Have you ever tried to stand on one foot and balance? How was it? A bit wobbly? Or did you manage to stand perfectly still?
Have you ever twisted your ankle and found that it affected your balance....and then after, noticed that you kept on re twisting it?
As a physio I have treated my fair share of ankles throughout the years and have found that one of the most important parts of the rehab in injuries like this is to work on balance. Unless you work on the reeducation of proprioception (I'll explain that in a minute) you will be forever vulnerable.
Proprioception is the ability of the body to sense how it is positioned in space. Within the muscles and joints and ligaments surrounding joints (in this case the ankle) are the nerve receptors that are responsible for picking up signals of stretch and tension. If you are standing on one foot and sway a little, the signals from these receptors are sent to the brain to be processed and acted on accordingly. If the body is swaying to the left it will counter it by pulling it to the right. It does this by a complex relay of information from these nerve receptors, up to the brain and back down to the opposing muscles. It is the ongoing interplay of these signals, constantly firing, that allows for continuous readjustments to position so that we don't fall over... and It's done mostly at a subconscious level.
If these receptors are damaged (in the case of the twisted ankle) the information sent to the brain is impaired and it can affect the perception of how the body is positioned. It can also affect and slow the nerve signals to the correcting muscles...if you are then unfortunate enough to twist your ankle again, the correcting muscles don't have enough time to fire and you end up doing a whole bunch more damage. The ankle gives way, you end up feeling off balance or you fall over.
So why am I talking about Proprioception today?
