10 Minute Tip 30: How To Keep Training With Foot & Ankle Injuries in Barbell Training & Powerlifting
Powerlifting is a relatively safe sport in that the risk for injury is far less than contact and team sports and still less than Crossfit and weightlifting. Foot and ankle injuries directly caused by powerlifting are extremely rare. In fact, most injuries of the foot and ankle that affect your ability to powerlift occur outside of training. If they do occur as a result of barbell training, they are usually caused by a weight room accident.
CYou may feel that because a foot or ankle injury affects the way you walk or how you bear weight on your foot, that you shouldn’t squat or deadlift. However, in most cases, barbell training can and should be uninterrupted due to a foot or ankle injury. If you can put the foot down, you can perform the squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press. The reason this is the case is because there is little to no ankle movement and there should be no foot movement during the powerlifts.
In this 10 Minute Tip podcast episode we encourage you to keep training in appropriate ways with respect to foot and ankle injuries in three categories and exactly how to do that:
Chronic conditions:
a. Bunions
b. Plantar fasciitis
Weight Bearing injuries
a. Stress fractures
b. Ankle sprains
c. Tendonopathy
Non-weight bearing injuries
a. Post surgical
b. Fractures
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Email: podcast@progressiverehabandstrength.com
Rori IG: @rorimegan_prs
Alyssa IG: @alyssahope_prs
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:00:19] Welcome back to the Progressive Rehab & Strength podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Alyssa Haveson, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Rori Alter. Today we are going to be doing a ten minute tip talking about common foot and ankle injuries that will affect or can affect barbell training. These aren't necessarily injuries that are caused by barbell training, but sometimes we experience them and they can affect how we feel while we're training and how to deal with them and how to continue training while still managing those injuries or symptoms. Also, of course, training injuries or weight room accidents may occur, not necessarily injuries from training, but stuff that happens in the weight room. Those are the only foot injuries that are related to training, like when you drop a weight on your foot or you trip over the platform or your gym bag. That's never happened to me, but I could imagine within the powerlifting and barbell training community faces those things a lot. I've somehow trained myself to ignore the obstacles in my way.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC : [00:01:31] I've tripped on so many things. I've tripped on clips and deadlift wedges. The worst. This is another weight room injury, when you ram your shin into the end of the barbell of the deadlift or when you are passing through between the racks and you jam your shoulder into it or you hit your head on them. I hit my head one day. One day, it was postpartum and I was in a bad mood, and I went to go squat and I went to walk under the bar to get into position and I just slammed my head into the bar because I did not duck low enough. So anyway, we're not talking about all that stuff.
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:02:20] Not hitting your head, but, you know, there are there are weight room accidents.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC : [00:02:24] Those are the type of injuries that we get pertaining to the foot and ankle in barbell training. We don't really see training load training technique. We don't really see those things affect the feet, the foot, and ankle. So again, just training injuries. What we want to do with this episode is talk about things that happen to your feet and your ankles outside of training that may interfere with your ability to train optimally or lead you to believe that maybe you can't train normally, if that makes sense.
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:03:08] All right. So, do you want to start a timer?
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC : [00:03:10] I got it. Yeah. That's what I was doing when I was looking down. All right, guys. I got it set for ten minutes. All right, here we go. Three, two, one, ten minutes.
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:03:23] What conditions or injuries of the foot or ankle tend to affect us while training?
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC : [00:03:30] Yeah. There are people who can have chronic conditions of their feet that they can't change, like bunions for one thing. Bunions tend to be irritated by footwear more than anything else. So for bunions, we want to be really careful that we're finding a shoe that allows our foot to move freely, isn't pressing on the bunion, and doesn't contribute to worsening the bunion because you're going to spend a lot of time in your weight lifting shoes and you're going to load your feet in a weightlifting shoe. We don't want to wear a shoe that is uncomfortable or crushing the toes. And also, honestly, just from my own personal experience, I have bunions and we're going to have an interview coming out with one of our clients who's had bilateral bunionectomies. People tend to have limited range of motion in their great toe, so in their big toes when they have bunions, and that can affect things like specifically squat, bench, and deadlift because your feet are flat and not moving. You're not going through the joint range of motion in those lifts. But accessory exercises like planks or lunges or split squats can really irritate your bunion. We want to be careful if we are doing anything that requires great toe extension. That might not be the best exercise selection for someone who has bunions or even plantar fasciitis, which is the next thing that I was going to talk about.