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Summary: In diving it is important to warm up the feet and ankles so that you can keep your toes pointed during dives. Learn how to stretch and warm up your feet with tips from a diving coach in this free competitive diving video.
For the last twenty years, Bobby Larew has participated in diving competitions as an athlete, a coach and a judge. During his competitive days, he trained with the University of...read more
"Hey, I'm Bobby Larew. Now that we've just warmed up and done a little cardio, we're actually going to start stretching, okay? There's four major groups that you want to concentrate on when you stretch, you've got your feet, your legs, your torso, and your arms and upper body. Right now, I'm going to show you just a few things for your feet, and why it's important, you may think it's silly to stretch your feet, but in diving, pointing your toes and stretching your feet is one of the best things that you can do to get a high score, alright? So, I'm going to just show you two exercises that you can do to stretch your feet out. The first one, you're just going to sit down on the floor, or on the mat, start with your right foot out, and what you're going to do is you're actually going to trace the alphabet with your right foot, using your ankle, okay? We're going to start, we're going to do A through L on the right foot, and it's very simple. It's just like you would be writing on a piece of paper, you're going to use your foot to write in the air the alphabet. Okay, when you get to the letter L, you're going to switch to your left foot, and you start with M and go to the letter Z, making sure that you're stretching your foot, okay, using all of your muscles and moving and flexing as far as you can. The second exercise, you're going to get on your knees, you're going to put your foot flat on the floor behind you and point your toes. Okay, now be very careful, you can really stretch out your foot too much on this, but you're going to put a little pressure down on your heals, and lean back just a little bit so that you can feel the stretch right here in your foot. Those are just two things that you can do to stretch your feet."
eHow Article: Diving Feet & Ankle Warm Ups