Squatting with Ankles

(Squatting with Ankles really should be squatting with STIFF ankles, but after I typed it, I laughed a little and decided to keep the title. )

I have always been strong in my lower extremities. I have been a soccer player, a runner, and now a very beginner rock climber/boulderer. All of these things require a lot of leg strength (yes, rock climbing included). But during conditioning for sports, I always notice that my squat looks different. I’d have coaches saying “lower, lower, LOWER,” and I just couldn’t without leaning way forward or changing my feet.

Now that I’m a physical therapist, I can tell you more about why my squats are more challenging and how it has happened to me (lots of ankle sprains), but we’ll focus more on the why. Looking at these pictures, you may not realize that a lot of the problem is coming from my ankles. My ankles are stiff in the motion of bringing my toes to my nose. This lack of mobility is affecting the stability in my arches along with the movement in my knees and hips and back which is changing how I am able to squat and how low I can go. I cannot squat “ass to grass,” as they say, without lifting my heels off of the floor. If I try to keep my heels down, I end up getting stuck in how low my hips can go because to perform a proper squat, a person has to have good trunk mobility, hip mobility, knee mobility, and ankle mobility - it’s all connected after all.

So when a person (hi, it’s me) is limited in ankle mobility, their shin can’t shift forward (compare my shins in the picture on the left above to the girl on the right), the body weight shifts backwards out of the center of balance. If you still try to go deep here, you will fall backwards (trust me). To stay upright, your body needs to balance out the weight. To do this, people hinge forward and basically end up facing the ground, but they don’t get any lower to the ground because the ankles still aren’t moving. See how much more upright the girl on the right is.

Here are a couple ways to combat this:

One is to clear the way and take a wider stance and turn your feet out.

This gives you more space to drop your hips and limits the amount of ankle mobility you need to get to a deep squat. The Upside of this approach is you don’t need extra equipment to get into a lower squat. Downsides is (as seen in the picture) we lose arch support and my foot is rolling in more which changes our leg structure in the squat. That leads to changes in how muscles are utilized.

Option two is to slide something under your heels. This can be a rolled up towel, a small book, etc. (Or if you are regularly squatting, consider weightlifting shoes that have a small heel lift).

As seen in the picture, by slightly lifting my heels, I can lower my body weight and don’t hit a limitation in my ankle like I did before. My knees translate forward more and are able to get more bend because by shins are able to move forward. Pretty neat trick. Now with this, you will utilize your quads more, meaning you will likely start to feel them working harder, not just because you're going lower, but also because, same as above, you are changing the way you are using your muscles.

Now, the fun part! You can test your ankle mobility at home with a knee to wall test. Stand about 5cm away from a wall (big toe at the 5cm mark) and bend your knee in an attempt to touch the wall with your knee while keeping your heel on the ground. If that is easy, move 1cm away from the wall at a time until you get to 10cm. If it is too hard, scoot closer to the wall 1cm at a time until you can touch. If you can get 8-10cm, you may not be limited in your squat by your ankles. If you get less than that, your ankles may be a problem. Do this test as a stretch to begin your ankle mobility journey and reach out to learn more and prevent future injury. If you don’t have a problem with this test but it is still difficult for you to deep squat or maybe you’ve had an un-rehabbed ankle sprain and you don’t want to end up like me reach out through the website or email kelsi@dashphysio.com and we will get to the bottom of the problem.

P.S. I gained mobility in my ankles and had better squat form, THHEEEEEN I fell off a bouldering wall and sprained my ankle (yes, again) and have had to start over (YAY!) - follow along on instagram for my ankle mobility journey!