Ankle Pain When Walking? Why It Hurts and What Actually Helps

Ankle pain is easy to ignore while you’re sitting down. Then you stand up, take a step, and remember.

That’s what makes ankle pain when walking so frustrating. A sore shoulder can be rested while you get on with your day. A sore ankle can’t. You feel it on every trip to the kitchen, every walk to the car and every flight of stairs. Each step puts several times your body weight through the joint, thousands of times a day, so an ankle that’s even slightly irritated never really gets a break.

Most sore ankles aren’t serious, but a lot of them are handled badly. People tend to rest too much at first, then do too much too soon, and stop their rehab the moment the pain fades. This article is about doing it better.

Start With Where Your Ankle Hurts

Point to the sore spot with one finger. That single detail tells us more than most people expect.

The outside of your ankle. This is the classic rolled ankle. You step off a kerb awkwardly, or land on someone’s foot at netball, and your foot rolls inward. The small ligaments on the outside take the strain. If that happened recently, it’s the likely cause. If it happened a year ago and the ankle still feels “loose” on uneven ground, it’s still the likely cause.

The inside of your ankle, just below the bone. Pay attention to this one, especially if you’re over 40. Just behind that bone runs the tendon that holds up your arch. When it’s overworked, the inside of the ankle aches after walking, and over time the arch on that side can start to look flatter than the other.

Here’s a quick check. Stand on one foot and rise onto your toes. If your good side manages it easily but the sore side struggles or hurts, get it checked. Left alone, this problem tends to get worse rather than better.

Pain at the front of the ankle is a different beast. People describe it as a pinch, or a jamming feeling, right where the shin meets the top of the foot. Walking up the ramp at the train station brings it on. So does squatting to grab something off the bottom shelf. Often there’s an old sprain somewhere in the story, or an ankle that simply doesn’t bend forward as far as it used to. Try lunging your knee towards a wall on each side and see if one ankle stops short.

Pain at the back? Nine times out of ten, that’s the Achilles. The story behind it is remarkably predictable. Someone buys a fitness tracker, or books a week of walking in Tasmania, or dusts off their runners after a winter off, and nobody asked the Achilles whether it was ready.

Then there’s the ankle sprain that fools people. Instead of rolling in, the foot gets wrenched outwards, maybe in a tackle, maybe when a teammate lands across your leg. The pain sits a little higher than usual, above the ankle bones at the front of the shin. This is what’s called a high ankle sprain, and it’s slow. An ordinary rolled ankle might feel decent within a few weeks. This one can take twice that, or longer. Better to know now than to wonder in week five why nothing seems to be improving.

Then Notice When It Hurts When Walking

This is the clue most articles skip, and it’s often the most useful one.

Stiff for the first ten steps in the morning, then easing off. This is typical of an irritated tendon or joint. It’s annoying, but it usually means things will respond well to the right exercise.

Fine at first, then worse the longer you walk. Be more careful here, particularly if pressing one small spot of bone makes you wince. This pattern shows up when bone is under more stress than it can currently handle. Think of someone training for their first fun run, or someone who has started walking to work every day after years of driving. Bone needs time to adapt, and pushing through this kind of pain is a mistake.

Burning, tingling or pain that moves around. If the pain barely changes when you move your ankle, the problem may not be in your ankle at all. Your lower back can send pain down the leg, and that’s more common than most people realise.

A hot, red, swollen ankle that appeared overnight with no injury. See your GP. Conditions like gout can cause exactly this, and they need a different kind of treatment.

Why an Ankle Sprain Keeps Coming Back

The biggest mistake people make with an ankle sprain is treating “no longer painful” as “fixed”.

A sprain does more than stretch a ligament. It also disrupts your ankle’s sense of where it is. That sense is what lets your foot correct itself when you step on a stone or catch a tram step at an odd angle. The pain usually settles within a few weeks. The reflex can take much longer to return, and sometimes it never fully does without training.

That’s why so many people roll the same ankle again and again.

Research suggests up to 40 per cent of people are left with an unstable ankle after a sprain. In our experience, most of those cases trace back to rehab that stopped too early.

What about the old advice to rest it and ice it? A few days of protecting a freshly sprained ankle makes sense. Ice can ease pain, but there’s little evidence it speeds up healing. Weeks of rest work against you. Ankles recover by being loaded gradually, starting as soon as you can walk comfortably.

When An Ankle Pain When Walking Needs Urgent Care

Doctors use a simple rule to decide who needs a scan straight away. Head to your GP or emergency department if:

• – you can’t take four steps on the ankle, even with a limp,
• – pressing on the back edge or tip of either ankle bone is very tender,
• – the ankle looks out of shape, or
• – it’s hot and swollen and you feel feverish or unwell.

Outside those situations, our view is that most ankle pain doesn’t need a scan first. Scans often show wear and tear in ankles that feel perfectly fine, which can cause worry without changing the treatment. A careful hands on assessment usually tells us more.

What to Do About Ankle Pain Right Now

Should you keep walking? Mostly, yes. The real question is how much.

We give our clients a rough rule. While you’re walking, the ankle can grumble up to about 3 on a scale of 10. By the next morning, it should be back to where it started. If you wake up sorer than the day before, you’ve overdone it. That’s useful to know rather than a disaster. You simply trim the next walk.

Splitting 30 minutes into a morning 15 and an evening 15 often does the trick. It sounds strange, but the ankle gets a breather in between.
Now go and find the shoes you wear most, and flip them over. A heel worn down hard on one edge, or a sole you can wring out like a tea towel, is doing your ankle no favours.

People often ask us which brand to buy. Our answer tends to disappoint them, because there isn’t one. The right pair is whichever leaves your ankle feeling calm after a full day. For most people, that isn’t a pair of thongs.

One last thing, and it takes about two minutes. Stand on one leg next to the kitchen bench, with a hand hovering just in case, and count to 30. Swap legs. Then do slow calf raises on one leg until you can’t manage another good one, and write down the number. Repeat on the other side.

Forget about what “normal” might be. Compare left with right. If your sore side is wobblier or weaker, that’s a big part of the explanation for your pain. Happily, it’s also the part we can change.

How Physio Helps Ankle Pain When Walking

A good ankle assessment rarely stops at the ankle.

We’ll watch you walk, test your calf strength and balance, and check your hips and lower back. A weak hip can let your knee drift inward with each step, which changes how your ankle takes the load. If we treat only the ankle, the pain often comes back.

Hands on treatment such as joint mobilisation, massage, dry needling and taping helps settle pain and gets a stiff ankle moving again. But we won’t pretend it’s the whole answer. What changes the long term outcome is steadily rebuilding strength and balance until your ankle can handle uneven footpaths, stairs, sport and whatever else your week throws at it. That work is also what stops you needing us down the track.

How to Stop an Ankle Pain Turning Into Your Next Ankle Sprain

Rolling the same ankle three times in two years isn’t a coincidence. Almost always, the ankle was never properly retrained after the first sprain, so it’s still running on a faulty balance system.

Fixing that won’t eat into your evenings. It does ask you to keep going for a while after the ankle stops hurting, which, frankly, is the bit almost nobody does.

Start at the bathroom sink. Brush your teeth standing on one leg, change legs halfway through, and do it twice a day. Too easy? Close your eyes. You’ll be surprised how quickly the wobble shows up. It feels a bit silly, but it works on exactly the reflex a sprain knocks out, and you were going to be standing there anyway.

Next, your calves. Find a step, hang your heels off the edge, and rise up slowly on one leg, then lower slowly. Of all the exercises we give for ankle pain when walking, this is the one we’d keep if we could only keep one. Stop counting weeks and count reps instead. Keep at it until your sore side matches your good side.

Be wary of fresh starts. A new year’s step challenge, the trek you’ve finally booked, the tennis racquet coming out of the cupboard. All great, and all easy ways to overwhelm an ankle that isn’t ready. Build up over several weeks. If you’d like a number, keep weekly increases to roughly 20 per cent.

Tape and braces have their place, and your first season back at netball or footy is exactly that place. Wearing one every game for years, though, tells us your strength and balance never caught up. The brace is covering for work that still needs doing.

And if the ankle starts muttering again after a big day on your feet? Don’t panic. Ease off for a few days, keep up the exercises, and give it a chance to quieten down. Still grumbling a week or so later? That’s the time to come and see us, well before it turns into a month of ankle pain.

Ready to Walk Without Ankle Pain? Book With Instinct South

We’ve been looking after South Melbourne since 1987, and our team brings more than 30 years of experience in professional and semi professional sport. Whether it’s a fresh ankle sprain, a sore ankle that has lingered since last season, or pain you can’t quite explain, we’ve seen it before.

You’ll get a proper assessment, a clear explanation in plain English, and a plan built for long term results rather than a quick fix.
Book online through or call us on (03) 9696 2180, or visit us at 500 City South Rd, South Melbourne. We’re open Monday to Friday, 7.30am to 8.00pm.