The best sprained ankle treatment at home is one that addresses the inherent damage and weakness caused by an ankle sprain. When your ankle first gets injured, it’s going to swell and cause a lot of pain. You may be able to walk with a limp or you may need crutches. In some cases, there may actually be a fracture! The point is that you should NOT underestimate a sprained ankle, because it’s not something you can afford to ignore…

Inside the ankle, there will be a lot of bruising and tissue damage with a lot of waste getting trapped in the ankle joint. To make things worse, scar tissue may develop. The ankle will feel very weak and unstable. You will have pain for weeks, months and in many cases, it can last for years.

So, the most important question is… what is the best sprained ankle recovery strategy?

But, before we get to that (and we will), let’s quickly discuss what NOT to do…

What does NOT work

If you ask your friends, they will tell you to rest and ice your ankle until it feels better. But, here’s the problem… rest and ice have been shown to be completely inadequate for healing a sprained ankle. There are a lot of reasons, but I will briefly cover it here…

Basically, a ton of recent research has suggested that rest and ice does not heal ANY of the damage from the injury, nor does it strengthen or stabilize the ankles. In fact, rest and ice may actually set you up for a very long recovery with weak ankles that are at a HIGH risk of re-injury. The reason is that rest and ice does NOTHING proactive to heal the injury and ankles do NOT heal themselves. It’s a wait and see approach that doesn’t work, unfortunately… For more on this, please read: Ice a Sprained Ankle?

Sprained Ankle Recovery

Okay, so what works best for a sprained ankle? The key is to heal the damage in the ankle and then improve strength, stability and healthy range of motion. In other words, you have to manually fix the damage instead of waiting and hoping it will heal itself, because it won’t!!

The first thing you need to do is start removing the swelling and waste from the ankle joint. Remember, the ankle sprain will cause a lot of swelling and if you just rely on ice, it could get trapped in there for a long time. Instead, we want to manually remove the swelling with safe and gentle techniques that improve healthy circulation.

Next, it is important to gently and safely improve strength and stability in the ankle. We have to rebuild that weak, unstable ankle from the ground up. Otherwise, it will stay weak for a long time. That’s why we see so many people relying on ankle braces, but that causes a number of problems…

One, it keeps the ankles weak, because the brace is a crutch that never allows the ankle to stabilize on its own. And two, braces immobilize the ankle, which places a great deal of strain on the knee. In a nut shell, ankle braces keep the ankle weak and unstable and force your body to move in an unnatural way, which can increase the risk of injury. For more on this, please read: Ankle Braces Increase Sprains.

To avoid all that, you want to naturally and slowly increase strength and stability in the ankle. It will not only help you move faster and better, it will also protect you from future sprains!

Lastly, we have to dramatically improve healthy range of motion in the ankle. That means creating good mobility and flexibility in the entire ankle joint, because it was meant to move in many different directions. Remember, your feet and ankle are what come into contact with the ground, so making sure that is natural and healthy is absolutely vital to all the other joints in the body.

HEM Ankle Rehab

We developed HEM to fully and quickly heal a sprained ankle.

It is the #1 selling sprained ankle at home treatment. HEM Ankle Rehab will show you how to heal your ankle, step by step, at home, without any equipment. It works fast and it’s very easy to do. You can expect a FULL ankle recovery and strong, healthy ankles at a much LOWER risk of re-injury.

If you would like to learn more about our system, please click: HEM ANKLE REHAB