5 Common Mistakes That Keep Sciatica From Getting Better

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement Podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everyone, it's your co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement Podcast. Thanks for joining the Movement Movement. Today is going to be a short podcast on sciatica and the five most common mistakes that people make that is hindering their recovery. If you guys need any help along your journey, you can always reach out to us, 714-502-4243 or info at p2sportscare.com. All of our contact is in the description for this podcast and any of the references that I do make, I will include in there as well.

So sciatica, for those of you who don't know, I'll just shortly, quickly describe what it is. It is a symptom, not a condition, but it's a symptom of electrical or pain down the backside of the leg. It usually starts at the buttocks area or the SI joint region, kind of on the backside of the lower back, or it can start at the lower back itself and travels down kind of around the hamstrings, down into the calf area, sometimes to the bottom of the foot, sometimes to the side of the foot, sometimes it's numbness, tingling, stabbing, shooting, aching, burning, or it can also just feel like general tightness, which is also misleading for a lot of people too, which is why they make some of these mistakes.

So here are the mistakes that people make, and I'll dive into each one of them independently so you can get a better idea of maybe how not to make this mistake on your own. Number one is avoiding movement. Number two is thinking stretches will help you. Number three is self-diagnosing. Number four is carrying items in your back pockets. Number five is pushing through pain. So let's cover avoiding movement. Now, for people who have recent onset of lower back pain or sciatica, probably the movement that bothers you the most is really the only movement that should be avoided. For example, if bending over to grab an object or touching your toes bothers it, because a lot of times people in the morning, they try to bend over and put their pants on or put their shoes on or put their socks on, it bothers them.

This is something that can be modified or avoided for a short period of time. But generally speaking, we want to keep moving the best you can. And although it may not seem like doing things that don't hurt it nor trigger the area really help at all, they actually can really help. For example, walking. Walking is one of the easiest remedies for many types of conditions that create sciatica. Remember, sciatica is a symptom of other conditions. So, but walking, if it doesn't really hurt, it actually can be very helpful. If sciatica is coming from a lower back disc injury, disc herniation, or even things like piriformis syndrome, it can be very, very helpful just to walk.

It helps grease up the hip. It makes it so the hips have a better ability to do better quality movement. And it also leaves a lot of the spinal, excessive spinal component out. Swinging the arms. I apologize. I'm on a drive right now. Swinging the arms can be helpful for core stability. It also greases up the shoulder joints, which help out to keep core stiffness in play, which a lot of times is necessary as you're getting through this. Now, movements that tend to not hurt with some people, but also others, is squatting. For some people, squatting is absolute murder. But for other people, especially older populations who have sciatica, squatting is actually a position that takes most of their pain away.

And she can actually use squatting as an exercise or a movement to make it so you're keeping the legs in good order while you're starting to mend the injury. For other people, squatting does not feel good. In that case, doing hip dominant patterns or hip hinges actually can be very helpful. Now, number two is thinking stretching will help. I would say this is super, super common. I've done endless YouTube videos on it and we've done podcasts on it as well. Sciatica, although it can be created by many different types of conditions, it is generally what we call a neural tension disorder. The nerve does not tolerate stretching.

So you can literally just not stretch the sciatic nerve and it will probably feel 50% better within just a few days. Not to say it'll completely take it away. Not to say that's the only thing you need to be doing. But people unknowingly make their problem worse and worse and worse sometimes when they're just stretching a tension disorder, which does not tolerate tension. Something that can help out instead of that and actually improve the nerves ability to tolerate tension is going to be decreasing pressure on it at whatever location is creating pressure. That is kind of a diagnostic part, which is helpful to work with your healthcare provider on.

Number two is usually flossing. Typically, we treat neural tension disorders with flossing. But remember, not all sciaticas are tension intolerant disorders. Some of them are slide disorders. In that case, you would actually stretch it to make it feel better. I know it seems complicated. Rewind that and listen to it again. You'll realize that what it doesn't tolerate is often the mistake. What you can do instead of it is the opposite as a treatment typically. But not everybody is exactly that clean with the condition. So things you may be doing like toe touches, hamstring stretches, whether it be on your back or standing, are usually things that will trigger this thing and make it so it's going to keep going on and on and on.

Number three, before we get into self-diagnosing here, we actually have an online program that we wrote up for sciatica, and it does use some of the exercises and stretches that we tend to use. Again, I said stretching is not helpful for it. Correct, but stretching of the locations can be. And so we have an online program, which is very helpful in the stretches, exercises, and strengthening ones that we use here at Performance Place. But if you ever want one-on-one help, you can also reach out for a consultation too. We're licensed in different states. Now, number three, self-diagnosing. This is a very hard one because there are plenty of people on the internet who are savvy enough to get the right remedy, even though they don't have a formal diagnosis.

But the problem is, is there's enough people who try to self-diagnose and don't realize the risk involved with it. If you get it wrong and your problem persists and you develop something called motor loss, you actually may have more long-term disability. Now, motor loss doesn't happen with everybody, but I've met plenty of people over the years. Who end up having long-term sciatica from various different types of conditions. They actually have a weakness of the calf muscles so much they can't do a calf raise anymore. And I ask them, how long have you had this? And they say, well, I haven't been able to do calf raise in like a year or so.

And I said, so what are you doing to make this better? And they said, well, I'm just doing calf raises, but I know I just need to strengthen it, which is not correct. So self-diagnosing and getting poor treatment early on limits how well you'll fare over time, but more the danger is of the motor loss associated to it. So if you weren't able to use the ankle or the foot anymore, how do you think you'll fare? Probably not very well. And so I've heard a few surgeons talk about this before. They said, look, it's your choice if you want to get surgery or not. By the way, not everyone needs surgery for this.

But if you have motor loss, that may be something, and treatment's not actually working, that may be something you actually need to do. So they said, you don't need to have surgery, it's totally up to you. But if your rehab does not work, and you actually have continual motor loss, and you can't use the foot, how do you think your life's going to be? And really, it's up to the user or the person. Like, if you're satisfied with how your life's going to be, great. You don't need to have surgery, you don't need to do any rehab, and that's fine. But that's usually not the case. Everybody wants their foot back, which it can come back, but sometimes it takes different interventions to get there.

Now, on to mistake number four is carrying objects in your back pockets. If you are of the age who knows about Seinfeld, you'll realize that there was an episode where George had a massive wallet. They weren't really too wrong when they were talking about how George should empty his wallet, or at least put it maybe in the front, to decrease the amount of back pain that he was having. Now, how this relates to sciatica is mainly because the things that we put in our back pocket is directly over the location, over where most people have their sciatic nerve pass through. They pass through the piriformis muscles there.

The piriformis isn't necessarily the issue on everybody's problem, just because there's sensitivity there. But what we do know is that in most cases of sciatica, anywhere that you press along the path of the nerve, where you can put pressure on the nerve, it actually can create a lot of sensitivity. And so this is misleading for a lot of people self-diagnosing because they'll push in all these different locations, and it'll hurt kind of everywhere. So they'll think they have maybe an entrapment in their calf, or in their hamstring, or in their piriformis, and so on. But really, when there's pressure on the nerve, it will swell to about, they think they say about three to four times normal size.

We can create mechanical or pressure-based sensitivity throughout the entire path of the nerve. So what this means is, in regards to having things in your back pocket, is you're putting continual pressure on the nerve and just irritating the whole darn thing. So the easiest thing you can do is either get a fanny pack or put things into your front pocket, at least for a period of time. It doesn't mean you can't use things in your back pocket ever again, but at this point in time, I think you spare yourself some easy grief and just make it so you don't have pressure directly on the sciatic nerve so you can repair it a little bit faster.

Number five is pushing through the pain. This is something that a lot of people don't always mess up, but I have met many people who have because there's this time, there's this saying that's lasted throughout time, which is irrelevant for most people's problems and most people's situations is no pain, no gain. So I had a guy that I used to work for that he had a different saying, no pain, no brain. I think what he was really trying to say is, you don't necessarily have to have pain to feel better or to get the results that you want. Yeah, going to the gym and working out your calf to get a bigger calf muscle may end up being painful in a way that it's like effort pain, but it's not like stabbing or like searing pain.

So I think there's a difference and maybe we should qualify that saying down into burning or effort-based pain is okay to get the gains that you want, but you don't have to necessarily fight through pain to have the right remedy for this problem, which leads us back into mistake number two, which is people stretch their problem excessively and it hurts oftentimes to do so. So don't make that same mistake. Don't find things that hurt the area thinking that it'll actually help you and you have to experience the pain to feel better because most of the time that's really incorrect. And a lot of the remedies that we have for reducing sciatica pain are actually not painful at all.

Some of the corrective exercises that we may end up doing may actually be effortful, but they don't have to be painful during the exercise. And that's another big mistake people do is they do something like a dead bug exercise and it hurts their leg to do so. And so they think, well, the dead bug is supposed to work for me, so I may as well keep doing the dead bug because I guess I have to suffer through this pain to feel better. That's not really correct. You need to have a different version of the exercise, a different coaching strategy, a different regression of the exercise, or maybe the exercise isn't actually correct for you at all, which dead bugs aren't perfect for everybody.

Sometimes bird dogs are better or side planks or so on. So I'm hoping that these five touch points help you guys make better choices about your sciatica. And again, if you're looking for help with any of the condition you've been experiencing in your body, remember we do have consultations and we have telehealth and we also have licensing in different states. So we'd love to help you out if we can. 714-502-4243 or info at p2sportscare.com. All of the references to the online programs are in the description for this podcast player. So subscribe to the channel for more to come soon on this topic.

Take care.