Can Physiotherapy and Surf Rehab Help Me Surf Better and Avoid Ankle Injuries?

If you are looking for a sports physiotherapist in Truro who understands surfing fitness demands and injuries and you want to reduce your risk of getting injured – you are in the right place!

Ankle injuries are common in surfing (Lundgren et al., 2014) and are likely to increase given the shift in competitive scoring toward favouring aerial manoeuvres on the wave face.

The risk of ankle sprains, fractures and other soft tissue injuries is higher during landing from aerial manoeuvres because of the forces going through the lower body and the rotated, odd positions that surfers usually find themselves landing in.

Whether you are a local shredder at Fistral Beach, Newquay or regularly send it in the hollow, steep breaks at Porthtowan, you are going to want to hear how I build my surfing injury prevention programme Cornwall.

Here are my non-negotiables for athletic development for surfers in Cornwall:

Surf Rehab Plyometrics and multi-directional jumping

Landing from a front side air or front side air reverse, our ankle dorsiflexion (how much our knee can go over our toe) reduces the risk of injury (Forsyth et al., 2021) and the competitive surfers’ trail leg can have loading forces going through it in excess of 20 times their body weight per second (Forsyth et al., 2021).

This emphasises the need for surf rehab to incorporate regular ballistic-based activities spread over the training week to build capacity in the ankle-foot complex to handle slamming down off a large front side air at Fistral Beach. I would also add a rotational component to some of the ballistic exercises because surfers never land straight when coming off aerials or floaters, there is always some degree of spin.

Strength training in surf rehab for big landing gains

If the trail leg sees more than 20 times the bodyweight of the surfer and physics tells us the force = mass x acceleration, some heavy strength training is also going to be a non-negotiable addition to our weekly ballistic activities (the acceleration component) to address the mass aspect of the equation.

I see my fair share of ankle sprains in my NHS role and one recurrent movement pattern that finds its way into every program is the lunge – and it would be no different when approaching surf rehab for bolstering ankle performance. I would program in 2 strength sessions per week, focusing on a lunge and then a squat movement pattern on either one of the sessions.  Depending on necessity, I might program a short 4-week triphasic eccentric-isometric program into the surf rehab to really target the absorption qualities of the landing from an aerial.

Visual-Perceptual Training and aerial landings in surf rehab

Human movement is emergent (read it here) and surfing is chaotic and unpredictable – the wave face, winds, other surfers all add high levels of unpredictability which I factor into our surf rehab and performance coaching. Using the modified perceptual framework, we can break the aerial landing down into its skill-related components and build structured chaos into the training.

Whilst we cannot entirely recreate the training stimulus if we aren’t on the wave, we can recreate the primary response similarly of absorbing force from an aerial landing and build decision and anticipation into it. I often find building it into a warm-up is a great way to inject fun into training alongside accruing a decent amount of skill-based volume.

I would include lots of low level plyometrics to build capacity – ankling, pogos, multi-directional jumps – and then add in colour and decision-based jumping and catching activities with variable visual input. Surf rehab needs to emulate the reactive nature of aerials off the wave face, often with limited visual input around the landing aspect and a brain that is focused more on executing the trick than on foot placement on landing.

If you are looking for a surfing injury prevention programme Cornwall and you want a physiotherapist that understands the demands of the sport, then secure your appointment today and make a plan to bullet your ankles for those large aerial manoeuvres.

References

Forsyth, J. R., Tsai, M. C., Sheppard, J. M., Whitting, J. W., Riddiford-Harland, D. L., & Steele, J. R. (2021). Can we predict the landing performance of simulated aerials in surfing?. Journal of Sports Sciences, 39(22), 2567-2576.

Forsyth, J. R., Richards, C. J., Tsai, M. C., Whitting, J. W., Riddiford-Harland, D. L., Sheppard, J. M., & Steele, J. R. (2021). Rate of loading, but not lower limb kinematics or muscle activity, is moderated by limb and aerial variation when surfers land aerials. Journal of Sports Sciences, 39(15), 1780-1788.

Lundgren, L., Nimphius, S., Sheppard, J. M., Brown, T., & Butel, M. (2014). High ankle sprain: The new elite surfing injury?. International SportMed Journal, 15(4), 321-327.