Sebastian Brosche · 17 min · 917 words
Previously titled: Video 5 - Achilles Tendon Rehab
Hi folks, welcome back. This is the final day of our Achilles tendon pain program. So today I'm going to use my massage ball. I'm going to use a resistance band.
I've got a slightly heavier one today. You can stay with the same one, but if you want to increase it that's fine as well. I'm also going to use my step and a weight. So I'm going to start out with a massage ball.
And as we've done on previous days, I'm just going to start by working into the back of the calf there, finding the tender points. You can just hold that for a second. And then what I want to do is I'm going to start at the knee end of the muscle. I'm just going to pull the toes back, move the ball slightly, pull the toes back again.
I can work all the way down. This is quite a nice way of finding all those points in the muscle that are a little bit tender and just doing some really local stretching. I'm not going to work down too close to the painful area, but I can start getting a little bit further down into the muscle. And then dropping the massage ball to one side.
I'm going to grab the band and we're going to go with our exercises for tibialis anterior, that muscle on the front of the shin that we've talked about before. I'm going to start by doing some few reps here. And then what I'm going to do, I'm just going to hold the foot in that position there. I'm just going to scoot myself back.
I'm going to do an isometric hold to finish. And rest there. Repeat that on the other side. Once we get to this stage of rehab, it's really worth doing everything on both sides.
Because often if there's a weakness on one side, there may very well be one on the other side as well. It's not uncommon for people to rehab one side of the body and then to discover that the other side has started hurting. Scoot back and do a hold. As we talked about before, this is a really important muscle for jiu-jitsu anyway and it often gets neglected.
So this is a good one to add to your program. And relax there. Switch back to the first side. Do another isometric there.
Do make sure the band's attached to something which isn't going to fall over. Switch back. And rest there. So as we did on day four, I've got my weight, my step, and I've got something to help with my balance a little bit.
We want to increase the weight slightly. From last time we did this, that's fine. Again, we're going to go up on two legs. Transfer the weight.
Lower yourself down slowly and under control. These eccentric calf exercises are one of the staples of any tendon rehab program. So it's something that I will always get my tendon pain patients doing a lot of. Switch sides.
Go straight up. And onto the other side. And we're going to go straight back to the first side again. And we're going to repeat the exercise.
And we're going to go straight back to the first side. And we're going to go straight back. And switch over. And we're going to go straight back.
And we're going to go straight back. And we're going to go straight back. And we're going to go straight back. And we're going to go straight back.
And put the weight down. Now we're going to go into some lunges. So for this one we're going to do a stepping lunge. Going forwards, touch the back knee to the side.
And then we're going to do a lateral lunge. We're going to go down to one side, and back up. And the other side. Again, if I get any pain in the tendon area when I'm doing this, I can reduce the range of movement.
So I'll go less far. Or I can use something to support me to take some of the weight off. For example, holding onto the back of a chair or something like that. Back to the forwards lunge.
And one more set on the sideways. And rest there. Finally, we're going to go back to those jumps that we were doing before. We're going to start with one set, the same as we did yesterday.
A two foot take off, two foot landing. And again, the idea is that you make the jump as small as you need to in order to be able to do it reasonably comfortably. And take a rest there. So the next set we're going to do is we're going to take a two foot take off and land on one foot.
So the idea is to land and balance on that one foot. Again, we can make the jump very, very small. It's not about the height. It's about getting the mechanics right and landing as quietly and in a controlled way as you can.
The next step from there would be to build that into all sorts of dynamic movements. So you've got your jumps, your hops, all of those things. But for this programme, we're going to stop there. So feel free to go back over those exercises as many times as you need to.
And good luck getting back to fighting fitness.
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