Commonly Used For: Foot pain, ankle pain, plantar fasciitis and collapsing arches.
Video Transcription: I'm going to show you how to do an inversion ankle exercise, which strengthens the muscle here at the inside edge of your calf. It comes down under and supports the arch of your foot so this is an important exercise to do for anybody who has a problem with their arch collapsing on them or any sort of plantar fasciitis heel pain type problems. So, you're going to need an exercise band that you can get at most sporting goods stores or online [here's one at Amazon.com]. I tied a loop at the end of mine just to make it a little bit easier. So what you're going to do is you're going to cross the leg that you're going to exercise over your opposite leg. Put the loop around your foot so that the band is going over your big toe here. You're going to go behind your opposite foot and up, point your toes downward and then pull out, slowly coming back. You don't want to let it just whip back. That's part of the exercise — slowly controlling it back to the starting position and you should feel a nice burn in the muscle going on either in your arch or up here, up into your leg. You want to make sure that you don't see this tendon in front pop out like that. If you see that tendon popping out, you're using the wrong muscle and you need to point your toes more. So, when I do it correctly, that tendon flattens out. If I do it incorrectly and I'm not pointing my toes enough, you can see that big tendon. So nice and pointed, slowly out to the side and slowly back. So that's your inversion ankle exercise.