How Everyone Can Get Long Term Sciatica Relief

Have you been suffering with sciatica problems for months now? Are you looking for real long-term relief? Well, in this video today, I’m going to give you three expert tips, including three exercises that you can do right now at home to begin to improve your sciatica problem for the long term.

Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. And I’m a specialist physical therapist, I’ve been helping out people with sciatica problems for years, we’re pretty darn good at it. Now, there are three exercises that I give our clients frequently. And I’m going to go over those with you today, so that you can start doing those at home for your sciatica problem to get true, long term relief of this issue.

And I’ll tell you about situations where you might need to get some expert help too, just to make sure that you fix any joint problems or any problems that you can’t really fix at home. But these three exercises that I’m going to show you are pivotal in making sure that you get long term relief for your sciatica problem.

The first big tip that I want to give you is, you have got to avoid stretching your sciatica nerve!!! And there’s tons of ways that people do this, I’m going to show you just a couple of the quick common things that people do to stretch their sciatic nerve, they look like this, the two most common stretches. People lie down the back, cross one leg over the other and then pull their knee up into their chest or towards their head this way to stretch this part out because that sided nerve travels through the leg this way. And you’ll feel a big stretch doing this.

The problem of doing this is when you get that stretch, it’s feedback. It tells your body you’re doing something, but the truth is if you’ve got a real irritated sciatica nerve, it’s going to irritate it further. In another video, I go into a lot of detail about why stretching is bad for sciatic nerve problems, check out the link in the description below to get to that video.

Another stretch that’s commonly done to stretch up the sciatic nerve is people will do this,

they’ll just reach towards your toes, you might do in standing as well, where they’re standing up and just bending over. But the same idea is there where you’re reaching your feet with your hands. And the problem with this is you are stretching your side mirror this way, and nerves just don’t like stretching. Again, I go into it in detail in that video, check out that link for that video in the description below here.

But the main message I want to leave you with today on this video is if you are stretching your sciatic nerve anyway, even if it’s different than the ways that I just showed you, you’ve got to look at avoiding doing that. The only time I tell people go ahead and do it is if you’re just at a crossroads where you’re like, alright, I’m either going to take this medication, which I really don’t want to do, or I’m going to do a stretch. It’s kind of up to you what you want to do at that point.

But I wouldn’t look to stretching as a long-term solution to fix your Sciatica problem. That just isn’t the case. It’s a short-term solution.

Now the second tip I want to leave you with today, for Sciatica a relief for the long term is to move. You have got to move. Now this is based on whatever is in your tolerance for movement. Because if you’re really severe, with your sciatica problem right now, then a lot of movement may not be a good idea for you, you got to do what you can, without flaring up your problem too much.

We get people to come in here to the clinic and they’re just hunched over, they can’t straighten up. If you’re in that situation, you got to probably do movement in a seated position or lying down position. But you’ve got to move somehow it may be some exercises, it may just be doing some chores or something simple, you may be folding the laundry sitting down at your couch or chair wherever you are, you’ve got to keep up with your life a little bit at least, because that movement is critical to move your nervous system you all your nerves within your body, including that Sciatica nerve need movement, the worst thing you can do is just sit there and do nothing for a long period of time.

Because that will actually make your nerves worse over the long term. A lot of people that come in here with sad problems are just sitting around trying to let it calm down and it will kind of calm down a bit if you sit around. But then your nerves will tighten up nerves have a certain amount of flexibility. When they get irritated, they shorten and then if you don’t move a whole lot after that they shortened even more.

You want to make sure your nerves have good links so that they can begin to move better. And you can recover from your socket problem for the long term. So if you’re sitting right now and you’ve been sitting for a while, you got to get up and start moving, do what you can without clogging up that sack a problem too much.

Now the third tip I want to give you is but exercises you have to get stronger in your butt muscles. And what I want to just differentiate what I want to talk about the difference between for you is there’s a difference between high repetition cardio type exercises like where you’re moving consistently for several minutes, maybe 10 1520 minutes. Like if you were to get on a treadmill or a bike an elliptical or something similar or rowers, another option, that’s good for increasing the amount of reps you can do, being able to keep your glutes moving for a period of time.

What I’m talking about though, is strengthening like gaining more strength, increasing the amount of strength that you can put it through a muscle, the amount of power that you can put in through muscle. There are a few exercises I’m going to take you through right now to show you how to begin to get that strength. But for the long term, you’ve got to increase your strength and keep it up high to prevent this Sciatica problem from coming back.

So I’m going to give you just a quick progression, what you should do. And the first exercise I’ll show you is just like the beginner exercise; you might hang out there for a week or two just depends on your current strength level and irritation in your sack a problem. The second exercise is kind of the next step, you might do it in along with the first one. And then the last exercise I’m going to give you that third one is definitely a higher-level exercise.

I would make sure you’re good at the first two exercises before moving on to that third exercise. Now, just a quick side note, before we get too late on this, if you’re planning on following this little quick routine for your sciatica problems, so that you can get that long term relief, you might just bookmark this this page that you’re on this YouTube video, so that you can come back to it in case you forget which exercise comes next. So just reminding you to do that now. Right, let me show you the first exercise.

So we’re going to do bridges. And I need you to do it just like this. So you can be lining your back, on your bed on the floor, wherever you want. You got to push your back flat so that your abs tighten up here. So you’re pushing this part down, and then you’re going to squeeze your butt muscles. So you should feel them tighten up right there, holding the back flat, abs tight, and then your butt muscles tight, you’re going to lift up and start to hold it here.

And the hold is really important because it starts to wake up all those muscle fibers, all the cells in your butt muscles that haven’t been used properly over the past months or years, or however long it’s been for you develop the Sciatica problem. After about 10 seconds, you can come down and relax. And you’re going to repeat this 10 times. So back flat, but tight, lift up and do a slow 10 counts. And you should be feeling these butt muscles working really hard, hard. Now what I want you to think about is, a lot of people start getting spasms here or Charley horses’ cramps, that kind of thing.

You want to avoid that the way that you can avoid it is by making sure that your butt muscles are doing the majority of the work, you shouldn’t feel like your hamstrings are doing a lot of work. So if you’re going through the setup for the exercise, or you’re pushing your back flat and then squeezing your butt, you need to make sure that when you do the squeeze your butt part that it’s tight, as hard as hard as you can, because then when you start to lift up, you’re going to be using these butt muscles rather than the hamstrings.

And if you feel like you’re just really dominate like you want to use your hamstrings don’t even lift just start with a modified version of this where you just back flat, but tight and just get good at tightening up your butt without trying to fire your hamstring so much. Another tip is open up your knees, that tends to fire your butt muscles a bit more. So I would work at waking up those butt muscles holding it for 10 seconds here to get all the fibers all the muscle cells in your butt working hard.

Now the second exercise I’m going to show you requires you to have already good control over your butt muscles. So you just can’t quite get them to turn on because that happens all lot and people will sciatica problems, they just don’t need to use your butt muscles are almost unaware of being able to fire them. But once you’ve got that down, you use that bridge exercise to get them going.

Then here’s the next exercise that you want to do. It’s called the butt blaster; you need to get on all fours just like this to put your hands however you want. And another version of this to call it the donkey kicks.

Same thing, what you got to do is again, tighten up your abs that helps you to make sure that your back is stable and that you’re not moving in a funky way that could hurt you back. And then once you got your abs tight, you’re going to keep your knee bent and squeeze your butt as you bring your foot up towards the air and just going to do reps like this. I would go if you can get to 100 reps, that’d be fantastic.

You might start at 20 or 30 reps, work your way up to 50 and eventually work your way up to 100. And every time you come up you need to be squeezing that booty muscle. You might alternate sides doesn’t really matter how you do this exactly. If you want to go one left one right, or 10 on the left on the right or just do them all on one side and then do the other side. It doesn’t matter.

You just got to get those buttock muscles moving and strong and you should be squeezing pretty darn hard. Every time you’re about to lift like right here when we’re about to Pick up my leg, I’m already thinking about squeezing my left, but she has his knees coming off the table here. And then as I drive my foot upwards, my knee, my butt muscle is squeezing as hard as it possibly can. And which one avoid is twisting your back a lot.

That’s why you keep your abs tight, so that you’re not doing a lot of back motion while bringing your foot up. And it as you can see, I’m not bringing my foot that high, if I were to twist that can get way higher. But the point here is not to twist my back is to strengthen my butt. So I want to make sure that my butt muscle tightens up quite a bit.

So that’s the second exercise that we’ll be doing. Now those first two exercises, you might spend some decent time there just depends on how severe Sciatica problem is, and how weak your butt muscles are. If you’re quite weak, and you’re just not confident that you can do much more on your butt muscles just hanging out and these two exercises for a while, remember you, you’re going to want to bookmark this video, so that you can come back to this third exercise this third exercise does require you to have some decent strength in your butt muscles, as well as be able to just fire your butt muscles on command.

Now just a side note, kind of a weird thing, but it really helps if you’ve got the ability to squeeze each butt cheek independently, like you can do left, right, left, right, left, right, then you’re ahead of the game, you got some good bug control, and you’re probably going to progress to these exercises a bit faster. But if you’re the type that you’re like, holy cow, I can’t do that. That’s, that’s too weird for me get good at starting to do that and use these two exercises that I just showed you.

To get that control over your butt muscles to where you can fire them on command, you’ve literally got to get a better brain connection to your butt muscles and be able to fire them independently and on commands so that you can do this next exercise appropriately. Alright, let’s go into exercise number three here, this is the one that you’re going to take yourself to the next level on make sure that your strength actually goes up the past two, were mainly to wake up the butt muscles and get the all the little cells all the fibers be able to use 100% of them because muscles do shut down.

If you’re not using them appropriately, they will weaken, and they won’t give your joints and your muscles and all the other tissues the support they’re supposed to give them. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re using all the fibers. So you can do a squat here. Now I’m going to mainly show you my hips and you need to be able to see my hips here, you’re going to be in a comfortable stance, it doesn’t matter if you’re in how wide your feet are too much.

Generally, the about shoulder hip with the part is a good place to start. And you want to angle your toes out slightly, just make sure they’re not straightforward, you want to just slightly angle them out. And I’m showing you a side view here because I need you to see my hips and my lower back just like we did on the bridge where you flattened out your back and tighten up your butt, you got to do the same thing here. So in the standing position, you’re going to fly out your back, squeeze the butt muscles, and this is the top position of the squat.

Now your knees might be slightly bent, that’s okay, that’s actually not a bad thing at all. But suck those abs in, squeeze the butt. And then what you’re going to do next is descend or go straight down, as if you’re dropping your butt right between your heels. So it looks like this, I’ve got to keep my back straight and go straight down. And right here I’m firing butt muscles. It doesn’t feel like I’m firing much else a little bit in my thighs. But mainly but muscles, then come back up and squeeze the butt pretty hard.

When you come down, you don’t have to go down low, you just have to go down what’s comfortable. With your butt’s still firing. So if I go down to about right here, I feel my butt working pretty hard. But as I go down lower but starts to turn off just a bit. It’s still working, but my thighs are engaging a bit more. So I’m going to come up out of there at that position, you don’t have to go down super low. So down nice and wide with the knees, and then up and tighten up, down. Why would the knees and then up and tighten up.

What you want to do here is start out with about 20 reps, slow controlled, you’ve got to control your back position and make sure that your butt’s working the whole time. As you get more and more comfortable with this, then you can go a little faster and I would definitely climb up in reps a great goal to have to make sure that your sack problem goes away for the long term and that you keep it away is to be able to do 50 to 100 reps somewhere in that range while still using your butt muscles.

Now let me show you the wrong way to do this because everybody makes this mistake. They set up right and then instead of dropping straight down especially as they get higher and reps like once or into the 50s and beyond, they start to hinge too much they start to bring your chest and shoulders down and stick their butt backwards. If you’re using your butt as a targeting you know you’re aiming with your butt, you don’t want to aim for behind you on the floor at the wall behind you. You want to aim straight down.

So your butt should be dropping straight down when you come down and then squeezing when you come up. And I have people do this exercise, sometimes even just mild where they’re just doing a little baby bend like this and then coming up, and that’s okay as long as you feel like your butt muscles are working.

Remember, the biggest thing about all these exercises is the main expert tip points that I want to leave you with is you’ve got to strengthen your butt muscles. That’s just it. The reason for it, the bringing my skeleton here in a sack a problem.

That sciatica nerve pops out right here, and it goes down into the leg it this is the buttock area right here. The glutes, the butt muscles, they wrap over this area and attached to the tailbone. And they give the joint between the tailbone and this pelvis bone, lots of stability. And in most cases of Sciatica, of this pelvis bone out of here is shifting in some way, putting pressure on this poor Sciatica nerve, because the bone around and there’s a ligament right here, can compress it and cause it Sciatica issue.

Now, there could be other issues up in the lower back, that could be issues down in the hip and into the knee, and even into the foot contributing to this. But what I see is, by and large, a lot of sciatica patients that we see here are dealing with some shift in their pelvis. And it’s because this, the glute strength out of here, is not good enough to keep this bone in the position that it should be. So it is critical that you strengthen your butt muscles.

Well, guys, I want you to give these exercises a shot. Let me know how it goes for you drop a comment right down here below to let me know if they’re working out for you. And if you get to those squats, if they if you end up progressing yourself to the first two extra, the first two exercises, and then you get to that third exercise, you’re doing a squat, let me know how the squats work out for you as well.

I’m really interested to know how these exercises are working for you. So please drop a comment for me. And make sure to check out that video that I dropped the link in the description for about how why stretching makes sack problems worse, so that you can have a full understanding about why you to exercise specifically the glute muscles and why you should avoid stretching. Because if you’re doing stretching and trying out these exercises, you may be working against yourself. So it’s good for you to have a good understanding about why you shouldn’t be stretching.

Hey, if you’re thinking that you might need to hire us to help you for your specific sciatica problem, because you’re just not quite getting these exercises, right or you’re afraid that you might do something wrong and hurt yourself or you’re still having some issue with a sciatica problem, whether it’s in your back or your hips or somewhere else where the sciatica nerve travels, and you want to get some hands on help some expert help in person, then what I recommend you do is scroll down to the bottom of this page and find the button that says request a free 20 minute discovery visit.

Hit that button will pop up a little window where you can leave us your details. And what we can do for you is give you a completely free discovery visit which is a 20 minute appointment with a specialist physical therapist where we can check out your sciatica problem in person or virtually. And we can see you over the camera we use zoom or Google Hangouts, one of those video software’s and we can diagnose the problem and begin to formulate a plan to resolve your problem for the long term.

There is nothing to lose, this is a completely free visit. And there is no commitment if you don’t, if you decided to want to work with the school, our responsibility to us just to make sure that we give you all the information that you need about your sciatica problem, so that you can make the best decision moving forward about it. But I sure hope we can be a part of your success story. Please take advantage of this offer go down to the bottom and hit that discovery visit Request button.

Or another option for you is to also just call us our phone numbers at the top of the page here or I’ll give it to you here it’s 915-503-1314. And when you talk to one of my staff will be asking you questions about your sciatica problem because we just want to make sure that we don’t waste your time that it’s a type of sciatica problem that we can really help out here in the clinic so that you can get that long term relief and avoid having to suffer with a softer problem and possibly have an unnecessary surgery, injections or rely on pain medications without finding a true cure for this problem, which is exactly what we do here. Force advocate issues. I hope you have a wonderful day.