Sciatica – Why Stretching Is Not A Good Idea

Hey there, have you tried stretching for a sciatica problem? Well, I’m here to tell you that it is not a good idea, especially in the long term. Real quick, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. I’ve been helping people out with sciatica problems for many years now. And I often get them coming in saying they’re doing a certain type of stretch.

Typically, they’re doing a stretch where they’re reaching towards their toes with their legs straight, or they’re crossing their leg one over the other, and then pulling their knee towards their chest to stretch up the butt area, right where the sciatic nerve comes out from the base of the spine.

These types of stretches are not a good idea to be doing, especially in the long term. And let me go into three reasons why.

Number one, nerves get worse with stretching.

You got to think of it this way, nerves have a certain amount of flexibility. Now many people realize this, but whenever you move your body, say your arm or your legs, there’s nerves in there, and they have to move with your body.

So if you stretch out your arm a certain way, the nerves that come out of your neck, and go all the way down into your arm to your hand, have to be able to stretch and move through the normal range of motion that you’ve got.

But an interesting thing that we’ve learned recently about nerves is that they have their own separate flexibility apart from other tissues. It’s not drastic, like some muscles can get really tight, because it’s not like a muscle where it can shorten and lengthen. But it does actually shorten just a tiny bit and lengthen just a tiny bit. And that tiny bit of lengthening and shortening can make a huge difference in nerve symptoms.

So if we’re talking to Sciatica nerve, it’s the biggest peripheral nerve in the body meaning not spinal cord, besides spinal cord, it’s the biggest nerve in the body. So when it comes out of the tailbone area, and goes all the way down the back of your leg back of the knee, into the calf, into the bottom of the foot to the toe tips, if you lose just a little bit of flexibility, and that sciatic nerve, going to go walk, when you have to move your leg out, and stretch it out, just subtly to take a step, all of a sudden becomes a stretch for your nerves. And if you’re doing that repeatedly, then you’re just constantly stretching that side nerves, it’s irritated. And it can keep it more irritated.

So, if you think now, I’m going to go reach my hands towards my toes to stretch that nerve or bring my knee towards my chest, to stretch the nerve where it comes out of the butter because it feels tight back there. It actually is further stretching the nerve. And this tends to make it worse.

I tell people all the time to stop stretching here in the clinic. And they look at me confused. And because they’re thinking, well, it kind of feels good to stretch you I’m going to stop doing that. And I tell them Yes, absolutely. There’re other things that we give them to do that help them with some short term pain relief. But doing the stretching in the short term ends up affecting the nerve for the long term, it ends up keeping the problem there longer than it should, because it doesn’t let the irritation within the sciatic nerve to go down so that it can calm down and allow you to sleep at night.

So if you’re stretching right now, stop doing it so that you can allow that nerve to calm down. The second reason why stretching is a bad idea is because a lot of times in Sciatica there’s different types. But one of the most common types, is when we’re the pelvis bones, the hip bones in other words are shifted.

And if they’re shifted, and a person goes to stretch out their leg muscles or their butt muscle, they can further shift the bones, which makes the side of the problem worse. Oftentimes, when those pose bones are shifted, right where the sciatic nerve comes out from the pelvis, it is pinching on the on the side of nerve.

So if you think of the pelvis bones, so the tailbone would be in the back spine coming up, pelvis just like so, and then you have the hips on the outside going to connect and down to the legs. If one of those bones shifts, it starts to pinch on the side of nerve right where it comes out of the pelvis. And if you go to stretch not knowing that your pelvis has shifted, then it’s going to potentially further twist the pelvis and pinch that nerve worse over time. And if you don’t stretch hard enough to actually shift the pelvis, at the very least what it’ll do is keep the pelvis shifted. You want to avoid stretching also for this reason.

Now let me side note here, let me tell you about why stretching can kind of be a good thing for just certain situations within a sciatica a problem. Well, people are stretching because they feel tight, and it just makes sense. If it’s tight, then go stretch it. And whenever a nerve gets affected, especially like the sciatic nerve, the muscles that are connected to that normal respond by tightening up.

That’s a tightening sensation that you get the nerve itself is also tightening. So that could produce a tightening sensation as well. But if you reach down behind your leg with a sciatica problem, or sometimes in the calf muscle, you’ll feel those muscles are just hard. And it makes sense to want to stretch it out on the surface level. If that’s what you’re doing the stretching for, that’s the reason why you’re doing the stretching, you got to realize that there’s other ways to relax the muscle besides stretching.

The next most common thing that people think is, well, should I massage it?

That’s a slightly better solution than stretching. But you want to not put pressure on the nerve itself. So massaging it, you got to be careful with that, too. There’s, there’s some certain ways to go about it. So just wanted to give you that bit of information in case you’re thinking okay, I’ll start massaging instead of stretching it.

Now these tight muscles will pull the bones into a shifted position. So you want to make sure that these muscles end up relaxing eventually. But if you really stretch hard, on an already tight muscle, it’s going to further pull the bones into a shifted position. The biggest reason of all to avoid stretching, or at least have the right mentality towards stretching is that stretching is not solving the root problem of the sciatica issue.

Usually, it’s a disc problem up in the spine, some spinal movement problem. In other words, the spine is out of balance with the muscles and it’s moving in correctly, that pelvis shift is another big reason why the sciatic nerve is involved. And if we don’t correct those things up higher than the sciatic nerve problems are going to go away no matter how much stretching is done. So he got to stop stretching in the short term to make sure that the long term problem is fixed.

Now there’s abdominal exercises that need to be done usually glute exercises that need to be done to get that stability up in the in the pelvis and lower back. If you have a known disc issue in your lower back, then that needs to be definitely addressed. And that’s typically not an easy thing, you need to make sure you see a health care professional to make sure that you’re going about that correctly.

If you’ve got a sciatica problem right now, especially if it’s been happening for several months, or even years, sometimes it isn’t severe when it comes on. But it comes and goes it goes away for a little while. And then it comes on if you do too much like if you walk too much or, or do certain exercises, it can flare up and then it starts bothering people whenever they’re sleeping, just sitting around whenever they first get up to go walk that that tends to be very uncomfortable. And usually stops people from being able to walk as long as they want, or be able to do exercise, or even just get comfortable in any position.

In extreme cases of sciatica, we see people that are just uncomfortable sitting uncomfortable standing there just constantly shifting positions, trying to find some position of comfort but not having much success. Sadly, if this is you, you need to get some sort of short term relief. So maybe stretching will help.

But if it’s not getting better with stretching, after you try it for just a day, then don’t proceed, you might need to go see a specialist to make sure that your problem is under control if you just can’t find a comfortable position, because that’s not any way to live. Now if you’ve got the type of sciatica or problem that kind of comes and goes and you’re okay, for longer periods of time, then that is the best time to work on it because it’s usually not that severe, so it’s not going to take as much treatment to get better.

Now a few bits of advice that I can give you to start doing the short term is to definitely strengthen your abdominal muscles, and also strengthen your glute muscles, the butt muscles, those two muscle groups in nine out of ten sciatica cases need to be strengthened severely in order to take the pressures off that side of nerve and keep the bones all stable. So if they’re not shifting, it also helps to take pressure off discs that are affected and can cut you can be contributing to the Sciatica problem.

The next best thing that you can do is don’t stop moving. Now this is relative to your current ability and how irritable the Sciatica nerve is. If you can’t walk for more than five or 10 minutes without this sciatica problem just getting worse, then just walk for one or two minutes. The point here is that the more motion you maintain, the healthier the nerve will be in the long term.

If you just do nothing if you stay still, if you rest it, it tends to get worse because nerves need motion, but within their tolerance with what with what they can do with how much time they can take and how much flexibility they have.

The third bit of advice that I have for you is go see a health care expert somebody that specializes in treating Sciatica problems is ideal, because then they’ll they would have seen this regularly day in and day out. It’s something that they probably treat every day like we do here in our clinic. But you need to make sure that you get a handle on this sciatica of problems so that you can work it out of your body and be able to get back to all the things you were doing before.

Here in the clinic, we have an excellent success rate with treating sciatica problems. And we just know how to identify the different types sciatica. We know what techniques to do, how to guide patients on exercises, we have countless reviews on our on our website on our online. Wherever we have reviews, we see sciatica quite often and get it under control for patients really fast. And the thing that I want to stress to you about this is oftentimes patients come in with their sciatica problem.

They’ve been dealing with it for months, and it just my heart breaks when they’ve been going so long, trying to find some sort of short term relief thinking that it’s going to solve the problem like they’re taking medications, they’ve gone to physicians that have given them injections and prescription strength pain medications.

In some cases, people have had surgery to have this problem address and it didn’t go away. So it was kind of an unnecessary surgery. It breaks my heart when that happens. But I’m also glad that they’re here so that we can get that issue under control.

Please start taking this advice, I don’t want you to be dealing with a sciatica problem any longer than you should. If you’re thinking that you need to hire us to help you for your sciatica problem, we’d love to help you out, we look to at least just begin the process of seeing if we’re the right fit for your type of sciatica problem.

The best way to get started on this is to go up to the top of our webpage right here and hit the cost and availability button. Once you hit that a webpage will come up. You can leave us your details on that web page, your name your numbers, some other information that we asked about your Sciatica problem.

Once we have that information, one of my staff will call you back as quickly as possible so that we can begin to find out if it’s the type of sciatica problem that we’re best at helping out. It’s not we want to make sure to send you the right healthcare professional and not waste your time. If you are the right type of problem that we can help out so that we can solve this issue, then we’ll let you know the next steps to take with us. I hope you have a wonderful day.