Ankle dorsiflexion is the angle closing between your shin and the top of your foot. You can produce it two ways: lift your toes toward your shin with the foot in the air, or keep the foot planted and drive the knee forward over it. The second version is the one that matters for almost everything people train for. Squatting, lunging, going down stairs, and the middle of a running stride all ask the shin to travel forward over a foot that’s stuck to the ground.
That’s also the version you can measure in a couple of minutes, which is where I’d start before doing a single ankle drill. Most ankle work gets prescribed on a guess, and the guess is usually “your calves are tight.” Sometimes that’s right. The test tells you when it isn’t.
How we test dorsiflexion
Most people know the standing knee-to-wall test. We run a half-kneeling version. Kneel facing a wall with the foot you’re testing flat on the floor in front of you, a few inches back from the wall, and drive that front knee forward toward the wall while the heel stays down. The knee aims over the first and second toes (the first and second metatarsals, if you want the anatomy). If the knee reaches the wall without the heel lifting, slide the foot back and try again, until you find the farthest distance where the knee can just touch with the heel still flat. Measure from the tip of the big toe to the wall, then do the other side.
If you’d rather have an angle than a distance, set your phone against the front of the shin at that end position and read the incline off a level app. Tests built this way hold up well; in one reliability study of the standing lunge version, raters with different experience levels tested the same people a week apart and agreed closely using both the distance and the shin angle (1). That was a small group of healthy adults, but it’s why this family of tests has stuck around. You can repeat it at home and get a number worth comparing.
Keep the setup honest. The knee has to track over the first and second toes. If it drifts in toward the big toe or out toward the little toe, the foot rolls to make room and you get distance the ankle didn’t produce. The heel stays down the whole time. Half-kneeling also takes balance out of the equation, so you’re measuring the ankle instead of how steady you are on one leg. And test at roughly the same time of day when you retest, because ankles tend to be stiffer first thing in the morning.
What the number means, and where you feel the stop
You’ll see benchmarks floating around for this test, usually somewhere near 10 centimeters, or a shin angle in the mid to high 30s. I treat those as a rough reference. The comparison I care about more is left against right, since a difference of more than a couple of centimeters between sides tends to show up somewhere in how a person squats or runs.
Where you feel the stop tells you as much as the number does.
A stretch through the back of the lower leg, low in the calf toward the Achilles, points at the soleus and the tissue around it. Because the knee is bent in this test, the gastrocnemius (the bigger calf muscle that crosses the knee) is partly slackened, so a bent-knee test mostly reads the soleus and the joint. A straight-knee calf stretch against the wall reads the gastrocnemius better. If someone is limited with the knee straight and fine with it bent, that’s a different conversation from the reverse.
A pinch at the front of the ankle is the other common answer, and it changes the plan. That sensation means the joint is running out of room somewhere, and stretching harder into it rarely helps. When a client pinches in this test, the next step at Motive is hands-on work with me, because I need to figure out what’s causing it before anyone trains through it. Sometimes it’s a lack of eversion; the ankle isn’t only a hinge, and if the foot can’t roll out the way it should, pushing the knee straight forward jams the front of the joint (I go into that in the piece on tight calves versus missing eversion). Sometimes it’s general stiffness through the joint. And sometimes the pattern points toward a bony impingement on the outside of the ankle, which is a referral to a clinician. If the pinch showed up after one or more sprains, that history matters too, and the ankle sprain rehab piece covers that side of it.
Why it shows up in a squat and a stride
When the ankle runs out of dorsiflexion, the movement doesn’t stop. Something else covers for it. In a squat, people tend to lose depth, shift weight toward the toes, or let the heels come up. Some turn the feet out further than they’d choose to, which lets the shin travel forward in a direction the ankle has more room for.
One lab study made this visible by putting healthy people on a wedge that limited how far their shins could travel forward. Under that restriction, they squatted with less knee bend and their knees drifted inward more, with quadriceps activity dropping and soleus activity rising (2). It was a simulated restriction in people without injuries, so it tells us what the body does when dorsiflexion runs short and nothing about who gets hurt from it. That’s still useful. The knee drifting inward in a squat is a coaching cue people get yelled at about for years, and sometimes the knee is just responding to an ankle that has nowhere left to go.
Runners show their version during stance, when the shin rolls forward over the planted foot. A short ankle tends to cut that phase short; the heel comes up early or the foot turns out to find room. A few degrees of difference doesn’t feel like much on any one step. Over a few thousand steps on the Lady Bird Lake loop it adds up, which is why ankles are one of the first places we check in the mobility work for runners.
Lifting shoes with a raised heel deserve a mention here. They put the shin further forward before the squat starts, which is a perfectly reasonable tool. They also hide the ankle. I’d want to know what the ankle can do barefoot before deciding a heel is the answer.
What changes the number
The training sequence for the ankle follows the same order we use for every joint, starting with control and finishing with load.
Start with ankle CARs. Slow circles of the foot at the ankle, with the shin held still, through the biggest circle you can make. Most people find the ankle moves in a lopsided oval and that the toes want to help. The class below goes past the basic ankle circle into coordinating the foot and ankle together, which is where a lot of people discover how little independent control they have down there.
Then load the calf at long length. Get into a half-kneeling or split position with the front knee driven forward over the toes until you reach the limit you found in the test. Spend a couple of minutes there, then press the ball of the foot into the floor as if you were trying to point the foot, building effort gradually while the shin stays put. That isometric works the tissue being lengthened at the length where it’s limited. Afterward, try to pull the shin further forward using the muscles on the front of the shin. If you want the reasoning behind holding there instead of bouncing, the piece on isometric training at end range goes through it.
Then build the range under your own power. Sit with the leg straight and pull the toes and foot up toward the shin as hard as you can, then try to lift a little further without letting the toes curl. The front of the shin will cramp sooner than most people expect. That’s a muscle that rarely gets asked to work at the end of its range.
Then add load through the full range. Calf raises from a plate, letting the heel sink below the toes at the bottom, train the calf through the deepest dorsiflexion you own. The spring position on a plate is a good place to begin; you hold the bottom position under load and let the ankle get used to producing force there.
From there, split squats with the front knee allowed to travel past the toes, Cossack squats, and slow step-downs from a box all ask the ankle to dorsiflex under bodyweight in the positions it will meet outside the gym.
If you’re new to this kind of work, we start KINSTRETCH beginners at the ankle on purpose, and the reasoning is in ankle mobility foundations.
How often to retest
Run the half-kneeling test before you start, then every two to three weeks under the same conditions: barefoot, same wall, similar time of day. Do the CARs daily, since they take two minutes and double as a check on how the ankle feels that day. The heavier isometric and loading work goes two or three times a week.
From what I’ve seen, the number moves in small increments, and the side-to-side difference tends to close before the absolute number changes much. Everything in this section assumes the test felt like a stretch in the calf. If it pinched at the front, get that looked at first, because a bony block, a missing piece of eversion, and plain stiffness call for different answers. KINSTRETCH Online runs this kind of progression as guided classes if you’d prefer to follow along.
References
- Bennell KL, Talbot RC, Wajswelner H, et al. Intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of a weight-bearing lunge measure of ankle dorsiflexion. Aust J Physiother. 1998;44(3):175-180. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0004-9514(14)60377-9
- Macrum E, Bell DR, Boling M, Lewek M, Padua D. Effect of limiting ankle-dorsiflexion range of motion on lower extremity kinematics and muscle-activation patterns during a squat. J Sport Rehabil. 2012;21(2):144-150. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsr.21.2.144
Written by
Brian Murray, FRA, FRSC
Founder of Motive Training
Motive Training is a coaching studio in South Austin built around assessment, joint health, and strength you can use. Most clients start with the Movement & Mobility Assessment. From there, train with us in the studio, come to a stretching class, or work through the progressions in KINSTRETCH Online.