Hi, I’m Tahmineh and I’m an athletic trainer at Tahoe Forest Sports Medicine. Today I’m going to show you a couple ways to tape two commonly injured areas. So, first we have the ankle.
Instead of showing how to do an entire tape, I’m going to just show two tape patterns that provide light support in the event that you only have tape available. First, we want to tape the ankle in maximum dorsy flexion. That’s with the toes pointed all the way up.
That’s the most stable position for the ankle. And with my athletic tape, I’m going to place an anchor around her the lower leg.
The first tape pattern is called a heel lock. There’s a couple anatomical landmarks you want to pay attention to. So we have our malololis which are these bones of your ankle joint and then your the base of your fifth metatarsal right here.
So with the heel lock, I start on the inside. I wrap behind her lateral malololis, behind her medial malololis, and then pull up in front of her lateral malololis.
So that’s one half of it. The other half I start on the outside of her foot, go behind the medial malololis, cup the heel, wrap around the heel, and then go in front.
So when you’re doing this, especially if you don’t have any underwrap, you want to try to limit the wrinkles that you have, too. So that’s one heel lock.
The other pattern is called a figure eight. And this one you basically trace a figure eight with the tape. I’m going to start.
We’re going to wrap around her foot and then around her lower leg. So starting at the top here, paying attention to that base of the fifth metatarsil. I don’t want to cover that bone.
So I’m going to wrap around around the foot and then around the lower leg. Next we have the finger which is a commonly injured area in sports.
Specifically we’re talking about this joint which is called your interfallenial joint. There’s two different ways to tape it. I’m going to first show you the X method.
You’re going to need a strip of tape that’s about 10 in long and about half an inch wide. And the goal of this tape is to provide collateral support to this joint. So, we’re essentially going to draw X’s on the side of the joint here.
So, to start, I’m going to wrap around her finger. I’m going to angle the tape downward to form one half of the X. Wrap around the finger again and then angle the tape upward to form the other half of the X.
And then I’m going to repeat the same thing in the opposite direction. So I’m going to wrap around the finger angle down to cover the side of the joint.
Wrap around again and then angle upwards to form the other half of that X. So this tape is good if the athlete needs this finger to be separate for dexterity.
It still allows some movement while providing collateral support.
There are many different types of tape out there and they serve slightly different purposes. You could use athletic tape, which is what I showed in the video, chisio tape, or lucco tape, which is a more rigid tape.
Thank you for watching. I’m Tahmineh. I’m an athletic trainer. If you have any questions, please reach out to our sports medicine department at Tahoe Forest Health.
