Skiing Over Spring Break? Get Ready With These Ankle Exercises… [Skiing Series 1]

Hey guys… it’s Stephen from CORE Therapy & Pilates… I wanted to go over our new series with spring break just around the corner, we have a lot of our clients are heading to the mountains for some skiing and snowboarding, myself and my family included.

I want to start going over some basic exercises to do for your legs, we’re gonna start today at the ankles and a little balance work. I’m going to show you a few things that you can start working on because we’re about 4 weeks out from spring break. We want to start building up some of those little muscles and ankles because for those of you who don’t ski frequently, like most of us in Texas, it becomes an issue where when you do go skiing you can shred your muscles really, really fast…

So the first thing I want to go over is just a standing posture and with that said my feet really collapse in quite a bit. So what I’m gonna do is strengthen my arch… the very first exercise I am going to lift my toes and splay my toes and relax, lift my toes and splay my toes and what that actually does is it creates an arch lift right here… so we call these arch lifts. So that’s something I think about when I’m standing in line at a grocery store, when I’m standing around talking to clients or friends, it’s just something I try to think about…

So that’s the first thing then we’re gonna create that lift and we’re gonna go up on the toes… 10 times… trying to create that lift of the arch the whole time, alright that may not have been 10, I’m a poor counter. Now we’re going to rock back onto the heels and lifting the whole ankle. This engages the whole back line, we get the glutes and the hamstrings firing, it keeps your lower back in a good position… again one of my favorite exercises in standing is getting people to lean back into their heels…

Alright so then we can take that idea and go into one leg for balance work… so we’re gonna create that arch lift and we’re gonna hold that and balance… now you’ll start seeing the challenge in some of the balance training, shoot for about 10 or 15 seconds. I went into this position holding that arch up immediately and shooting for 10 or 15 seconds.

We’re starting to create a situation where we’re working all these little intrinsic muscles in our feet. It’s time to progress once you start getting pretty comfortable on the one leg. Now we take that standing on one leg and we start tapping like a clock, go on around and tap it and then you can go across your body you can’t go all the way around but each of those positions is gonna challenge your balance in a different way…

Something everyone has at home is a simple pillow, take that pillow and stand on it to challenge your balance a little differently. Try to create that lift of the arch and try to find your balance. A way to progress this would be hold this position and do a slight squat, back and forth, you’re not going very far just back and forth, switching legs… You can do this with or without the pillow, it’s a little more challenging with the pillow. If that gets really easy take that pillow fold it in half and then all of a sudden it’s a little wobbly. That’s a little more of a challenge for me…

Alright, so these are some ankle exercises and balance exercises to do to get things started… now I’m going to show you something simple with a thera-band, so with the thera-band on my foot, I’m gonna push straight away, straight away, straight away… then I’m gonna turn it to the side and pull it across this way… then I’m gonna pull it across this way and really control it, don’t let it flop back, control it back, control it back, I have a little less control this way and then the last motion is to get into it this way, Oops, I untied it… hey Dudley, I knew that was gonna happen – now the last one is to bring it into this direction, dorsiflexion and you can do this sitting in a chair or down on the floor. if you’re sitting in the chair this way here… this is better it would be this way here and this way here…

Okay, so that’s a start… there’s way more to do but that’s a starting point for getting into the ankles, getting a little balance work going and what we’ll do over the next few videos is we’ll start working up the chain… gonna start making sure you’re doing some strengthening for your knees, some strengthening for your hips and some strengthening for your core… so that’s it for todays video for getting you ready for ski season… I hope you have a safe spring break… We’ll chat with you soon… Take care

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