Evolutionary Athletics

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Recently on the WGF Forum the Doc’s have been discussing ankle rocker and posted some videos on YouTube regarding the 5 compensation strategies for a dysfunctional ankle rocker.  This is new topic for me, but watching the video, I was able to identify several of my athlete’s movement compensations.  Compensation pattern 5 was exhibited by several of my young female water polo due to wearing sandals often.  Several of the female volleyball players also exhibit some major movement dysfunction that could definitely be caused by ankle rocker dysfunction.  Three young ladies have a common posture with internally rotated, valgus knees, while their feet are slightly externally rotated.  I believe it’s due to the years spent with ankles braced up taught to play defense in the internally rotated valgus knee position..  With “function dictating structure” and ankle braces hindering dorsi flexion (to a certain extent), it’s no surprise the issues that these girls have.  This posture exacerbates the forces at the knee upon landing, which will lead to an increase in ACL tears.  ACL tears are already a plague of the female jumping athlete, but with ankle rocker dysfunction, which leads to hip instability, it is even worse.  The foot is the beginning of the kinetic chain so returning the foot and ankle to proper function needs to be the first assessment made when looking to help an athlete.  Literally, a “ground up” approach needs to be taken when looking a performance assessments.  The ground is the start of the kinetic chain, so it all starts there.

With ankle rocker issues recently coming to light for me, I took some football athletes who had issues with their squat depth and elevated their heels.  This takes ankle rocker out of the equation and bam, a rock bottom squat maintaining great neutral spine position.  This however, is a band-aid and not a fix.  I realize this, I need to re-educate ankle rocker and strengthen foot and anterior tibials musculature.  This is slightly above my knowledge set at the moment, so the new DVD’s from the Doc’s can’t come soon enough for me.  It amazes me how many hat’s performance coaches have to wear.  I remember when I was extremely naive I just thought, all I had to do was get athletes stronger.  The good old days…

Tell me what you’ve experienced…

Jeremy