Acute Ankle Rehab

You stepped off a curb, now what?

If you’ve lived on this planet for any period of time, you or someone you know has sprained their ankle. If you don’t or haven’t please reach out to me and help pick some lottery numbers.

Anything you Google for ankle rehab is going to be complete garbage. RICE never has and never will “fix” your injury.

If you just sprained your ankle, check out my previous post here to rule out a fracture. If your ankle is currently broken, stop reading and do not continue on.

Lets discuss what acute actually means as it pertains to rehab. The textbook definition of acute is the period of 1-3 days after an injury. That definition doesn’t really help anyone because it doesn’t equate to function, which is the most important component.

For the sake of this, acute is going to refer to the phase where your ROM is restricted.

Before we get to the rehab program, we’re going to get a crash course on ankle anatomy only as it pertains to a sprain. I assume 90% of you will skip this part to get to the rehab, but for the 10% that do, I appreciate you.

There are 3 mechanisms that can cause an ankle sprain:

• Inversion

• Eversion

• Rotation

The classification doesn’t change a ton when it comes to rehab as you can’t isolate a ligament much. It does matter a ton regarding return to sports and taping/bracing as a preventative measure

What matters most to you all is the timeframe of injury. An low grade inversion/eversion sprain heals quick and reliably generally (almost always in the 2-4 week window). When it comes to a high ankle sprain, you may be better off with a fracture as some of those take months to heal.

Let’s briefly get into it.

Inversion

This is by far the most common. In sports, this usually happens when someone lands on the foot of another player or something as simple as stepping off a curb.

Inversion and plantarflexion (pointing the toes down) often occur together which stresses the lateral ligament.

With a lateral ankle sprain, there are 3 ligaments to injure. Frankly, its not important because it doesn’t change the rehab at all so I won’t bore you with that. I don’t care which one is hurt and neither should you.