Outer Foot Pain/Sprain Exercise: Treat the CUBOID

Metatarsal stress fracture or cuboid dysfunction? I would check the cuboid first to see if there are any joint restrictions. In this video, I'm going to talk about outer, or lateral, foot pain. Biggest cause for outside or lateral foot pain, outside of any type of stress fracture, ankle sprain, or anything like that is usually restrictions of the cuboid. Let's take a closer look at the cuboid a little bit in the role of the lateral foot.

The fifth metatarsal, the fourth metatarsal, both have to share the cuboid and you can see where they come together . The outside part of the foot, from a functional standpoint, almost works like a training wheel. It kind of goes up and down and it helps us when we're on uneven surfaces.

Finding the cuboid is easy. You come along the outside little toe, you come to this ridge or the base of the fifth metatarsal and you drop in and that's the cuboid right there. You can't miss it right there. So I'll tell you how to get to it from both places, from the front and the bottom. Most of the time, the cuboid is stuck down or flexed, and what you need to do is work on bringing that back up, mobilizing it up towards the ceiling in this situation here.

Think about after inversion sprain, right? Most sprains are inversion here. So let's say you roll your ankle and you can see how you might be able to take that cuboid and further jam it down, causing all sorts of lateral foot pain, or outer foot pain. So the way we're going to take care of it, first of all, we've got to find out whether or not the cuboid is involved.
After you restore mobility through the cuboid, and how do you know you've restored mobility? It's less tender and you actually start to get a little bit more of that training wheel kind of motion. The next thing we have to do is we have to work on the interface between the fifth metatarsal, the fourth metatarsal and the cuboid. So I'm going to come right down through here and you'll feel the web space and you're going to come right down here. So before we were here, now I'm right on top. With my other hand, I'm going to try to stabilize that cuboid, and I'm going to come here onto this fifth metatarsal and I'm specifically trying to move this training wheel up and down.

So now what I'm doing is I'm stabilizing the cuboid, but I'm moving the fifth metatarsal on the cuboid. Really pretty easy guys. Once again, sets of 10 here. This one's also going to be a little bit painful, not as painful as the cuboid. See if you got some better motion through there. How do you tell if you've got better motion? The whole foot has better lateral motion.

You're going to put a fair amount of force into the cuboid as you try to push your foot into eversion. It's not going to be very fun. It's going to be a little bit painful, but that's what you need to do. Once again, for one set of 10. Reassess. Does the foot have better lateral motion? Is it less tender through the cuboid? If it's not, then guess what? Another set of 10. After you do that, don't forget. We've got to fix the training wheel.

Now what we're going to do is we're going to stabilize the cuboid and we're going to basically grab the base of this fifth metatarsal, or this little toe here, and we're going to try to work just the interface between the fifth metatarsal and that cuboid right through there. Once again, a set of 10. The goal is increased lateral motion. I want this to spring a little bit better. Check the other foot if you need to. Once again, a set of 10, see how you do. You know you're done when there's a little bit better lateral motion through there.

So I've just shown you two ways to mobilize that cuboid if you were having lateral foot pain. One, if you have friends and number two, if you don't have any friends, you still have no reason to not try to mobilize your own cuboid. It's a little bit painful to do. Can't really hurt yourself, so don't worry about that. And the idea is that you want to try to get a little bit better motion so that you feel that foot has a little bit better lateral glide, especially, kind of visualize that training wheel going up and down on uneven surfaces. It's big after an inversion ankle sprain. So work with that a little bit, see how you do. Leave a question down below, subscribe to the channel if you haven't and let me know how things are going, okay? Good luck.

Видео Outer Foot Pain/Sprain Exercise: Treat the CUBOID канала Front Row with Ed and Elizabeth