How soon after a bad ankle sprain can I start running again? It’s a complex answer, but it’s a great question. I guess I’ll answer the question with a question, not to be politician here, but a lot of it would depend on when the ankle sprain occurred and what have you done for it since?

Grading System For An Ankle Sprain

At Motus Rx Physical Therapy typically, we have a grading system that we go through for ligament and ankle sprains. We can say grade one through four, how severe is it? The timetable in terms of two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, that kind of gets thrown out the window a little bit. We can’t necessarily, with higher grade or more severe ankle sprains, be as accurate in predicting recovery time. I would say that this question goes for ligaments, sprains, ankle sprains, muscle tears, and matters of that sort. So again, with our higher level and more significant issues or ankle sprains, the timetable gets thrown out the window a little bit.

But, what happens is, hopefully Motus Rx Physical Therapy can come along and help determine when is the right time to get back to physical activity, or specifically running?

1. Swelling: Has the swelling returned back to a prior level of normal, a normal ankle-size pre-injury or what we would classify within your normal? Sometimes we can compare to your uninjured ankle to your injured ankle. The reason this is important is because swelling can cause all sorts of changes in your muscle activity. It can cause changes in how the muscles are functioning and it certainly can cause changes in the joint performance. You wouldn’t want to be participating in a lot of high impact activities on the ankle if there’s still a significant amount of swelling in it.

2. Strength: There’s some strength tests that we would do on the ankle. We want to make sure the muscle function in that ankle is as optimal as possible before putting a lot of impact on it. If you think about somebody that’s had a bad ankle sprain or repeated ankle sprains, the challenge is that the ligaments are not doing their job anymore or as well anymore. So, you really need those muscles that surround that ankle and control that ankle to be optimal and really, REALLY solid. We want to make sure that strength is there when we test the ankle. We also want to be able to get you on your feet, challenge your balance and stability a little bit, and see how you tolerate some lower impact-type activities at Motus Rx, at home, or over video. (Just a little plug for Telehealth. With all that is going on with COVID-19, this is just a reminder that Motus Rx Physical Therapy does offer our services via the internet as your safety and security is our top priority.)

I know that’s a long-winded answer. If I had to say, you could be good to run again after a bad ankle sprain as soon as three or four weeks, but we want to make sure that the swelling is in check and that the strength is back to normal. Additionally, we would test it a little bit with some impact.

Another good thing to do is go for a walk at a decent pace and see how you respond to that. If your goal is to run or you’d like to get back to running, let’s say for simple math, a mile, take a fairly decent paced walk at a mile. If you’re doing okay after mile shoot for two. If you respond okay to that, then you may be on the fringe of starting to think about doing a little bit of light jogging and running again. If you really struggle with a higher paced walk at a mile or two miles, you’re probably just not quite ready for that impact yet. All right, so there’s really a couple phases to that answer.

Braces For An Ankle Sprain

Now, do I recommend any specific type of brace to wear? The thing that I would say about that is, as much as possible, we do not at Motus Rx Physical Therapy, try to have people rely on external devices or external supports. What can happen is if you become dependent on those, that likely means they’re not being overly dependent on your own body and your own muscles. That can send us down a little bit of a negative cycle.

Now, if you have done everything the right way, you’ve worked on strength, you’ve gotten your swelling down, you’ve trained for impact, you’ve looked at your hip strength, you’ve done all that full gauntlet and you’re still having issues, then I do recommend a brace just to help you function and do what you want to do in a healthy manner.

If you had to go with a brace, I’m probably not up to snuff as much nowadays with what’s out there, but you would probably want some sort of external support…more than just a sleeve. There are certain braces that give you some support side to side. There are also the lace up braces which provide a fair amount of stability. Again, keep in mind, braces are, in these four walls at Motus Rx Physical Therapy, our last resort, and we want you to do everything to kind of control your own destiny and your own variables before you jump into relying on an external device.