Ankle sprains are common injuries for athletes and can put one on the sidelines for extended periods. Learn how to treat sports injuries in this video on health and rehab.
Assess degree of stability
Apply ice immediately
Keep extremity elevated above heart
Restore range of motion
Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.
RUSS PAINE: Today we're going to talk about ankle sprains, a very common injury in sports. Ankle sprains can occur in different ways but today we're going to spend most of our time on the lateral ligament sprains, which is by far the most common injury to the ankle. On the outside of your ankle, you've got three different ligaments and we kind of grade the severity of the ankle sprain according to which ligaments are involved. You got one in the front, one down in the middle and one on the back of the ankle and they provide stability to the outside of your ankle. So typically when you come down and you pivot or twist your ankle and your foot goes to the inside you involve the lateral ligament complex of the ankle. So we're going to show you on our model here exactly what happens. Again, you're going to be very tender on the outside of the ankle around the lateral malleolus, the front one, the middle one and the back one, and if you go to a physician they will look at your ankle and they will assess the degree of stability you have as I do this drawer test; that really measures the extent of damage. They will also pull your ankle inward this way. This is not something you need to do. This is something that a physician should do as they evaluate your injury. So treatment for ankle injuries obviously you've seen on TV and on the sidelines, ice application immediately is helpful because this is going to swell. It's not uncommon for you to get a lot of bruising, a blue-yellow skin pigmentation that occurs, and that may travel around your Achilles and all the way down to your foot. So ice application, compression, elevation and when you say elevation, you need to elevate your extremity above the level of your heart so that helps facilitate that swelling in your ankle. So swelling is a big key component of this injury that we'll try to get rid of. The next thing we do is restore range of motion and we'll show some of that in our exercise session. We're going to restore dorsiflexion range of motion, should be about 15 degrees is normal. Then the next thing we'll do is strengthen these muscles that go all the way from here, all the way down around the outside of your ankle and provide stability for the outside of your ankle. If you really strengthen the muscles of the ankle, they can overcome some of the laxity that is created from tearing these ligaments. The third thing we do is do proprioceptive exercises, and this is really important for ankle sprains. Proprioception is your awareness of your
joint position in space so we basically do some exercises, we'll show in the video session on how to restore your balance awareness. So that's it on lateral ligament sprains.
