What is Sciatica?
Sciatica is a set of symptoms including lower back or buttock pain, pins and needles or numbness that may be caused by general compression or irritation of one of five spinal nerve roots that give rise to each sciatic nerve.
The symptoms are only felt on one side of the body, with the pain occasionally running down the leg to the calf muscles.
Common causes of sciatica
Include lumbar disk injury, degenerative disc disease, pregnancy and poor posture associated with a tight prirformis muscle.
Sciatica symptoms can results by overloading the piriformis muscle, causing compression of the sciatic nerve as it leaves the gluteal region (bottom).
I have had many pregnant and post pregnant clients suffer from this.
Self treatments:
If you do not stretch correctly the piriformis (deep muscle) and only stretch the glute this will become very tight. You need to alter the angle of the leg when stretching through your hip and try a few different stretches to make sure you get a deep enough stretch.
If your core is weak and you do not hold your pelvic floor and activate the transversus abdominus (deep abdominal muscle) while performing abdominal exercises this can shorten the piriformis muscle. It is essential you keep these muscles switched on and focus on this area.
Tight hip flexors can increase the lumbar lordosis in our postures and increase tightness in the lower spine and piriformis muscles. We then tend to favour the use of the hip flexors as the preferred muscle to stabilise when performing exercises such as a plank, sit ups and push ups. It makes sense that a weaker core will trigger sciatic or lower back pain.
I know women concentrate too much on the abdominal exercises and not so much back extension exercises to help improve the overall core, you need to work on both areas the same.
Stretching needs to be including after each workout/training session and or run.
A quadriceps stretch is more common and a few calf stretches but we need to make sure we work deeper into the glutes and hip flexors to ensure sciatic does not arise.
It is important as the piriformis muscle is crucial to our daily function, standing up – sitting down, abducting (turning leg out), squatting and lying down.
An awareness of these functions will make you realise we need to look after these muscles as the pain of sciatic can be quite painful and the “grabbing” of the nerve can be very sharp.
A little stretch goes a long way, from being uncomfortable to pain free, so take time out to stretch as much as you can.
Get off the couch and onto the floor each day and I can assure you, you’ll feel so much better.
