Last year I sprained my ankle when I landed during a high speed crash, I stretched or tore the ligament at the side of my ankle. Anyway it's playing up again and wondered if Physio Sarah could suggest some exercises or treatment to stop it hurting when walking on uneven ground?

HI Bex, sorry to hear your ankle is playing up again. There is certainley plenty you can do to help improve your proprioception (the ability of the ankle to know where it is in relation to the rest of the body) as this will improve balance reactions and thus prepare you better for walking on uneven surfaces.
Start of by going back to basics and practice balancing on 1 leg. As you improve and feel steadier, gently raise up onto the toes and lower down slowly. Repeat this action making sure you minimise the wobble! Once you have improved your balance in a static environment, you need to challenge it by adding more movement. Get comfortable with side stepping and walking backwards, and then gradually increase your speed into a jog concentrating on how your foot lands on the ground. Try moving in a figure of 8 and practice changing direction more quickly. All of these directional changes help to stimulate some of the dormant receptors in the ankle ligament thus improving your ability to react to change, which is essentially what your ankle has to do when you walk on uneven surfaces. The better the ligaments are at detecting change in direction and stretch, the quicker they send messages to the muscles to contract and protect the joint. Remember, progress slowly and make sure you spend enough time doing the static balancing before you progress on. You should be able to stand easily on the bad leg alone for 1 minute without a wobble!! Good luck, let me know how you go(If you have access to a wobble board or similar device then that would be even better).

Sarah Carter (Physio)

Try this tip if you find that you tend to "go over" on the injured ankle (tried and tested several times - lament of a trail runner):

Place a strip of sports strapping tape from ankle bone to ankle bone running beneath your foot.
It helps with proprioception (simply put you feel the sticky tape and know where your ankle is ;-)) while you patiently wait for the rahab exercises to take effect, which could save possible re-injury.

Er...thats only while on foot, no amount of tape is going to stop you crashing a bike at high speed!

sorry to hear about your poorly ankle. hope it is now on the mend..

I have a similar problem, having also damaged my ankle ligaments about 18 months ago (they certainly take a long time to heal. Apparently the older you are.......) I have recently converted to SPDs (what a revelation) but with that, my ankle ligaments have started to twinge again. I have the SPDs on really, really loose, so there's no major movement in getting out of them. However the side that I tend to get off my bike is also the weaker ankle.
Could it be that this clipping in/out movement is causing the pain and stretchy feeling of the ligaments (funnily enough I can walk OK and when exercising the pain goes?)
Any advice (other than what you told Bev, and training myself to clip out of the other foot?)
Many thanks

I managed to explode my ankle ligaments earlier this year, having done a similar thing about 4/5 years ago (careless I know...) Ligaments take a LONG time to heal properly, so I hunted around and found a brilliant ankle guard from Six-Six-One - called the Race Brace. Fits in my shoe easily (and I have quite narrow Shimanos), nylon inserts up both sides and lace-up for a close fit. Exercises and stuff still need to be done off-bike, but this is easily the best guard I've found. £14.99 from Evans online.