Quick and Easy Ankle Taping Tutorial: Fix Your Sprain in a Snap!

Ankle sprains are a very common injury, and at the start of summer I decided to make a small video about ankle taping. About 85 percent of ankle injuries occur on the lateral side of the ankle, because the mechanism of injury is the inversion direction. The purpose of taping is to provide good external support in the first few days. Small and mild ankle injuries heal up on their own within 14 days of injury, and the bigger the issue, the more attention you need to put into rehabilitation.

First you will see a small clip of how I tape a client's ankle in my office, and next you will see the clip of how I tape myself if I'm alone and need external support for the hand.

First grab yourself a good amount of hard, regular, non-flexible sports tape. Place your ankle at a 90-degree angle, place the center of the tape on the other leg - the point is to make a circle around the foot. The distal part of the malleoli and the midpoint between them should come on top of the upper ankle joint. Take the end part of the tape that comes to the lateral side of the leg, place it on top of the ankle, roll it behind the heel, and place the ending part on the lateral side of the ankle - make sure the tape has good contact with the skin all the way around. Take the inner part of the tape and put it on top of the ankle again, making an "X" mark on the ankle. If you have enough tape you can go around the heel nicely.

Grab a new piece of tape, place the midpoint again under the leg, and make another "X" tape in a similar style - you want to have your tapes overlapping each other by 50%, so half of the tape is on skin and the other half is on top of the previous taping. At this point you can repeat this X-taping as many times as you want, but typically I use two or three rounds to get good support for the ankle.

Next we need to add direct straight strips of tape going from the bottom of the leg to both sides of the ankle. Grab a smaller piece of tape, ankle again at 90 degrees, place one end of the tape on the medial side of the circular tape, then place the rest of the tape going downwards around the leg to the lateral side. If your tape is too long, tear it or cut it with scissors. When you want to support the lateral side of the ankle, put several strips going from the medial side to the lateral side of the leg.

At the end of the taping you want to make a good circle of tape to secure all the tape ends - do not pull the tape tight, because we don't want to block circulation, and the placement of the tape should always be done gently without pulling. Here is an example of the tape going nicely from the medial side to the lateral side.

When you apply the tape on yourself, you want to follow the same idea in the background: keep the angle at 90 degrees, place the leg on top of some sort of platform or something similar, make a similar "X" style mark on top of the ankle - grab a long strip of tape, place it under the leg, and apply the taping similarly as in the previous taping, placing the end of the tape loosely going in a circle around it. Take another strip and place the tapes on top of each other with half the tapes overlapping - put as many rounds as you need. Then take a shorter piece of tape and place it from the medial border of the circle to the lateral side, applying this kind of tape in your own style depending on how firmly you want to give the ankle external support.

When the direct tapes are done, make a circle of tape loosely wrapped around all the tape ends, and try out how much support it gives when you move the ankle into the inversion direction. ---