A Scientific Approach to Training The Tibialis Anterior
What's up, everybody? Welcome to the THP Strength podcast. My name is Isaiah Rivera. I have a world record 50.5 inch vertical. This man right here to the left of me is the guy who has been training me for the last five years.
Isaiah:And right here is my good friend Austin Burke, and he has a unofficial 47 inch vertical off one foot. Used to. Used to. Yeah. And he also jumps pretty high off two feet.
Isaiah:And John also happens to jump pretty high as well, 40 plus inch vertical. And today, we are gonna be showing you guys how to train a muscle called the tibialis anterior, which is right here in front of your shins. This is a common muscle that is trained very poorly with an exercise that looks a little bit like this. But today, we're gonna show you actually how to train it. Yeah.
Isaiah:So, yeah, let me pass this topic off to John. What
John:about sponsors? Oh, you're right.
Isaiah:Oh, you what are you talking about?
Austin:We we yeah.
Isaiah:You have sponsors?
Austin:Yeah. We we do, actually. What? You don't remember? I I gave you the facts.
Isaiah:I do not remember this. I forgot. Short term memory loss.
Austin:Oh, I think you should introduce it because they like you more.
Isaiah:Woah. I just remembered everything.
John:Oh, wow.
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Austin:Hey, Isaiah.
Isaiah:Yes, Austin.
Austin:You know what we should do? What? We should give them a discount.
John:No way.
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Isaiah:And you'll still be playing Warcraft, but you'll get out for an hour a day and get some sun while you dunk. Yeah. Absolutely. They fit really well together. Gaming and dunking.
Austin:They do.
John:Alright. THP. Oh, you don't need
Isaiah:a mic.
John:So we're gonna get into it. We are gonna talk a little bit how to train it, but before we do that, we need to talk about how it works, what its relevance is, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about why it is worth training or isn't worth training. And we'll talk about how to train it a little later in the podcast. But first, I just wanna show you guys what it actually does because there's a massive misunderstanding about its purpose. I think a lot of people think that it's gonna just magically make your your knee pain go away or that it's gonna help you jump higher or be a Or better it's gonna help your shin splints.
John:So we're gonna go over all that stuff. But before we do that, we need to understand what it does and we bought the purchase this handy dandy whiteboard to help us help you understand how it functions. So this is your lower leg. We have two different frames here. We have a touchdown, and then we have mid support.
John:Right? We we could do toe off, but I feel like this will be a good Can
Isaiah:I demonstrate what that is?
John:Yeah. Sure.
Isaiah:Go ahead.
John:Go ahead.
Isaiah:It might
John:not be in the frame, but you can you do it on the chair.
Isaiah:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sick. Alright. Help.
Isaiah:Off one or two touchdown is when your plant leg hits the ground. That's touchdown. Mid support is when I'm right here and I'm at my deepest point in the jump. And then toe off is when my foot first comes off the ground. Right there.
John:Right. So go to touchdown.
Isaiah:Touchdown. Alright.
John:So this is touchdown. This is tibia anterior. This is his calf. I have drawn that here. Right?
John:So this is his heel. This is his the forefoot. Here's his calf. Here's his tibialis anterior. This is the shin right here, and this is his kneecap and and femur.
John:So we are gonna draw a free body diagram, which is a way to show you guys in a static condition at least what's what that muscle is going to be doing. Right? So to do that, we need to figure out the axis of rotation, which in this case is going to be his ankle. So I will take the green, and I will draw his ankle here or the joint, the axis of rotation labeled in green. Alright.
John:So now we need to figure out what force is happening at touchdown. So when his heel hits the ground, we know that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So he's running, he strikes the ground on his heel like you do on a one foot or two foot jump. So I will draw that arrow like this. Right?
John:Because that's where he contacts. These are the forces. Right? This is his heel coming to the ground. This is the ground reacting back at his on his heel.
John:I'll draw the ground a little bit.
Isaiah:I'm gonna I'm gonna pull out my quizlet real quick. If you don't know what a force is, it's the instantaneous measure of the interaction between two objects, and it can be a push or a pull. So in here, it's the it's the measure between your foot and the ground. So you're applying force into the ground, and the ground is applying force to you. Cool.
John:So because you have strike struck strike the ground. Strik stricken striking. Strikan the ground. Basically, if your muscle doesn't do anything, your foot will flop against the ground. You'll become a puddle, everything else.
John:But fortunately, we have a muscle on the opposite side of this seesaw. If you can visualize that. Right? That stops your foot from plopping down. Right?
John:So if Isaiah comes back up here, he strikes the ground. This is the axis of rotation. This muscle
Isaiah:on this use this leg?
John:Yeah. This muscle on this side is functioning to stop his foot from coming down. So that is the function of this muscle. It is called an agonist. It is a prime mover in that action.
John:Right? It's the tibialis anterior. So that muscle originates somewhere on the tibia and inserts on the medial cuneiform of your one of your foot bones, basically. Right? So it is responsible for stopping your foot from coming down, and that is antagonistically.
John:Right? It shortens. It is pulling basically like this to stop your foot from coming down. Right? So that is what that muscle actually does.
John:Now that is not a prime mover. Meaning, when Isaiah's foot hits the ground or my foot is or anyone's foot hits the ground on the heel, it is stopping your foot from decelerating down into the ground very, very aggressively. It is lengthening during that contraction, and this is where mid support happens. So after your foot strikes the ground and comes down, right, we are at this frame, which is you can go ahead and demonstrate on the bench here. Strikes the ground.
John:This is mid support. Right? So this is amortization. This is where we're about to start applying a lot a lot of force. So at this point, the tibialis anterior has done its work.
John:It is basically completely done functioning during a jump. So that is its main purpose. At this point, we have force that is coming all drawn in green. At this point, the full foot is on the ground. So I'm sure you could draw for each of these bones, but we're just gonna net it.
John:Right? So we have a force like this, and then we have a force like this. And because and this is still the axis of rotation. Because the forces are functioning basically straight through the the line of of pull or the external forces are working directly through the bone, there's not a lot happening happening here. Right?
John:There's not a lot of external forces. So if this is the well, I guess we could say this is the joint action here. I guess it depends on how you draw it. Some people would say this isn't perfectly drawn. It's not perfectly drawn.
John:I will agree. But let's just say that the force is moving directly through the long bone, right through the axis externally. So these muscles aren't really doing anything. Right? At least for that second.
John:It's switching from the agonist of the tibialis anterior to then the gastroc and the soleus being a prime mover. So as you go to the next frame, which I guess I could quickly quickly draw, I'm not gonna make it as detailed as I just did, but I'll just draw it like this. As we go to push off, right, so if Isaiah's heel is here, this is the foot, here's his his tibia like this, and then in red, I'll draw the the muscles that I just drew. This is his heel, so here's his Achilles, and then this is the the ball of muscle we call his calf. His tibialis anterior is over here, and it inserts here.
John:At this point, he is functioning concentrically with his gastroc to produce force. Right? So it is this is the axis of rotation right here, and that muscle is shortening, and it is allowing him to push off and generate lift. The tibialis anterior at this point is off. It is not doing anything.
John:So once you're pushing off, it is just your calf contracting. That is what's angulating the this what'd you call it? Not axis. It's a lever. This lever is moving downwards.
John:Right? It's rotating. Well, I guess I'll I'll draw it like this. Should I draw it on this side? How should I do this?
John:I'll do it like this. So this lever is moving downwards, into the ground, so you're getting your ground reaction force. That ground reaction force is allowing you to move upwards on the push off phase. So Isaiah, if he were to go back on the bench here, and now he goes into toe off, so he's pushing up. Right?
John:That is his calf working. That's causing his foot to move down into the ground. Right? Like I drew here, and now he is going to propel upwards into the air. The tibialis anterior is doing nothing at that point.
John:It should be off. If it's working, it will actually pull his foot. If this muscle was working, it will actually pull his foot the other direction. It would pull his foot upwards, which is not what we wanna do. We want plantar flexion.
John:Right? We want extension, triple extension to generate a lot of force, to jump very, very high. So that said, this muscle basically is responsible for not allowing your foot to slap the ground. Now you might think, well, if it slaps the ground, there's gonna be really high forces, and maybe that's stopping the knee or shin or everything else from from hurting. Here's the thing.
John:If you wanna jump high, you want force. You need a lot of force. Force is actually imperative. Right? So if your foot were to hypothetically slap the ground with, let's say, a ton of force, what would happen?
John:Isaiah?
Isaiah:You would get a lot of force going.
John:You wouldn't wanna talk the
Isaiah:Oh, you would get a lot of force going going up.
John:Yeah. You would you would actually jump higher. So the problem is if that happens with too much force, then you would hypothetically break your break your foot or break I don't know what would happen if you slap the ground that hard. Your foot would probably break Yeah. I would say is the is the thing that would actually happen.
John:Now when it comes to shin splints and things like that, that's gonna happen no matter what. Right? We look at this diagram here with your foot coming into the ground. Acting on this bone, there's going to be force no matter what, regardless of what the tibialis anterior is doing. There's going to be force going through that bone, and so you're always gonna have shin pain or bone pain as a result of those forces, those impact forces happening.
John:It doesn't matter how strong your shin is. You hit the ground with more force, you're gonna have more force going through the bone. And you know, theoretically even if this is functioning more aggressively, the tibialis anterior, that's gonna pull on the bone even more aggressively, which would hypothetically cause even more stress on the bone, which would cause more loading and potentially cause pain if it was above the capacity of of that bone. Right? You can imagine if I pulled on that if it attaches over here and you pull aggressively hard as hell with a ton of force, you could hypothetically rip the bone off at that site, or you could rip the the bone off the the the the medial cuneiform.
John:So either way, if the shin is if that tibialis anterior is working really aggressively with, you know, you take it to the extreme, you could actually still hurt yourself. So the question of what it does or doesn't do, I think is more complex than I think what people say that it is. I've never personally used it in terms of an exercise. I've never loaded it. I if someone has shin splints, my first thing is to unload the the pounding because the bones are actually these long bones are always gonna have that force going through them when you're running or jumping or or doing anything for that matter.
John:Any other any questions
Austin:about that? Got one if you don't. Alright. So in layman's terms, if an athlete does have shin splints
John:Yes.
Austin:What would you do?
John:Like The first thing I would do is I would look at the program, and I would say what I would and then I would ask them how much pounding are you doing day to day? Like, how much running? How much how much jumping, how much change of direction. And if they're doing a lot of that stuff, I'm gonna pull that out. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna control the impact in their training.
John:So I'm gonna only put it on certain days, typically every third day. So once every third day or fourth day, I'll load in in shock shock loading where you have really high forces happening really quickly. That tends to be good. When you're walking around, you still have forces that exceed, like, it's 1.5 times body weight. When you're jogging, it's like three.
John:When you're sprinting, it's up to five. When you're jumping, it could be like 10. Right? So that's you're gonna have those forces happening, but it it's like how much can that bone handle. If that bone can't handle those forces, that's when it's gonna that's when you're gonna have issues.
John:You're gonna have tiny little micro fractures in the bone or in what's called the periosteum, which is the where all the nerve tissue is around the bone, and that's usually when you'll have pain.
Austin:And oh, you got no. Was just saying, it would be would it be the same protocol for posterior posterior shin splints?
John:If it's the bone, yeah. Yeah. The bone is at the end of the day, it's it's the type of loading that you're gonna have. Even posterior shin splints will be the same. Oftentimes, shin splints are misdiagnosed.
John:People don't actually really know what causes the shin splints unless you were to like that's a general term that just means lower leg, anterior pain, or posterior pain. It doesn't tell you it could be Achilles tendinopathy for all we know. So you kind of have to look at it and go case by case. But yeah, it's kind of misunderstood.
Isaiah:I also want to talk a little bit about my anecdotal experiences with this muscle. Anytime I've taken a long break from jumping or if I switch plants, that's actually one of the muscles that gets the most sore. Not pain. Like, I'm not talking shin splint pain.
John:Yeah. Like Ethan Owens just had that exact thing happen.
Isaiah:Literally just my anterior tips get sore as hell.
John:That makes sense.
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:When you jump. And It's functions to brake. It's a braking force.
Isaiah:Mhmm. So the better of an athlete you are, and I guess the less you've been jumping, the more sore it's it's gonna get. But I've never done, tip raises in my life. I've literally just trained it by continuing to to jump. And over time, it gets less sore.
Isaiah:And I I have more, like, motor function of that leg. I also just realized why the hell I don't sprain my left ankle as much.
John:Cause you have more motor control in that leg.
Isaiah:Because that's the leg
John:that's Planting.
Isaiah:I bet you if I did more left
John:ankle sprains. I think for ankle sprains it could be good because in that case, it's not even just the tibialis anterior, there's a or there's a couple other muscles at the front of your your shin that will help with motor control. Right? And so for shin splints, it's not or ankle sprains, it's not just the tibialis anterior. You also have lateral muscles like you have the the peroneus on the outside, which is the kind of muscle that sticks out.
John:It would kind of be over here. There's a brevis and a longus, and then you have your soleus, your gastroc. You also do have your tibia anterior, and then you have muscles that help your your foot go into into supination and pronation, you know, which is basically where your foot is rotated like this. This is going to be what would that be? That would be supination.
Isaiah:I always
John:use these. I got this. This is supination, so if you walk on the outside of your feet, and then pronations if you, like, walk on the inside of your feet or your arch. So there's a lot of muscles that are involved in those too that off the top of my head, the lower leg is sometimes not confusing, but I would have to look and see specifically which ones. There's a lot muscles in the foot that control that as well as the lower leg that control it as well.
John:But, yeah, there there's a lot there's a lot going on. It's not really as simple as just this is what the tibialis interior does. Now in terms of training it, right, it's like, should I be doing tip raises? I would say this, it is like a like a 3% variable. Right?
John:Squatting heavy, jumping a lot, sprinting a lot, that stuff is gonna be should be the majority of what your training looks like. Right? This is like icing on the cake. If you're jumping and you do regular jump sessions, you don't really need to work on it. Even then, it's usually not the driver of mediating ankle sprains and stuff like that.
John:Usually, you're talking about laterally speaking, unless, you know, the top of your I don't even know how that would the only time that would sprain your ankle is if you plant it on your heel. I don't even know if it really does play a role in that. Maybe as a co contractor. I'm not really sure if it even really plays a role in that. It's mostly related to the medial and lateral rotation of your foot.
John:Right? So if you plant on the side of your foot and it rolls inward, that's gonna be that would that would play a role potentially. Yeah. Tibialis anterior would also laterally rotate the foot. But, you know, most people just do pulling the toe back to yourself.
John:I like the banded ankle work. So I have bands, which I can show you. If you are not if you're listening on a on a podcast or streaming platform, I probably would consider, watching this video. But we just bought these bands, handy dandy bands. So Isaiah, you can go ahead back to your your spot here.
John:And so if he were to if I were to pull the band like this, and he were to pull his ankle, you can pull it up towards yourself. Right? That's fine. But we also have to work on this this action as well. So now you can go the other way.
John:Right? And go do reps of that. That is actually going to be probably better for helping the ankle joint manage
Isaiah:feel really nice on my ankle.
John:Did you like that? Yeah. And then we go the other way. So you face if I were to go I'm trying to think. Just did this one, so I need to go
Isaiah:Let me hold it.
John:Yeah. Austin got it. So if you pull really hard. Okay. Now Isaiah can do reps of this.
John:Oh. Cool. So you can actually rotate your foot even more. Rotate. Show your sole to me.
John:Oh, wow. Austin always gets whipped.
Isaiah:His ankle's actually really messed up right now. Yeah. I sprained my ankle two weeks ago.
John:So this is probably more productive and then obviously, you know, this direction, like this is going to be just plantar flexion, which he will get he will get during just regular jumps. He's gonna work that. But the lateral work is typically where athletes are gonna have the side to side stuff is typically where they lack strength.
Isaiah:Is this the banded multi ankles are good? Is that what it is?
John:Multi ankle is just what I demonstrated. One too at all. Yeah. And you could just put this you could put this on anything. You could attach it to the the rack or any immovable object.
John:Someone could stand on it, and then you could do it that way. You could do it with a weight, or I could just have someone hold it like that. But it works really, really well. I recommend athletes with ankle sprains doing that. I think it's incredibly effective.
John:But Anything else that we wanna go through? You train it by jumping. You're gonna get way higher forces, way better strength by just jumping. I've never met someone that pulled their tibialis anterior.
Isaiah:Yep. That's pretty good. Yeah, man. That was a good cover of shin splints and ankle sprains too.
Austin:Mhmm.
Isaiah:Sweet.
John:Alright. Well, thanks for watching guys. Make sure you like, comment, and subscribe. If you have questions about this, feel free to ask. I hope the whiteboard was helpful.
John:Anything else? Oh, leave five stars and a subscribe if you're on a streaming platform. This might have been hard to listen to, so maybe consider watching it. We usually link the video as well to it. So you can click that, and it'll take you to the video.
John:Other than that, go to thbstrength.com and sign up for coaching if you wanna get coached by myself, Isaiah, and Austin to jump higher and be a better athlete.
Isaiah:Sweet. See you guys later.
