Which is more important, time or range of movement when you are doing the gluteus medius activation exercises and you have ankle instability? Well, that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I was just on a follow-up call with a trail runner. She has chronic ankle instability, and she had some follow-up questions about some of the exercises I gave her to do. And one of the exercises I gave her was an exercise that will strengthen the gluteus medius muscle.
Gluteus medius weakness is known to contribute to ankle instability and for her I said, okay, I want you to try this one exercise, and the specifics of the exercise are not really important here. It is about time versus range when you have an injury, you have identified a weakness, you are trying to fix it and get back to running. So, I am just using this particular exercise as an example.
What I did was I had her try the exercise. She stood up and she tried it, and she basically moved her foot to abduction of the foot and leg to move just the gluteus medius muscle. And so, she rotated outward and with her foot off the ground she did this exercise. I said it does not feel like much of an exercise. She was like no and I said okay great every runner says that.
But here’s what I want you to do. I know you think it’s not really an exercise so what I would like you to do is do fifty reps on each foot. This is only going to take you a couple of minutes. So, all you’re doing is rotating your foot outward with it off the ground in order to tighten and strengthen the gluteus medius muscle. Do fifty reps.
If you can’t do 10 push-ups it would make you very very very sore if you did fifty right? But if you were really really fit and you could do a thousand push-ups, if you did fifty push-ups it wouldn’t make you sore at all right? Okay, so in her case I said do fifty reps, let me know how it goes. She called me and she said oh my god I did fifty reps on each leg and I was so sore I couldn’t believe it.
I said okay good what that means is you’re really weak and she was like how’s that good? Well, it’s good because you have something you’ve identified that is really weak which can contribute to your problem which is rolling your ankle when you’re running on trails. If you strengthen that muscle, it should decrease your risk of rolling your ankle when you’re running on trails. And you know that since you’re so weak there you have a lot of very quick gains you can make because you’re so weak. So, it’s easy to get something really strong really quickly.
Again, if you can’t do ten push-ups, you can start doing push-ups and you can make a lot of improvement real fast. But if you’re strong enough to do a thousand push-ups you have to put in a lot more time to get strength that actually makes you a lot stronger like where you could do one thousand five hundred push-ups right? So, this is not going to take much time. It’s going to give her a lot of improvement really quickly.
Specifically, her question related to this was do I need to like focus on the amount of time I’m doing it or should I like be very specific about how I’m doing the form about like when I hold the end of the rotation what should I do? And I said truthfully in your case it doesn’t really matter.
As long as you’re getting sore when you’re doing that workout, working that muscle and exercising the gluteus medius muscle, you’re going to get big improvements. So, until you stop getting sore I wouldn’t even worry about that. I would just make sure that you do it consistently.
Make sure that you’re still getting benefit and you’re feeling like you’re sore and you increase the number of reps before you get sore. And then once you feel like you kind of plateaued then we can talk about the form and all these other details. But right now, it doesn’t even matter. That’s a huge benefit of having huge weakness in one particular spot.
If you want to learn more about the strategies I use with injured runners who are actually suffering from chronic ankle instability and want to get back to running, I talk about the strategies I use with runners who roll their ankles, get sprains, have pain in the ankle, and then get back to running in the Ankle Pain Masterclass. It’s free and you can come join me in that training if you sign up at www.docontherun.com/anklepainmasterclass.
So, go sign up and I’ll see you in the training.
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