Do you have achilles tendon pain? Tried injections and rest but it didn’t really help? Can’t be as active as you’d like to be?
Then make sure you read this incredibly important blog as I’m going to show you the 3 advanced achilles tendon exercises that you need to be aiming for to bulletproof your achilles tendon recovery.
Achilles tendon pain is horrible. It makes those first few steps out of bed in the morning agony and stops you from being active.
It’s a deceptive injury as you can rest or get an injection which can make you feel a heap better but then as soon as you get back to being more active it comes back with a vengeance.
Now let’s get into it.
Firstly it’s super important that you realise these are advanced exercises and not beginners. They are exercises that you only start doing once you have done all the beginner exercises and treatment to get you 100% pain free.
Advanced achilles exercise number 1:
Hopping
Hopping is super important as it’s a nice functional action that happens when you are running and jumping. That single leg control, strength, endurance and power all combined needs to be able to produce a beautiful hop that isn’t going to injure you, you can get good ground clearance and can keep it up with plenty of endurance.
But it’s super important that we aren’t just hopping up and down on the spot. We want our patients hopping onto steps, hopping at least 3 long hops in a row, doing zig zag hops and so on. It’s hard work to get here but you never want your achilles tendinopathy to lead to a compensation that then gives you an ankle sprain, a bad knee or hip pain.
Advanced achilles exercise number 2:
Calf bouncing
With tendon rehabilitation it’s incredibly important that you work all the way to the point where you are doing springy and ballistic movements. Calf bouncing is a great way to get targeted springing purely through your achilles tendon and not getting help from your knees and hips.
How you do it is by doing really fast calf raises not holding onto anything and not letting your heels touch the ground. It’s kind of like skipping with a rope. The trick is though that you aren’t allowed to bend your knees, not even a little bit.
Advanced achilles exercise number 3:
Hopping down from a height
So I wanted to have this one as it’s own separate exercise. It’s a massive test on how well your achilles tendon can deal with a sudden really heavy workload and compression. These sudden heavy hard loads are usually the reason the flare ups happen again which is why this exercise is so important.
To do this one you need to be standing on a step. The height of the step we want to aim for is at least 50cm. Standing on the step you then jump off it landing on the affected leg then immediately doing a hop. We like to change it up a bit by then calling out a direction to hop in – so you’ll land, we call out right and you will hop to the right. This is such a challenging exercise on so many levels but we have helped heaps of patients get right to this point and ultimate success.
The big thing is… YOU DON’T NEED TO PUT UP WITH ACHILLES TENDON PAIN. You just need to get the right assessment and the right plan to banish it for good.
If you’d like to get these results too then click HERE to book online or give us a call on (07) 4999 9773 so we can get you back to doing what you want to do and what you love.