats. Right angles have a lot to do with our squats, so if you want better squats, I suggest ankle mobility. It's also largely related to our our knees, right? It goes up the chain of command. I am about almost a year post knee surgery, and so I'm continuing to work on all things lower body mobility. So ankle mobility is roped into that. So I'm going to walk you through five exercises you can do to improve your ankle mobility, which will thus improve your squats, so on and so forth. So we're just going to jump right in so you can follow along at your pace and do this right at home. So I'm going to use this small box here. Imagine this was a wall. You could do this against a wall, a couch, whatever you have. First, we're going to test your ankle mobility and see where you' so I want you to make a fist and a thumb just like this. I'm going to set this on the ground. So this would be the distance I want to be away from the wall. Or in this case, this is my fake wall, the bench. I'm then going to put my foot behind this. So now I'm going to test my ankle mobility by holding my heel down on the ground. My heel needs to stay connected to the mat. And then I'm going to drive my knee over the second and third toes. So over the second and third toes, right? We don't want the knee collapsing. And knee goes over the second and third toes and see, can I reach the bench? I'm pretty close, right? That's what we would want. Good ankle mobility. A fist and a thumb away from the wall and then get it over there. So I'm pretty close on this knee, right? So I can test it. You can come back. This is your measure of progress also. This is how you improve, right? You just hang out here, keep testing, right? I'm going to do that same thing on my other knee, which I'll just move the box over, which you'll notice is this is my surgery knee, so not nearly as good ankle mobility. I am definitely still working on this knee right here. So I'm going hold this heel down. I'm going to drive my knee over. It's getting there. We're getting close. Just doesn't have quite the same flexion. Doesn't feel. This feels really hard. But I'm getting there pretty close. So this is exercise one. You're going to want to test your ankle mobility and then of course, you can hang out here. But if you're not getting very far. Knee over toe again. Knee drives over the second and third toe. No worries. All right, we're going to take you through an awesome modification, right? So you're going to find a step of chair, a bench. You're going to place your foot on that step. Chair or bench. You are then going to drive your knee over your toe. Your heel can pop up here. Okay. So I'm trying to get my knee over my toe again. Knee is over my second and third toe. And now what I want to do is slowly lower my heel towards the ground. Right? Okay. My heel started up here. Knees over toes. Now keep my knee over my toe as I slowly lower my heel towards the ground. Hanging out here, right? You're going to do this for around 60 seconds per side. So I'm going to just hang out here, knees over toes, slowly lowering down, doing the same thing on the other side. Right? Right here. Driving my knee over my toe on an elevated surface. Hanging out here, slowly lowering my heel down to the bench. Great. I can get there pretty easily, so I should go back down to the floor and keep trying for that. But this is a great way to progress and measure your progress. Right. It's a great way to scale back if you're starting with a little bit less ankle mobility from the get go. Okay. So that's how we measure our ankle mobility. And this is how one way we progress that measurement from the floor. Now how do we improve it and increase it? I'm going to take this bad boy back to a wall so I have a little bit more support. And we're going to go for heels. Are going to go off of my bench, my incline. You can do this on the bottom stair of a staircase. We're simply going to go heel raises, calf raises. Right. Lift up and down. You can go for reps. You can go for 25 reps right here. Option you could do this for a minute. I like to go 25 reps. So when I'm into my workout routine, I'm doing 25 reps here. If you want to make it harder, you go to single leg. Right? Single leg. Getting that full range of motion. That's a lot harder. Single leg, nice. Working on that heel drop. Full range of motion right here. Dorsiflexion. Toes are pulling towards the face. We'll work on that next. And then driving up, all those small stabilizing muscles are working in your ankle. Drive and drive. Nice. So again, we're going for 25 reps, 60 seconds. As you progress, you could go to 30 seconds per leg or go 10 reps per leg. That's a lot more challenging. Single leg is more challenging. All right, so from there I'm going to get rid of this box. So now we worked the ankle, we tested the mobility, we worked the back side of it. Now we need to work the front side. Our shins also just as important for ankle mobility. This is dorsiflexion or tib raises. So I'm going to place my back against a wall. The farther my feet are away from me, the harder it's going to be. The closer they are, the easier I'm going to find a nice middle ground here. Feet are planted. And now I'm simply going to pull my toes to my face. Toes to face. So tib raises. Working this muscle that runs along the tibialis, the front of my shin, also known as dorsiflexion. Pulling my toes towards my face, equally as important. So when you go into that knee over toe position, you're in dorsiflexion, right? So you need this to be strengthened and lengthened. Pulling up, pulling toes to face. Nice. This is also a move very important to knee health. Your tibialis, those muscles that run along the front of your shins. Great shock absorbers for your knee when you land in that knee over toe position. So a very important muscle to strengthen and often specifically under trained in everybody, like not a lot of people are doing these. So it's a very under trained muscle. Great way to reduce shin splints if you suffer with those as well. All right, and then the final way, the whole reason we're working on ankle mobility is tip typically because we want better squats, right? So you should work on holding the movement you want to get better at. So holding a nice deep squat, an active deep squat position with heels on the ground. So if you have to drop into this and your toes start to pop off, go to the point where your heels can be on the ground and hold that. Okay. Try to get nice into a deep squat. And then you're just hanging out here. You can pry side to side, right? Just hanging out here you can shift your weight to the side knife edge of your foot and then into your toe, side knife edge into your toe and hang out here. But hanging out in the position that you want to get better at is always a good way to improve it. So hanging out in a nice deep squat heels stay connected to the mat. Again, you can hang out here for 60 seconds or so. That is ankle mobility 101. So I hope you found these exercises helpful and you can apply them to your daily routine to improve your ankle mobility, thus improving your squats. Have a great day. I hope you enjoyed that ankle mobility routine. If so, drop a subscribe to our channel. We've loaded up another mobility workout you might enjoy right here or check out my free 2 week at home strength training plan in this playlist right here. Have a great day.