Twisted ankle and recovery time..........

[Tour90]

I twisted my ankle today right after doing a split step. The pain was excruciating. It sounded like someone crack their entire back or neck. I just dropped down on the court and winced for about 5 minutes. Soon after swelling could be seen. I'd say no less than 10 minutes. I immediately left the court and went home to ice it. I've iced it for about a total of 2 hours. The swelling countinues. As of now, I'm dipping my ankle in a bucket of ice water. I'm hoping that this will stop the swelling for now. Anyway, my question is......

Is there a faster method to heal a twisted ankle. I need to recover fast because there are a few matches I have in 3 weeks, (A city tourney type of thing).


Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[scotus]

Can you move and rotate your ankle in all directions? You should go see a doctor right away (not that they could speed up your recovery, but they should be able to tell you how serious it is).

Recovery depends on your health and age and also on the nature of your injury. If it's just a pull on a muscle or a slight misalignment in your ankle bones that caused pain, then you should recover in a matter of days to a couple of weeks. If you strained a tendon, longer. If you sprained a ligament, even longer. If you completely tore a tendon or ligament, it will feel like eternity before you feel like a half of your old self.

You can use ice and ibuprofen until swelling goes down. Then use heat treatment.

Most importantly, don't let a little city tournament get in the way of your healing process. Much better to wait till your ankle heals completely than to further aggrevate the injury and be sidelined much longer (Unfortunately young people almost never follow this advice ... to their own loss).

 

[Tour90]

thanks for the reply. I think I sprained a ligament or might have torn it. It was pretty bad. I've been icing it down for most my birthday (today). It sucks, but I plan to do a recovery and not a halfa$$ one. I've twisted my other ankle before and it took about 2-3 months before I could actually run lines and sprint again.

 

[Marius_Hancu]

a torn ankle ligament normally means surgery.

go ASAP to the best orthopedic surgeon you can find, someone who normally operates on pro athletes would be preferred.

you must have a diagnostic as soon as possible, but once torn, you can't do to much about it until surgery. an X-Ray and MRI would be most probably required.

I went through this. 1.5 months in a boot and crutches.

6 months from surgery for gradual recovery and strengthening of your ankle.

do it any faster and you risk ending up like Hingis.

 

[devilish_duke]

I'm no therapist or medical professional but I did sprain my ankle horribly on April 9 this year. Went up for a shot and came down.... on one foot.... on an ex-friend's foot.... all 160 lbs of me. Worse feeling in my life. I was on crutches for one month, I was only able to jog after 1.5, and I was on the courts (hobbled speed and agility wise) in 2 months. Since my accident I've been seeing a foot and ankle specialist and started physical therapy close to 2 months after the accident. Now it's been 4 months. I'm at about 80% on my right ankle; I'm half a step slower due to physical ramifications, and another half a step slower due to confidence issues (and not wanting it to get hurt again). Make no mistake, before I benched myself recently for trigger finger, I was playing 3 or 4 times a week at 3 hours each time with an ASO ankle brace. Do give yourself time to recover to at least the point of being able to jog and DO SEEK A SPECIALIST AND A PHYSICAL THERAPIST. I would NOT be where I am otherwise. I just saw my doctor for my monthly checkup and she's confident that I'll be as good as I'll ever be (sprains never fully heal) by the end of August, nearly 5 months after the accident. Luckily, my game hasn't suffered much and has improved due to the fact that now I have to be more prepared and better positioned due to limited mobility. Once I finish therapy and healing I'll have combined that knowledge with full athletic ability, so take heart and seek the proper treatment without rushing your return to the court.

 

[Nuke]

If it's a moderate sprain and not a bad tear, an ankle brace will get you back on the court with some discomfort and limited mobility in three or four weeks. Don't expect to be too competitive right away, or push your recovery to hard or fast. You may still be feeling after effects for a few months after this.

If it's more than a a sprain, could need surgery and physical therapy. Take it real easy, see how it is in the morning, and get a doctor to look at it. Unless you make a miraculous overnight recovery, a tournament in three weeks is probably a bad idea.

 

[bcaz]

The key is, how old are you?

At age 10, a sprained ankles takes a few days to heal.

At age 20, it takes 10 days to 2 weeks.

At age 30-35, it takes 6 weeks.

At age 45-50, it takes about 6 months.

Beyond age 55, it may never heal.

This is why athletes eventually retire from competition. It's also why it's ever more important to take care of your body as you get older.

 

[Nuke]

Yeah, I have to agree with bcaz. Now that I'm, uh, more mature, relatively minor injuries that used to heal in a few days now take me months to fully get rid of. Celebrate your youth!

 

[Marius_Hancu]

The key is, how old are you?

At age 10, a sprained ankles takes a few days to heal.

At age 20, it takes 10 days to 2 weeks.

At age 30-35, it takes 6 weeks.

At age 45-50, it takes about 6 months.

Beyond age 55, it may never heal.

This must be heavily weighted by the degree of the sprain.
if there's a ligament tear, it takes in the months irrespective of the age.

Also, depends on how much you worked on your ankles with squats, calves raises, tibia machines.

I had ligament surgery on my left ankle, thus I considered it paramount to strengthen it. These days my tibia exercises are about 125lbs (on one leg in the machine only), my seated vertical calf raises are about 170lbs (I myself being about 170lbs), my seated horizontal calf raises are about 320lbs (all on Hammer machines). One must get at least there in order to withstand the requirements of tennis. Otherwise you will be forever spraining your ankles. You should work with weights comparable with your body weight or more (talking about the leg work here), or at least serious fractionals of it.

A crucial element are the shoes. Shoes which are too low and unstable will lead you towards sprain. From such sprains I recover in 2 days and I am not in your first age range above

 

[Marius_Hancu]

also, many people are spraining their ankles because they never learned a proper moving technique and have their entire soles flatly glued to the ground.

you must be on your toes and front part of the shoes, people, when pivoting. in tennis one should be the least possible on one's heels.

also, the leg on which one pivots must be well flexed at the knee.

especially on hard surfaces one must advance by really tip-toeing a lot, if you don't want your soles to be glued to the ground.

 

[Marius_Hancu]

lastly, when having a sprain, don't just sit there. start massaging heavily the area with your hands and do some ankle mobility/light stretching exercises if at all possible. that will reduce the recovery time if no tears are involved.

 

[MCN]

A common injury in ankle damage is tearing the proprioceptors - these are similar to nerve endings which tell your brain the angle your foot is relative to the ground. If these are still damaged after the ankle itself heals, you may risk re-injury because your balance on that leg will be bad and you'll go over on it again quite easily (lots of amateur footballers in the UK suffer from this). A simple way to test is to close your eyes and try and balance on your bad leg once you have suitable recovered. If you keep losing your balance quickly (compared to your good leg), you should get your physio to prescribe some strengthening and balance exercises (this apparently 'trains' the proprioceptors to sned the right signals to the brain again). I used a wobble board (a flat board balanced on a half ball) for a couple of months and that did the trick - but in all it took around 4 months to get back into shape (I'm 50 and these things take sooooo much longer to heal than before. Ahhhh, the joys of youth .....)

 

[RB]

I would definitely wear some type of ankle braces from now on--ankles that have been turned over like that are usually suspect to having it happen again---look into the type worn by Hewitt or Roddick-----i have turned over my right ankle twice and both times required crutches---I now wear a brace on my right ankle and have never had a single problem since.

 

[Tour90]

well, my whole ankle is swollen, and no torn ligaments. phew. I iced it down and then left to canada. I spent an entire day without ice and did moderate walking. i'm not sure if the age scale works but i just turned 19 yesterday. I'm feeling fine for now, and will probably start therapy within a week. Other than that, Canada was awesome. I have a picture of what I did. If anyone wants to put it up for me that would be great.

 

[GOOOOOGA]

good thing you're doing therapy! i had a severe high ankle sprain, saw an athletic trainer who taped it up and sent me home. stupid me, i didn't have it checked out by a doctor, because i was too scared to see if it was majorly injured. so i was crutches for about 2-3 weeks, able to jog a week after that, and was back to soccer two weeks later.

i still do feel discomfort in that area after soccer matches, and i hafta ice it frequently. there may have been permanent damage done to my ankle. so its good to know that you didn't make the same mistake i did. remember:

R est
I ce
C ompressions
E levation

 

[ATXtennisaddict]

I was sprained my ankle badly when I rolled it stepping on a stray ball on court. Hurt like a ***** and healed COMPLETELY after 7 or 8 weeks. Really long time.

 

[Tour90]

i started to bike today, not sure if this is bad for it, there is little pain but nothing serious

 

[SB]

I'm getting over a moderate ankle sprain (almost 2 mo ago). I can play doubles fairly confidently now, but singles is still a little worrisome. I'm late 30s, so that "age table" was right on for me.

I'm doing phys therapy, and the best thing they did was some manual therapy using the Mulligan concept. You can google it for the theory, but after manipulation, I immediately -- and I mean immediately -- felt better. I still have to deal with swelling, not much pain, but the tight feeling in my ankle is gone. Supposedly this Mulligan thing is supposed to prevent chronic sprains.

Edit: I was going to add, my initial injury sounded a lot like yours. I rolled it during a split step, heard a pop-crunch, and ouch. It was unstable, swelled up, etc. The diagnosis was a grade 2 sprain (the "pop") and a fracture of the medial malleolus (the "crunch").

 

[MTXR]

I had a severe ankle sprain, i am on month 6, and i finally can play again.

But every time i play i still have pain. I went thru 24 rounds of physical therapy. Ligaments suck man. make sure you heal it well...


i didn't have an MRI but they speculated that it was a possible slight tear, and will heal itself. But if its complete tear you need surgery.

 

[vkartikv]

I had a twisted ankle this spring - my first moderate-severe injury in all my 26 years of existence. Thankfully nothing was broken and it was just a midly torn ligament. And it came right smack 3 days before spring break was to begin. The only advice I have for you is keep your leg elevated at all times or when watching tv (what else can you do??), place your leg in a bucket filled with gypsum salt - it alleviates it.

The worst part about it was fear of whether I will be able to get back to normal playing routine and be able to get back to original form. That's what is scary.

But the best part about injuries - getting your g/f to do everything for you..
Oh, what did I just say?!!!


Oh and one more thing - make sure your shoe is suited to the kind of surface you are playing on. My anke injury, I suspect, was because of wearing shoes with no traction on a hard court. Keep that in mind.

 

[Rickson]

I twisted my ankle today right after doing a split step. The pain was excruciating. It sounded like someone crack their entire back or neck. I just dropped down on the court and winced for about 5 minutes. Soon after swelling could be seen. I'd say no less than 10 minutes. I immediately left the court and went home to ice it. I've iced it for about a total of 2 hours. The swelling countinues. As of now, I'm dipping my ankle in a bucket of ice water. I'm hoping that this will stop the swelling for now. Anyway, my question is......

Is there a faster method to heal a twisted ankle. I need to recover fast because there are a few matches I have in 3 weeks, (A city tourney type of thing).


Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Keep icing it, for several days if you have to. No matter what you do, don't apply heat. Rest and ice should get you back on your feet in no time.

 

[RKS12]

I'm a veteran of probably 30+ bad sprains on both sides from over 30 years of playing basketball. If you have the time and patience, iceing 2-4x per day will really speed recovery. And the Kalassy ankle brace is one of the best products i've ever used. Michael Chang used to wear the Kalassy.

 

[onlainari]

Hi. I twisted my ankle last thursday on a tennis court. I have never ever before had any injuries this severe. I am 23 years of age.

Right after my right ankle twisted over, I fell down and strip out my shoe. The swelling was already there when I got my shoe off. Then my friend took me to a health center near by, and I got some 'cold' on it. At this point, I couldn't even think of putting the foot down, so I jumped to my friends car with one foot.

Doc moved my ankle on directions and compared it to my health ankle. She was unsure of how badly it is injured, but she said that it feels like that it isn't that severe that it would need a surgery. She adviced me to put ice on it few times a day. She gave me a brace and a forearm crutches for 2 weeks for starters. She also said I couldn't do any sport for 2 months probably. She adviced me to try move it more bit by bit if I don't feel any pain after couple of days.

The remainings of thursday, friday, saturday I barely did anything with the ankle. Now on sunday, I first time after the injury tried to put some weight on it and I didn't feel pain really,it just felt awkward. The whole ankle feels tight, it is hard to move it to directions, but if I do move it back and forth, I can hear a minor cracking sound, like if I was stretching my fingers. If I move it around, sometimes I feel a little pain, but mostly I don't feel any pain, just feel awkward as the ankle is tighter than the healthy one.

The swelling healed quite well at start. Already on friday(next day after injury), there weren't much swelling left, but after that it haven't descended really. It has stayed the same, being a little thicker than my left healthy ankle.


I am wondering if anyone knows how my recovery is going and what step should I take next literally?;I

Should I be stretching the ankle and giving it slow training,perhaps even try take steps or should I just rest+ice+compression+elevation, or both?

How important is the compression part and how should I do it? The brace that I have, I don't wear it all the times and it is not creating too much compression on the ankle.

I can see that scotus adviced heat treatment after the swell is down,hmmm...

Also Marius Hancu said:

lastly, when having a sprain, don't just sit there. start massaging heavily the area with your hands and do some ankle mobility/light stretching exercises if at all possible. that will reduce the recovery time if no tears are involved.

I am unsure if there are tears involved in my case....
:?:
How much will this take until I can walk? I am afraid I won't have motivation to go to the school with forearm crutches... I just had a lot motivation a week ago, but now it's somewhat gone. thanks.

 

[Marius_Hancu]

Hi. I twisted my ankle last thursday on a tennis court. I have never ever before had any injuries this severe. I am 23 years of age.

you should get an MRI to make sure the ligaments aren't damaged. ask that this doctor or go to a another one ASAP.

 

[Rickson]

No heat on a sprained ankle! I was a personal trainer for 5 years and I know that one of the biggest mistakes people make is to apply heat on an injury. Heat will make the injury site swell up more which is the opposite of what you want. Apply ice to bring the swelling down.

 

[onlainari]

Thanks for the quick replys. I am planning to go to another doctor tomorrow.

Rickson, I found a website mentioning about giving heat to ease the pain: http://www.healthsquare.com/mc/fgmc0737.htm

I haven't had real pains, so actually I don't need to take any burana pills or anything, and heating it up is not going to be in my to-do-list for now, but I guess I'll find out more tomorrow.

I have seen some changes from yesterday. If I sit on a bench for instance, I can place my injured foot on ground without feeling anything strange, so that sounds like good improvement, but I'll go to doctor tomorrow nevertheless.

Also I am thinking of buying a good brace for my ankle for future use. I tried to search a place to get it from this area, but so far I haven't had the best success. I think the doc can help me on that aswell

 

[Aeropro joe]

i messed my ankle up when i was in jr high and it never healed right now its a weakeness that i have to be wary of and always sport an ankle brace but have still hurt it even then so make sure it heals right the first time! it will pay off later

 

[onlainari]

Hi again. Looking back to my twisted ankle. During the night between 15-16.9.2005, my ankle had a great improvement.

I had visited another doctor few days earlier, and we decided to book MRI the next week, if it wouldn't get better, but luckily it did. So I was able to even walk after 16th, while on 15th, I wouldn't even think about it.

After:

Using McDavid ankle brace when doing certain sports.
Have had some pain on the ankle few times in the last months, but have not been disturbing.