Sciatica leg pain: symptoms, causes and first steps

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the movement movement. I'm Sebastian Gonzales, show curator and head clinician at Performance Play Sports Care in Southern California. This show is for active people, those who refuse to let pain and injury get in the way of their life and how they want to live it. Trails and trips, fields and courts, whatever moves you. Each episode features rotating host, expert guest, and real clinical conversations that help you move better and trust your body again. Here we go. Today, we're going to cover sciatica, what it actually is, signs and symptoms, what's happening to the nerve or the sciatic nerve when you have sciatica, the three most common diagnoses that cause sciatica, and at the very end, we're going to cover three simple tips that can help you jumpstart your recovery.

The first thing you know about sciatica is that it's not actually a diagnosis. I know many of you have been diagnosed with sciatica by your medical professional or you've read online about the diagnosis of sciatica. It's actually incorrect. Sciatica is a symptom. Sciatica literally just means leg pain. Leg pain is a symptom of many things. It's a symptom. It doesn't describe why you're having the symptom, and it doesn't identify the specific diagnosis. In simple terms, the easy way to think about this is if your car doesn't start. My car doesn't start. It's a symptom. It's a symptom of what? We don't know.

We need to investigate. Possible reasons for not starting would be no battery, no starter, or you're simply out of gasoline. So there's many different reasons why your car may not start, and there's many different reasons why you may be having leg pain or sciatica. Sciatica, common signs and symptoms associated with it are leg pain that is more intense than any spinal pain. This is the reason why a lot of people feel like they have tightness of their hamstring, or they feel like their hamstring is the main culprit of everything. They may feel like their piriformis muscle or their glute muscle is the main cause of everything.

They may feel that their tight calf is radiating up into their leg or creating a local nerve impingement within the leg itself, creating things like numbness and tingling. The sciatic nerve is made up of a few different nerve roots. The nerve roots come out of the spine. There's multiple different levels. These levels merge into becoming the sciatic nerve, and anything that the sciatic nerve innervates or touches can pretty much be some type of symptom. What that means is if the sciatic nerve innervates or supplies nutrition or electrical impulses to a muscle, that muscle can feel tight, it can go weak, the region of the body or the skin that innervates can become tingly or numb.

And so the most common areas that people tend to have problems with associated with some type of sciatica is the buttocks region, the hamstring or the side of the thigh, usually not into the inner part of the thigh or the front of the thigh. Those are different levels of the spine, and they're not innervated by the sciatic nerve. They're innervated by different regions or different mixed nerves. And down past the knee, the sciatic nerve mainly supplies most of the back and the side of the lower leg, everything below the knee. The bottom of the foot, the side of the foot, the calf, the peroneus muscle is part of the top of the foot as well.

These are all areas that a lot of times people will experience tightness, tingling, stabbing, shooting, numbness, stiffness, and so on. Sometimes people will feel that they actually, it feels like their leg has lost power. That's something I've noticed over the years that people say, well, there's this, it's really weird. I feel like my leg really doesn't work well. I feel like it's not powerful. I feel like when I'm lifting, I need to think about engaging that leg. When I'm running, I feel like that leg is not really doing its work, and there's nothing I can really do to make it recruit. I'm having trouble recruiting my glute muscle.

My hamstring is hyperactive. I feel like my calf always has tightness or spasm. Something that is a little bit, it's not always related to sciatica, but muscle fasciculations. The creepy crawlies under the skin, it feels like your calf muscle keeps flickering. Your hamstring keeps kind of contracting when you don't really mean for it to. It's just, you're laying there and it's just kind of flickering. These things can be related to sciatica and oftentimes are. Even something like calf cramping that you may associate it with something like electrolyte imbalance, being dehydrated. If you've tried all those things, sometimes this is a result of having some type of nerve impingement.

The nerve impingement makes the muscular system go a little haywire. It shuts muscles down and it makes muscles work a little bit more. The muscles that work quite a bit more, usually when people have sciatica, are the hip flexors and the lower back muscles. They just feel tight and stiff. The ones that feel like they're not working well are the abs, the glutes, mainly all the glutes specifically. So these are common things that people notice with sciatica of various different types. I'll cover the diagnosis that cause sciatica most commonly here in a couple minutes. But the things that actually tend to bother them most is just bending forward.

Interestingly, this is where things kind of come or kind of diverge a little bit. If you have something that is creating your sciatica that is different from somebody else, some movements may bother you while they don't bother the other person. Normally bending forward to touch the toes is something that bothers everybody, most people, while some people will feel their sciatica when they squat down like heels on the floor and butt towards the floor. Not everybody, though. That's the interesting thing, right? And it really comes down to what your diagnosis is. Some things you may not want to be doing when you have the inability to touch your toe because it creates the leg pain is things like RDLs, deadlifting, deadlifting with a deficit, stretching the hamstring, stretching the calf.

These are all things that you may not want to do because it may actually provoke your issue. And I can explain that a little bit later. And before we actually go on to the diagnosis, I want to share a story of one gentleman we worked with. It was a really good scenario of things that happen a lot of times, a progression of the problem. And by the way, I should have mentioned before, sciatica is not just buttocks pain. Buttocks pain or upper glute pain that's kind of around the area where your hand meets that. If you're angry and you put your hand on your hips, this is not sciatica. This is probably something else.

It could be related to sciatica. A lot of times people misinterpret sciatica for SI joint dysfunction and they're different. So anything that goes down past the knee is probably more of a nerve-based problem. Anything that's above the knee could still be a part of sciatica, but it could be also referral from something else. And it could actually be a muscular injury and so on. So it's the stuff into the buttocks area. I noticed that a lot of people say, well, this is, I got sciatica. You don't. You might have something else or you could have sciatica, but the probability is low or it's not a, you're not a textbook version.

So this gentleman that we work with was about 50 years old. He was dealing with hamstring and calf pain and tightness, like stiffness. Like it felt like a rod for about two years. He was a generally active person. He was healthy, in good shape. Like you look at him and it's like, this guy's in pretty good health. He was a recreational runner. He liked to run distances that vary, like 5k, half marathon, marathon. He did a free triathlon and so on. So he wasn't really committed to only being a runner. He just liked being physically active and challenging his body. He was a gym goer and he never really, the way he kind of described himself, it wasn't, it seemed like he never really shied away from doing any physical activity.

He was always up for a challenge. Like, let's go for a hike. Sure. Let's go. You know, he's that kind of guy. One day after a gym workout, he noticed that he was developing some hamstring tightness on one side after he was doing a leg day. I don't remember specifically what the leg day included. That would have probably been some really good information to know. But he started to develop the tightness on mainly one side. And first he kind of thought this was, maybe it got overworked. Maybe it's going to settle itself down. Maybe I just recruited my hamstring too much in an exercise and that's, it'll go away.

But over the course of the next two weeks, it never really improved. Tightness, just so you guys know, tightness associated with like delayed onset muscle soreness and things like, like you challenge your body and the muscles are sore because of that. Normally it's both sides. And normally it goes away over the course of a week, week and a half, generally speaking. So this is kind of beyond that point. The tightness began to travel to the back of his calf. It wasn't there originally. And periodically he noticed that he started having tingling into the side of the heel. I don't remember which side of the heel he mentioned.

I think it was the outer side. It didn't stop him from doing anything physically at that point. He continued to run and lift and he just kind of noted it like he thought it was odd. Felt like he had to warm up a lot more. Do more mobility work, stretch and so on. Over the course of the year, he noticed that it became more intense with sitting. Just as many people are nowadays, he was working from home and he noticed that actually it got better when he started to stand up and walk around. So the cool thing at least that he was working at home. So he didn't really have any qualms about standing up and walking around on phone calls.

He would walk around the house because that would calm things down. But as soon as he had to sit down on his computer for more than 15 minutes, it would tend to get tight again. The hamstring and the calf just really never seemed to completely loosen up. So he'd sit around 15 minutes or so and it would return. Over the next year, he started to manage his symptoms by pacing around the house, stretching out periodically, taking over-the-counter stuff like Advil and Tylenol and so on. Heat, ice, deep tissue work, all of them really helped, but they never really kept things away. They kept returning on a daily basis, which is a common thing a lot of people end up experiencing.

Like they find that something works, but it doesn't stick. The final straw for him when he finally reached out for help was when he was performing a single-legged deadlift at the gym and pain shot down his leg from his buttocks to his hamstring to his calf. And so he's like, that's it. I need to figure out what's going on. It's been too long. We end up seeing him at Performance Place. He looked like he was just mentally drained because he was thinking about the problem. He was a very smart guy. He was willing to troubleshoot it. He read a bunch of online forums and learned about sciatica and hamstring and calf pain and muscle strains and so on.

And he was all about taking care of his body, so he tried water and nutrition changes and so on. And so he was just exhausted, like, thinking about the darn thing. Although he physically wasn't able to do anything, I think it seemed like he was just more fed up with the idea that he had to think about it and deal with it. And it was, like, I know I talked to some people about this, is that, you know, if you never had a hamstring that was tight, would you ever care about learning what makes hamstrings tight? You know, like, you guys probably wouldn't be listening to a podcast on this if you didn't have or dealt with or knew someone that was dealing with sciatica.

It's, like, not something that you care about. Like, I don't care about learning how to paint baseboards until I'm learning how to paint baseboards, but I really just want to know step-by-step what to do. And so he was really intricate about learning about things, so he did come to the table with a lot of great information, a lot of good information, but a lot of outdated information, too. So we worked with him, gave him some exercises and stretches to do, and it's a general framework that we use to help people understand how to manage their symptoms, what they can do to stay in control and prevent things and so on.

And so we were able to help him get back to physical activity within about three months. He still had things that he was modifying a little bit, but generally he was back to running, back to lifting. He had periodic tightness, but he had the tools that he needed to be able to keep things under control because previously the things that he was using were not really lasting. It was just a day-to-day thing. So he was improving, and he was being physically active, which made him feel happy. Now for a quick pause before we keep going. Hey, everybody, it's Sebastian. If what we've been describing in the show so far sounds very familiar and you've been dealing with some ache, pain, or stiffness that keeps coming back no matter what you do and no matter what you try, we're offering a free discovery call today where we brainstorm with you what has been working for you, what hasn't been working, and we also try to unravel what is a critical part of the puzzle that you've actually been missing that's keeping you from full recovery and getting back to full activity.

The link's in the description. It only takes a few minutes to fill out the form. Okay, back to the show. In the framework, he was able to, now at this point, he can decrease his symptoms at will. He knows what to do to prevent them, and also he can knowingly challenge his body, assume the risk, and also put out any fires later. The way I usually talk to you about this is that, you know, you are in complete control. Like, you can put things out if you want to. You know what triggers your problem, but also it doesn't mean you can't ever do this again. It just means that if you decide to do this, you're assuming the risk and just know what to expect.

There's certain things that some people's body and tolerances really don't work well with, but they like it. And so in that case, they're dipping their foot in the injury pool a little bit, but then pulling it out after they start a little bit of a fire. And so that's okay, like he assumed the risk, he knows about it, and that's okay, which gives him a lot of potential to do things that he wants to do. The MAPLOAD framework is simple. M is modification of pain, so what can he do now to get rid of his symptoms? And a lot of times there's stretches and exercises that someone can do to simply reduce any sciatica pain.

I dare to say most people within a couple days, even with pretty severe stuff, can decrease their symptoms pretty significantly if they use some modification of pain strategy that works well for them. A means activating the support systems of the body. In this case, sciatica could be coming from the back or the hip. And so in that case, they need to activate the cast, the helpers, the glutes, the abs to make it so there's not so much susceptibility of injury going on. So he had some corrective exercises and some activating work to do. Also patterning, there's certain movements that he was doing that were just provoking things.

The way he was doing his RDL was provoking. So we needed to change slightly the pattern of doing the RDL and then L, loading, we can load the RDL. And so a lot of times good old-fashioned strength conditioning does help people keep sciatica at bay. And progressing them through this type of framework helps them to not have to go back and do the same thing over and over every day. His wellness at this point is being physically active, challenging his body a little bit through resistance training. If he gets into trouble, he'll go back and modify the symptom generator, he'll modify the pain. And then he'll go back and a couple days later, a week later, do strength conditioning, be physically active again.

Movement is medicine and motion is lotion. And so that typically works very well with people with sciatica. Now, you might wonder what you can actually do. Well, I'll go through some three simple tips a little bit later. But I think at this point we should cover the three most common things that people are diagnosed with that can create things like sciatica. And we'll also cover what's going on with the nerve, the sciatic nerve, when people have sciatic symptoms. So the three most common are foraminal stenosis, disc bulges, and piriformis tightness. I'm not going to say syndrome because syndrome is associated with many different phenomenons.

But overall, tightness of the piriformis can obstruct the sciatic nerve as it passes through or by it. For aminal stenosis, for the older listeners, people over the age of 60, 70 or so, for aminal stenosis is probably top on the list, especially if you had a long history with back issues. I met a gentleman the other day that he had, over the course of the year, he had 10 different instances of back pain over the year for about five years. So he had a lot of back issues over the years. And so something like foraminal stenosis, as he gets older, might be something that's the most common diagnosis creating sciatica or nerve impingent for him.

For the younger ones, you have 15, 20-year-olds, like there's not going to be a lot of the foraminal stenosis. There's going to be more of disc bulges or disc injuries that are putting pressure on the nerve. Overall, the nerve has pressure on it somewhere, whether it be from foraminal stenosis, disc bulges, or a tight muscle. It has pressure on it somewhere. The compression is what creates the major changes. Foraminal stenosis, in that version of it, it's a bony obstruction of a hole that it comes out of in the spine. If you want to know more about the actual anatomy of this, I do have a great video on YouTube that it's called the—actually, it hasn't really released yet, but it's going to come up soon.

It's called Nine of My Favorite Exercises for Sciatica Regarding Disc Bulges. That one is going to cover pretty much in detail the foraminal stenosis and disc bulges part. We do have other videos on YouTube that cover sciatica, so just go on our channel, Performance Play Sports Care, and you can use the search function and find sciatica, and that way you'll see the videos and us demonstrating these things too. Disc bulges are really common for the younger group. They can create pressure on the disc itself or on the nerve itself as it exits out, one of the contributing levels of the sciatic nerve.

Most common ones is L5, S1 nerve root, which encompasses all of the symptoms that I mentioned to the thigh, the calf, and the foot. With that being said, I'd say the most common one is probably going to be a disc herniation or a disc bulge, if I had to guess off the top of my head. With most of the people we see at Performance Place, the cool news is all these things can be managed very easily. You can get back to physical activity, and normally injections, medications, and surgeries aren't required for this type of thing. If you are dealing with sciatica and it's been a while and you don't have any strength in your foot, and you feel like you can't really push off like you do a calf raise, you know, something like that is something you need to be managed very, very quickly.

You need to be managed and helped because there are things that will come from, that can come from, having significant motor degrade or having pressure on the nerve too long. And so you need to make sure that someone is helping you find the right answers for that. But I'd say disc bulges are the most common ones that we see at Performance Place. Now what's happening with the nerve, this one really, kind of understanding this is really what brings to light, like why all these things happen and why odd things create issues. I know I've had people come in before where they're saying like, it's really weird.

It's not when I step on my leg or my land on my leg, it's when I bring my leg out, like when they're walking and like when they swing their leg forward. And they're like, isn't that weird? And I say, no, it's not weird at all. It's actually pretty common based upon what you're talking about. And so if you understand what's going on with things, it might bring to light these odd scenarios that you may be experiencing. And so nerves don't like pressure. They don't like compression. That's generally how things go. If you create pressure too long on a nerve, then it will create some type of abnormal response.

Many of you have experienced the funny bone before of the elbow. You hit the funny bone, which is the ulnar nerve, and all of a sudden your two fingers go numb on the inner part of your hand. And then over the course of time, a couple days or an hour, it comes back. And so this is a good example of what happens when you reduce pressure on the nerve. This one had a quick impulse of pressure on it in this scenario, and then it starts to return itself because the body naturally does want to heal itself. But if you continue to put pressure on that nerve, then it will continue to have problems. And what happens is if you put pressure on the nerve, it actually makes the nerve swell.

Some of you may be familiar with what a tourniquet is. A tourniquet is it cuts off blood supply. Actually, sorry, it cuts off the return of the venous return. So blood goes in, but blood doesn't necessarily come out. Actually, it depends on the firmness of the tourniquet. I guess if you're using a tourniquet, you want to obstruct the blood from coming out because someone lost their limb or something like that. It's an emergency situation. But in the scenario where you have nerve pressure, most of the time, all that happens is that you're obstructing the nerve enough to decrease the amount of venous return, meaning blood gets in, but it doesn't come out.

Because the nerve itself has an artery and vein system. And nerves don't want to be put pressure on, and they want to be able to get rid of their waste product, which is what the vein does. It brings waste product blood back into the body, and it gets recycled and replenished and pushed back out again. And when you obstruct this, it makes the nerve swell. It swells up. Swelling creates what we call it's an internal change. It's a physiological response. There's the only difference, I believe, what's happening with the nerve, if you were to see it, is it would look maybe a little swollen, maybe.

But overall, the inside, the inner workings of it are different. And a good way to think of this is if you had an x-ray done or an MRI done, this looks at structure. It looks at how does it look. It doesn't look at how does it work. Because if you have a computer, there's hardware, which is your keyboard and then your screen and everything. But let's just say you want to hit the Q button, and you hit the Q button, and the button's stuck. That's maybe a hardware issue. Like, you'd see that in an image. You'd see that there'd be an obstruction of the nerve. But what you don't see is if I hit the Q, and the Q works, but it doesn't work and doesn't produce a Q, that's a software problem.

And so that's how it works, not how it looks. And so the nerve changes how it works, as long as it has compression on it. What this does is it makes it intolerant to certain things that it normally tolerates. Normally, nerves can tolerate things like stretch and pressure. Like, if you put pressure onto your hamstring on your non-symptomatic side, it should feel like normal. It should feel fine. Now, if you do it on the side where you're having the sciatica, it just feels like, oh, man, that's hard. That's painful, right? People interpret that as a good pain because you feel like you're getting something done.

You're working something out, digging out the scar tissue. But actually, what you're doing is you're putting pressure on a nerve that's just sensitive. And normally, nerves can tolerate pressure, okay? But if a nerve is functioning abnormally because it has compression on it somewhere, then it doesn't tolerate it. And that's why things like digging in on your calf muscle, digging on your hamstring are painful, way more painful than the non-symptomatic side. But it never really seems like it goes anywhere. It just always keeps coming back, keeps getting tight. The other thing it really, really can't tolerate, nerves can't tolerate when they're in a pathological state, is that they can't tolerate stretch most of the time.

Things like stretching your hamstring, especially when you, like, if you're seated and you swing your leg out and then you bring your toes to your face. This is a tension test of a nerve. It's called a, it's part of a test called a slumps test. There's also a straight-legged raise test, which are hallmark tests that we do to figure out if your problem really is coming from a tight hamstring, if it's coming from a tight calf, if it's your piriformis muscle. We're looking to see if we can change your symptoms by moving something that's not attached to the area, which would look like this. If you lay it on your back, which, by the way, all your healthcare practitioners who are managing you for your sciatica, will probably do this to you.

They should be doing this to you if they're not, because it identifies what to do with you. It helps figure out, it rules in structures and it rules out structures. Because if you come in with only a hamstring that's tight or only a calf that's tight, there's a chance that it might just be a tight calf or hamstring. That's the reality of it. It doesn't mean it's always related to sciatica. But if your calf is tight and we cock your foot back, like you're laying backwards on the table, we cock your foot back and then we raise your hip. Like we start flexing your hip as if we're stretching your hamstring.

And all of a sudden your calf tightness increases and then we lower your leg and don't change anything about the calf. Like we don't change, like we still, we're still holding on to your foot and your ankle. And we lower your leg and all we change is how much your hip is flexed. And your calf pain goes away. That is, nothing attaches from the calf to the hip. The hamstring doesn't go that far. It is only skin, fascia, or vessels, or nerves. Okay? And so we can use tests like that to figure out what's going on. But overall, scaling back a little bit, the nerves don't like pressure and they don't like stretch.

So those are the things that we'll oftentimes we'll use to figure out what's going on with you, but also what you can safely do. Now, three of the tips that I would give you guys to understand a little bit more about how to recover are going to, they're going to be very simple. And obviously, you need to be checked out by a medical provider because you'll recover a lot faster if you're working with someone who knows what to do. The first one is very simple. You find a position or activity that brings the symptom above your knee. Remember earlier I said that the upper glute pain is not sciatica?

I'm talking about sciatica right now. Okay? So people with pain below the knee, tightness, irritation, numbness, tingling, so on, below the knee. You need to find an activity or position that brings the symptom above your knee. Okay? The easiest way to think of this is that the problem is centralizing. Whenever we're dealing with sciatica or nerve pain into the arm or even the femoral nerve, like, we're looking at reducing it mainly by moving the symptoms up as if you're working a thermometer upward. You need to make sure it works itself upward. This is called centralization. This is how people get better from this type of problem.

However, some people don't necessarily feel better, 100% better as it starts to centralize. Centralization sometimes comes along with something like sci joint pain, lower back stiffness, that becomes very uncomfortable. It can actually increase in intensity because as things peripheralize or go down to the foot, let's just say you have numbness to the foot, it's not uncomfortable. It's not painful. It's just odd. It's weird. And so sometimes it's more comfortable for people to be in a peripheralized state. However, if you want to get rid of this thing, it needs to centralize. Centralization sometimes creates intensification, right?

But finding a position or activity that brings the symptom above the knee is step one. And it really helps out your healthcare provider figure out how to help you because that gives good information about what's going on with you and the diagnosis that's creating the sciatica. The second thing is you need to identify an activity position that makes the symptom go down the leg and then minimize that for two weeks. With the example I gave earlier is that person was not able to RDL deadlift because it created symptoms. Also, the sitting increased their symptoms down their leg. And so we minimized it for a couple weeks with a few activity modifications but also changing some of their habits.

The third thing you need to do is find a healthcare provider that can help you streamline your recovery. It sounds so cliche and I know that most people will start turning off podcasts and videos as soon as you say you need to go see a healthcare provider. You really do. So, I know that when I had some work done in my house like countertops, it was a pain in the ass. Like I did it myself. It was a pain in the ass. And when it's all said and done, one of the three countertops is bowed. It's crooked. So, it took me more time and the outcome was worse. I should have hired a professional if I wanted it done well.

Now, countertops I really don't care too much about but I'm pretty sure my leg pain I would. And so it's mentally and physically hard to have nerve pain and there's a lot of questions that people tend to have. Having a healthcare provider who knows what they're doing, who's worked with someone with sciatica before can really help out to narrow these things down and squash all those exhausting feelings of what you should be thinking about. Like is it safe to go back to the gym? Can I run or walk? Is there certain things I should or should not be doing right now? Should I work through the pain when I'm doing exercises?

How long should it take to recover? What does recovery feel like? Do I need an MRI? Do I need an ultrasound? Do I need a surgery? Should I take medications? And so on. Like there's so many different questions that people have and to really to answer these questions like you can go on Dr. Google if you want to but the answer on Dr. Google is not specific to you. It's not specific to your condition because you are unique. You're very unique and as I mentioned this presentation to this person earlier, you might say, well, I have that but I don't have that. That's because you're unique. And the recommendations are unique to you.

So at Performance Place, we oftentimes see people with sciatica who have pain walking. Some people we say walk as much as possible. While other ones we say, hey, just take it easy for a couple days and then I want you to start walking for about five minutes and then take a break and then five minutes to take a break. They're different recommendations because they're different people with different problems and different diagnosis that are creating their sciatica. Some people, we totally allow them to golf. Go ahead. Golf as much as you want to but between holes, do this exercise and you can do as much golf as you possibly want.

And others, we tell them to hold off a little bit and we're going to wait until their pain goes above their knee. So different suggestions for different people. Some of them, we'll actually allow them to weight train and we actually suggest it. We make slight modifications. We slow their pace. We slow the range of motion or we change the range of motion or we change the weight, change the implement. Like we take away a barbell and add a kettlebell or something like that. So some people, weight training really, really helps them early in their care. While other people, it just makes things worse.

Recommendations are specific to you. And you can really find someone who's really good at working with sciatica if you look and you know the right questions to ask. Have you been, how many people do you work with sciatica? What's the rough timeline it takes for someone to get better? What does treatment generally look like? How many times do I need to come? A lot of times I have people ask questions and it's not about what they say as much as how they say it. How comfortable are they? You know, a really seasoned person who's worked with people with sciatica can tell you with pretty certainty, you know, like generally people with sciatica, like if it's intermittent, like if you have it with certain activities like walking but sitting's okay or vice versa, but you only feel like half the time of the day, you might feel better within about a week and a half period of time.

Come on in, let's evaluate what's going on with you and then I'll give you a couple exercises to do and you come back next week and let's just make sure we have you on the right plan to attack. But I'm assuming over the weekend you should probably feel better. Like confidence was speaking about it. Like that's the way you should probably go with it. If you're really having a hard time finding somebody, you can just call us at Performance Place. We saw somebody recently that they were a 30-year-old lady. It was a really cool case. It was someone with sciatica or leg pain. They developed it when they were pregnant.

And she, I mean, she had her son already. It was still, the son was one year old, one year old. So that's about what, a year and a half-ish or so she had it. So quite a long time. She couldn't touch her toes and she actually couldn't even put weight on the leg. You know, she, without making like a funny face or a grimace because it hurt and she was scared of doing it. Like she knew every single time that made her feel worse. She couldn't even walk for more than five minutes without needing to rest, rest her leg or take weight off the leg. And she was really having a hard time losing the pregnancy weight because if you can't walk, I mean, you can't even walk, you can't run, you can't be physically active.

There's a lot of activities she could not do. She'd been to four doctors and or physical therapists before she saw us. And within just a week, she was able to touch her toes. She can walk for three times the amount of time, which is 15 minutes, but her symptoms did come back as she walked longer than 15 minutes. So this isn't her final status. And with the right stretches and exercises, with the MAPA load framework, she'll do perfectly fine. I feel very confident with it. But the hard part is, is figuring out where to start. Okay. People can restore function in the leg. They can restore function in the nerve.

They can help you. You have to do the hard work. You have to listen. You have to put the time in. And you have to be responsible with your body. You're assuming the risk. But ask people. Ask doctors. See if they're willing to spend a couple moments discussing things on the phone with you. Or at least do a consultation with them and ask them any question or concerns you may have. People suffer with sciatica for so long. And it's so sad. It's very sad. It's depressing. Physical activity is very hard for them. I remember one young girl I talked to. She was probably 13 or so. She was not very old.

She had sciatica. And I asked her, you know, what is your goal? Like, what do you want to get back to? And she said, I just want to be able to get off the ground with no pain. And I said, well, do you, do you want to, do you want to play soccer? Do you, like, what would you go back to if you didn't have any leg pain anymore? I just want to get off the ground with no pain. Like, her only goal in life was not to have pain. It's so, so sad. You know, kids should be physically active. They should be, you know, having fun. Like, humans should be having fun. They should be playing. And so, dig deep when you figure out, when you're working with someone, tell them what you want to do.

If you woke up tomorrow and you had no leg pain whatsoever, what would you do? A lot of times people lose their passions. They lose their activities. They lose the things they like to do because they are adulting, you know. But you have to have something that makes you keep a good healthy habit. No one likes brushing their teeth. But it keeps their teeth healthy. I don't know anyone who likes brushing their teeth. But you'd be surprised. Something like going back and playing soccer might be the healthiest thing you can do for your sciatica at some point in time. Maybe not right now. But if you write that off because you think you're too old to do it or you think it'll bother your hamstring and your calf, I would rethink that.

If anything in today's episode resonated with you, visit the link in your podcast player. There you'll find any free resource that we mentioned in the show, any guest links, and a link for a free discovery call with us. We're licensed to work with our outdoor active people via telehealth across many states in the U.S. at this point. In fact, we cover almost half of the population in the U.S. and we add more states every year. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to the show. And we'll see you in the next one.