How to tell if your ankle mobility is improving
Ankle mobility is the single easiest thing to fool yourself about, because you're always looser after warming up — so every test you run right after mobility work says you improved.
The fix is measuring the same way every time, in centimetres. It takes 90 seconds, it uses a wall, and it turns "feels looser" into a number you can compare to last month.
The knee-to-wall test
Also called the weight-bearing lunge test. It measures dorsiflexion — how far your shin can travel forward over your foot while your heel stays down. That's the range that matters for skating stride, squat depth, sprint mechanics, and landing.
The protocol
- Barefoot, facing a wall. Shoes change the answer, and different shoes change it differently.
- Put your big toe a few centimetres from the wall, foot pointed straight ahead — not turned out. Toe-out is the most common way to cheat this test.
- Drive your knee forward to touch the wall while keeping your heel flat on the floor. The moment the heel lifts, the rep is void.
- If the knee touches, move your foot back a centimetre and try again. Keep going until you find the furthest distance where the knee still touches and the heel still stays down.
- Measure from the wall to the tip of your big toe, in centimetres. That's your score.
- Three attempts per side. Test both sides, always. Record each side separately.
Roughly 9–10cm is the figure most commonly cited as adequate for a deep squat and normal running mechanics, and under about 5cm is usually treated as restricted. Treat those as loose reference points, not a diagnosis — your own number over time is far more informative than any benchmark, because ankles differ structurally and your baseline is the only fair comparison.
Standardise the two things that will ruin your data
1. Warm or cold — pick one and never mix
This is the big one. Dorsiflexion range can shift noticeably between cold and fully warmed-up, which is more than months of genuine change. If you test cold on Monday and after training on Thursday, your data is meaningless.
Recommendation: always test cold, before any mobility work, at a consistent time of day. Cold range is also the more useful number. A warm-up lends you range for twenty minutes; cold is the range you keep.
2. Never test right after the mobility work you're evaluating
Stretching produces a real short-term range increase that fades within tens of minutes. Testing immediately after your ankle routine measures the temporary effect, not adaptation. It will show improvement every single time, forever, while nothing actually changes.
How often, and what counts as real change
Test weekly at most. Ankle mobility adapts on a scale of weeks. Daily testing gives you a chart of your sleep, your hydration and how much you walked yesterday (all real things, none of them your ankles).
The knee-to-wall test has real measurement error — where exactly you judged the knee contact, whether the foot was perfectly straight, how precisely you read the tape. Repeating it three times per side per session is what lets you see that error directly.
The rule
Your three attempts show your measurement spread — usually about 0.5–1cm with a careful protocol. A change smaller than that spread is noise.
So: 1cm+ of change, holding for two or more consecutive weekly tests, is real. A single reading 1.5cm above last week's is probably a measurement artifact. Two in a row at that level is progress.
Track each side separately — and track the gap
Almost everyone has an asymmetry, often meaningful, and averaging the two sides hides it completely. Two ankles at 6cm and 10cm average to 8cm and look fine. They are not fine.
Track the gap as its own number. The goal for most athletes isn't just "more range" — it's more range on the restricted side, closing the gap. If both sides improve by 2cm you've gained range but kept the imbalance, and the imbalance is usually the thing that shows up as a compensation somewhere up the chain.
What good progress looks like on paper
| Week | Left | Right | Gap | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6.5 | 9.5 | 3.0 | Baseline. Left is the target. |
| 4 | 7.0 | 9.5 | 2.5 | Inside measurement error — inconclusive |
| 8 | 8.0 | 10.0 | 2.0 | Left +1.5cm and holding. Real. |
| 12 | 9.0 | 10.0 | 1.0 | Gap closing. This is the win. |
Mistakes that make the number lie
- Heel lifting. Void rep. If you're not watching for it you'll drift into allowing a few millimetres of lift and "gain" a centimetre that doesn't exist.
- Turning the foot out. Rotating outward lets the knee reach the wall through the side of the ankle rather than through dorsiflexion. Foot straight.
- Shoes, or different shoes. Barefoot, every time.
- Only testing your bad side. You need both to know if the gap is closing.
- Testing after training. See above — it measures the warm-up.
Pain is not a mobility limit. If the restriction is sharp or pinching rather than a stretch, that's a question for a physio, not a tracking problem.
How I do this now
I'm a former competitive hockey player, and ankle mobility was one of the specific unconventional things I trained constantly — with absolutely no way to tell whether it worked. That problem is the reason I built Athlete Craft.
No workout app will help you here. They're built around reps and weight, and "knee-to-wall left" is not in anyone's exercise list. In Athlete Craft you make your own preset — for this one the input is just centimetres — and type your own exercise names, so you keep "ankle mobility L" and "ankle mobility R" as two separate tracked exercises. Each gets its own graph across 30/90/180/360 days, so a 1cm gain over eight weeks is visible instead of invisible.