Dr. Trevor McKay:
Video Transcript:
Hey guys, Dr. Trevor McKay coming at you with two quick drills that you can be working on at the house to reduce the likelihood of an Achilles injury. So, the first thing that we’re going to go over here is a stretch. You can use any sort of door, wall, anything that you can lean up against. You want to start about arms length away, and you’re going to take a step in with one leg and kind of lean into this wall, and keep the other foot back behind you. Our goal here is to stretch the calf of the leg that’s back behind us.
So, a couple of things to help make sure that we’re going to get the most out of this. We want to make sure that our toes are pointed forward, and then we want to make sure that our heel stays down on the ground, and as we go to shift our weight forward, keeping our knee straight, we don’t let that heel come off, because then we won’t quite be getting the stretch that we’re looking for. I recommend holding this for about 10 to 15 seconds, and you want to do about four to five rounds of that. And that’s…
The next thing that you can be working on at the house is something called a single leg heel raise. And this is going to help maintain the strength of your calf complex, and improve the resiliency of that Achilles tendon. So, we’ll also use the wall for balance here. You’re going to be standing on one foot. You want to focus on coming up onto your toes on that foot, and then back down. If I turn to face you, it would look like this. We want to come straight up, making sure that we have even weight on the inside and outside ball of our feet. This is something that I would recommend doing three sets, until you get a good muscle burn, that should happen right in the center of your calf complex.
So, that was two drills that you can be working on at the house. One’s a stretch, one’s working on some strength, and that will help reduce the likelihood of any Achilles injury.
