I sprained my ankle by landing on the outside of my ankle(over inversion) from basketball. It swelled, bruised, and had pain. I followed R.I.C.E for about a week (1-2 times/day). I started going to the gym 5 days after (when I felt little to no pain).
Now 1 month has passed and there is still slight swelling. I can run around and play ball, but I do feel slight pain on the ankle. The pain is only when I flex my ankle (like sprinting/pressure on the front half of my foot). No pain when I squat (flat feet).
During the 1 month, I have played ball 2x’s and I squatted 3-4 times/week.
Is there anything I should do to speed up the recovery or do u think this is normal?
P.S. - Ankle sprains for me usually last 3-7 days, but I guess this one was much worse.
I was planning on heating it before exercise and icing it after exercise.
Did you do any actual rehab or just rest, ice, compression, and elevation? I’d recommend actually doing some specific exercises to address strength, mobility, and proprioception for your ankle, feet, hips, and knees. Many times with ankle sprains, the talus will shift, muscles will become inhibited due to improper joint positioning and pain, mechanics will be altered, etc.
I never rehabed it, can you help me out LevelHeaded and send me some links for rehabing my ankle if you have them. Thank you. I will also try to look up rehab sites myself
Above is a 2 part article series discussing the ankle and some rehab techniques. Other than what you gain from that article, some basic stuff to do would include:
4 way ankle exercises w/ theraband, towel toe crunches and slides, single leg balance on a stable/unstable surface w/ eyes open/closed, ankle mobility and flexibility drills.
It is hard to give specific exercises without being able to do a formal assessment to determine where your weaknesses are and what areas need focus. You can also do some mobility work at your hips as well to keep all things healthy up the kinetic chain.
Also, stop doing stuff if there is still swelling. I agree with jskrabac on the compression wrapping. If you are still swollen, you still are in the acute stage of injury and activity is going to slow healing a lot.
Thanks guys. I’ve been wrapping it right after i saw your post levelheaded. I just started lifting again today after a week off. I don’t feel any pain on my ankle when I squat and I don’t want to give up my squat (I would rather have a slower healing process than to give up squats for a month or possibly longer).
I’ve been squatting after the ankle injury for a while (as I alluded to on my earlier post). I never had pain, but now when I squat I have slight pain on the front of my hips (where my hip flexors are), on the same leg I had the ankle injury, coincidence???
P.S. - I don’t see how I could have hip pain from my ankle injury because the hip pain occurred a little over a month after my injury.
Nonetheless, I’ll be focusing on keeping a health kinetic chain Levelheaded.
Assuming you have no underlying pathology and no gross history of hip pain, here are my thoughts and simple answer:
The hip pain COULD be completely unrelated, but I’d bet that the two are correlated. There is a reason people say not to work through the pain. Even if you THINK you are not favoring a side, your body will compensate and inhibit specific musculature during specific activity if there is pain present. Most likely, during squats and other activities that caused pain, your body was compensating for the pain present and altered your mechanics, which caused a muscular strain in your hip flexors.