04/09/2018
Dr Matthew Theng running through ways of improving dorsiflexion. Thanks to .rab.123 for the opportunity and the lengthy awesome post.
.rab.123 with
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Did you know the hip has just the 1 joint? That the knee has just 2 joints? And the ankle has 33 joints? No typo. 33 all there with a job to do. Our ankles are ridiculously unappreciated if you have a quest for better wheels!
So often a poor squat… especially one that looks more like a Good Morning… is misattributed to, say, a lack of hip flexor mobility or hamstring mobility or core stability or lack of firing in the glutes... I PROMISE YOU MOST OF THE TIME… IT'S NOTHING TO DO WITH THOSE FACTORS... it's simply a lack of dorsiflexion.
Dorsiflexion, in a context that’s most useful, is the ability to drive the knee forward, whilst keeping the foot grounded.
If your knees can’t travel forward to an adequate standard… you’ll do one or any combo of the following… pronate your ankle (rolling your ankle inwards which makes the knee vulnerable to also rolling inwards).
Shift your weight forwards to your forefoot and/or elevate your heels (creating more force in your patellar tendons). You may bend excessively at the hips (good mornings) thereby making your squat more of a lower back exercise than a leg exercise.
A lack of dorsiflexion quite literally f**ks your squats up, it f**ks your lunges up, it f**ks your leg presses up… & it has the potential to f**k your deadlift up too (referring to conventional or shoulder-width stance).
It’s quite a fascinating topic (for me anyway). If you’ve travelled to Asia or the non-developed parts of the middle east & Africa… you’ll see people quite comfortably sitting in a deep squat position for significant periods of time… ie, the lunch squat.
The question then becomes - why’s it so easy for these people to just hang like this… & yet for so many of us in the Western world, we can’t even get into the damn position, let alone have lunch there?! What some experts believe… & I definitely agree. the invention of the toilet… has modified the structure/function of our ankles, therefore making dorsiflexion
