THE SPORTING FOOT AND ANKLE: AN INTRODUCTION TO SPORT-SPECIFIC FOOT AND ANKLE INJURIES

This article describes both some of the common injury risk factors relating to the sporting foot and ankle and highlights a few sport-specific injury patterns along with their potential causes. The ultimate aim is to offer you, the reader, an understanding into what factors might lead to a foot or ankle injury, enabling the implementation of prevention methods or the appropriate design of a rehabilitation pathway. The correct application of this knowledge could lead to a reduction in injury rates ensuring more players remain available for selection for training and, most importantly, match play. This knowledge, along with subsequent articles in the series, should optimise the rehabilitation pathway, leading to the most appropriate and quickest possible return to play, and the prevention of future foot and ankle injury.

FRASER MCKINNEY MCSP INTRODUCTION

This mini-series of articles hopes to provoke thought on foot and ankle injuries in sport through initially highlighting some of the general potential causes and common sport- specific injuries. This will naturally progress towards an understanding of the prevention and rehabilitation pathways required to aid in the reduction, the occurrence rate and severity of foot and ankle injuries in sport.

10

Ankle injuries in the UK account for 3–5% of all Accident and Emergency attendances (1) with the most common injury involving the lateral ligaments and capsular structures. The likelihood of complete rupture of the most commonly injured ligament, the anterior talofibular ligament (ATFL) in the general population is rare, around 1 per 10,000. In sport this has been shown to rise, with one sport reporting that over 60% of ankle injuries sustained involved significant damage to these lateral

sportEX dynamics 2012;34(October):10-14