Evolutionary Athletics

Foot Function for Sports Performance – Becoming Forefoot Dominant

By now you should have a fairly nice and strong foot.  Our next goal is to develop ankle stiffness and forefoot dominance.

First lets talk about forefoot dominance.  Every coach in the world yells at their kids to get on their toes.  This is true from MMA to football to sprints.  Being on your toes allows for more acceleration, quickness, and speed.  How do you get to your forefoot.  Simple.  Your “toes” or forefoot is made up of a bipod.   What is your foot bipod.  This should be simple to find.  From the earlier articles you should have already found your tripod comprised of the base of your little toe, big toe, and heel.  Your bipod then is the tripod without the heel contact.

What is ankle stiffness?

No it is not inflexibility.  It is the foot and calf’s ability to absorb energy rapidly.  Think of skipping rope.  The foot contacts are very short.  The foot and calf absorb and release the energy from jumping very quickly.  From a sports science nerd perspective it is eccentric rate of force development.

Now we know you sprint on your toes.  When you strike on your bipod as the heel collapses to the ground energy coming from your hips/glutes that is supposed to be transferred to the ground is being leaked out.  You simply cannot apply much force to the ground when the calf is going through an eccentric contraction.  It would be the equivalent of trying to race a car on flat tires.  The less your heel collapses, the more force gets into the ground, meaning you run faster.  Greater heel drop means less force is transferred into the ground.

Less force = less speed

So how do we develop forefoot dominance and ankle stiffness.  The answer is simple.

We work through the following drills:

Low Ankle Jump

High Ankle Jump

***Note the low jumps and high jumps start around 1:08 in the video***

Jump Rope – Use the same foot technique as in the Low Ankle Jump exercise

Low Squat Jump focusing on absorption

Low Squat Jump – Focusing on quick rebounding.  Perform as the previous exercise but focus on quick ground contact

Lateral Low Squat Jumps – In the low squat position jump laterally (L-R) over a line on the ground.

These drills can be excellent as a conditioning tool as well.  Generally perform 3-6 sets of 20-50 seconds.
Mastering these drills will go a long way to improving your ground contact time, quickness, speed, and agility.  Please remember that all drills will be performed on your bipod.  Always land balanced on the bipod with about 60% of the load on the ball of the big toe and 40% on the little toe.

Alex