Besides traditional strengthening and massage work, here are some really valuable gems I've discovered for keeping my feet and ankles in the game longer.
https://instagram.com/p/4aT14pMcpS/
1. Roll the bottoms of your feet to improve the condition of your plantar fascia. This will have positive effects all the way up your body. This is my #1 tip for people with new ankle sprains. But don't use a ball or a normal sized pvc pipe, instead, use the thin pvc pipes that most people use to stretch their upper body.
2. When you do use a ball, use it to roll the small ligaments on top of your foot and around your ankle. But don't use a golf ball, baseball, tennis ball, or lacrosse ball or whatever. The best ball is actually a large bouncy ball!!!
Roll and put pressure on hot spots (if any) for a couple minutes.
3. Get some voodoo floss compression wrap, wrap your ankle and manually move it in circles, rotate, stretch, press, kneed for about 90 seconds. Then release.
This global compression combined with full range of motion movements increases bloodflow for 10 minutes plus after you release... and bloodflow is what you need for the body to heal. Do this often. Especially once or twice before training.
4. Get some yoga toes. They are the shit.
Wear them while you drive, in the office, all the time. Walk around the house in them. I wear them for up to an hour at a time sometimes.
Hi juji, recently I have been drill my sideswipes and I had them pretty good to the point of muscle memory but recently I have begun to lose them even though I have been drilling it every session. I train 6 day a week for 4 hours. These 4 hour sessions are split into two training sessions one in the morning and one at night. Morning sessions are 45 min runs and bo staff drills. Night sessions are 2 hours of tricking with 15 min warm up 90 min of tricking 15 cool down then lifting for 30 min. Do I need to adjust this schedule or is it normal to lose tricks because all of my other tricks are consistent except for my sideswipes which used to be very consistent
Nice article Juji!
Maybe you could do similar articles on other common injuries later on. I bet they’ll be very useful to everyone. :)
JUJI!
Bringing emphasis to the feet seems to be the new cool thing. Have you seen the “Speed of Sport” training stuff? He (Nick Curson) emphasizes the feet a lot. I’ll provide a few links at the bottom for you. But do you think his training method has some good applications to the acrobolic athlete? He seemed to badmouth traditional weightlifting, but only in the sense of it not being ideal for athletes that aren’t weightlifters/bodybuilders (I.E. Boxers are better off only training things that are specific to boxing. Hyper-specificity if you will). Can’t be acrobolic without weights, so disregard his opinion of weights haha. If you get the time to check it out a bit, let me know what you think, if you feel so inclined of course.
Instagram: https://instagram.com/speedofsport/
Main Website: http://www.speedofsport.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/SpeedofSport
The JRE podcast where I found out about him (it’s a good listen if you’ve got a couple hours free, or to listen to while performing some tedious labor!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJmYFlvKloE
Hmmm this might explain why i have such a miserable time walking along pebble beaches barefoot. When on holiday, the wife and I would go for a walk along the beach. She would be walking along ahead without a care in the world and i would be 10 paces behind her struggling to keep up. I’d ask doesnt she find this painful and she’d not have a clue what I was talking about.
just to add to your already great list, running barefoot is supposed to help with preventing injury… at least according to my soccer coach of 25 years ago…
also, i like to stretch my toes by sitting on them, in a kneeling position. Then stretch them backwards the other way.