It’s no wonder that ankles are so prone to injury. Besides sharing 28 bones, 33 joints, and 112 ligaments with the foot, they’re controlled by 13 extrinsic and 21 intrinsic muscles. When even one of these moving parts fails to work effectively with the others, you’re at risk of injury to the ankle.
If that’s happened to you, you’re not alone. Every year, approximately two million acute sprains occur in the United States, making it one of the most common musculoskeletal injuries.
Regardless of your age or athleticism, getting the proper treatment for your ankle sprain is key to restoring full range of motion and preventing recurrent sprains.
Ankle Sprain Treatment at Live Athletics
At Live Athletics, we use a comprehensive process during ankle sprain treatment which includes four comprehensive phases: Protection and Offloading, Basic Strength, Power, and Sport Specific.
Protection and Offloading
We’ll start your ankle sprain treatment by protecting the injured ligament and controlling swelling. Then slowly, we’ll begin to restore the normal range of motion.
We’ll measure your dorsiflexion, which is the bending and contracting of your foot towards your shin. Your dorsiflexion plays a significant role in the kinematic sequence of your ankle. Without it, efficient production and application of force during everyday movements, including walking and squatting, would be challenging.
Basic Strength
After our initial work is complete, we’ll progress into restoring basic strength.
At first, we’ll help rebuild your ankle’s endurance while ensuring that your new collagen is healing in a well-organized manner. Strong ligaments (what collagen creates) and strong muscles and tendons can prevent further injury and enable maximum performance. We’ll use various equipment to stress your ankle strength appropriately, such as TheraBands and light weights.
Power
Next up in our ankle sprain treatment program is improving the strength and power of your ankle.
While keeping your requirements of the goal activity in mind, we’ll gradually start increasing the amount of weight and reps during our rehab exercises. If we notice any immobilization or non-weight bearing elsewhere in your lower limb, we can prescribe specific exercises to address the weakness.
Sport Specific
Once you’ve developed enough strength and power in your ankle, we’ll evaluate your ability to absorb force. We’ll incorporate various drills to test this aspect before progressing to return to play activities such as running and jumping. We’ll include training that improves your ankle’s ability to react well to changes in direction, certain loads, contraction times, and specific angles.
Ankle Sprain Recovery Time
We know you want to get back to your regular lifestyle as soon as possible – and we do everything possible to make that happen quickly. The recovery time for an ankle sprain can vary from three weeks for a mild, first-degree sprain to six months for a severe, third-degree sprain.
The best way to reduce the recovery time for your ankle sprain is to get a proper diagnosis and treatment plan. Otherwise, you may experience chronic complications such as instability in the ankle joint, tendon inflammation, and arthritic changes in the ankle.
To start your ankle sprain treatment today, reach out to our qualified team of professionals for a free consultation.
If you would like to learn how to treat other injuries, please visit our Injuries section. No matter if your injury is big or small… we have a solution for you!
