Al/Ni reactive multilayers are employed in a variety of applications, including joining, welding or self-healing of metals. Investigations into reactive multilayers usually concentrate on how fast heat is released upon ignition and how hot the self-propagating reaction gets. For integration into various devices, it is also important to understand the mechanical properties of such multilayers. We use nano-indentation Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations to characterize hardness and modulus for various bilayer heights from 25 nm down to 5 nm. Furthermore, we use shock compression MD simulations to investigate the behaviour of the multilayers under shock loading for bilayer heights from 5 nm up to 100 nm. This allows to obtain an estimate of the effective elastic modulus as well as studying the phase changes and reactivity under shock compression. In nano-indentation, we observe an inverse Hall-Petch behaviour at the bilayer heights studied, which is related to the grain size and eventually to the fraction of grain boundary atoms. In shock compression, we show that the behaviour depends on the shock direction. Moreover, we can observe interesting phase changes upon shock compression, which depend on the shock velocity and agree with what has been observed experimentally in Al and noble metals. In summary, MD simulations allow us to study the mechanical properties of nanometric multilayers, while also giving insights at the atomistic level, which will aid the future design of nanometric multilayers.