The Best 5 Quick Pain Relief Tips For Help With Severe Sciatica

Sciatica can be so severe that it won’t let you move, walk or doing normal things comfortably. In many cases, even sleep is not comfortable for people suffering from sciatica, when in this situation getting quick relief is important. And it’s even better if you can do it naturally without relying on pain medications, or going to the doctor for injections or procedures.

In this video, I’m going to show you the best five quick pain relief tips for help with severe sciatica. Let’s show you the first one here, I call this one hand to heel rocking. So let’s get you on your hands and knees here. You can do this on the floor, you can do this on your bed, if you’re in your bed, it might be very soft.

So you just have to manage that it’s not going to mess up the movement at all, because you’re trying to put some slack or take some tension off is another way of saying it on your sciatic nerve. So you want to make sure that you open up your knees just a bit more have about this much space, a comfortable amount of space.

It’s not there’s nothing magical about the amount between your knees. And then you’re going to rock back like you’re a cat or a dog sitting under their hunches. And then come back up over your hands just about right there. And just nice and easy. You should do this carefully, cautiously if your pain is very severe, only move within the amount of motion that you can, without making anything worse, it should not hurt more to do this.

I love this as a starting exercise for severe sciatica. Because you’re not standing, you don’t have to get up right usually that’s very painful. Your hips are able to move in this motion most of the time, and you’re offloaded. It’s not your full body pressure. So if you have a disc problem, as part of your sciatica issue, it takes pressure off the disk to move like this. And then you can start to get a little more complex in the motion.

If you can go back and shoot your hips over to the side. Yeah, like she’s going over to the left, right there, and then come back up. And then you can go back to the middle. And then on the next rep after that you can go out to the other side over to the right. And make your hips and nerves as a result of that move slightly differently, I’ll usually tell my patients to do this hourly, one to two minutes at a time, don’t even bother counting reps, just go for a minute or two.

You can go more than that if you like but usually you get diminishing returns. In other words, it’s not going to improve that much more. But I do have some patients that say they go to town and they’ll do this for five or 10 minutes at a time, because they feel so much better after they move like this.

The second exercise is knees to chest. And it’s more of a stretch and it is an exercise you don’t have to really work too hard, maybe just your arms to hold your knees into your chest. But this one tends to be very comfortable for people because it’s relieving. It’s taking all that extra pressure and tension off the sciatic nerve off the back. And it doesn’t really aggravate anything, you can stay here for as long as you can tolerate.

I’ll usually tell people go for about 30 seconds to a minute. But some people will do this for even longer. And if for some reason being on your back is uncomfortable. You can do this on your side too. Here’s what it looks like when you pull your knees into your chest from the side. And you can be very comfortable with this you have to pull in aggressively you can kind of just position your legs there and usually they’ll generally stay there.

And this is a great position to be in just to get some comfort and relief. If your sciatica is very aggressive. If it’s very severe, it’s not letting you get into a comfortable position. This is a favorite position for my patients when they’re coming in very irritated. The number three quick pain relief tip for sciatica is hanging, been able to get some distraction to decompress your spine and your hips, your pelvis is excellent.

If you have a pull up bar if you have access to one at home or at the gym, this is ideal to use. And you can see she’s touching her feet to the ground here which is perfect because if it’s a challenge for you to grip with your full body weights, then it’s okay to put your feet down and hold yourself up.

Even if it’s a significant percentage you’re holding yourself up if it’s a 50% that your feet and 50% of your body weight in your hands. You’re still getting the decompression in your back. And that’s excellent. Now if you can’t grip from up here very well are you going to have a pull up bar, you might have access to somewhere where you can put your elbows.

So let’s show that one. Go ahead and get your, your elbows on here facing that way. You can also accomplish decompression by hanging like this and just let your legs hang down. Okay, they kind of touch the ground a bit and hanging out like this. decompresses that spine give you some much needed relief for your sciatica problem.

My recommendation for doing this is either if you’re hanging from the pull up bar or holding yourself up from the elbow pads here is to accumulate 10 minutes of time, ideally all at once because it builds up in that one time where you hold it for like a minute even 30 seconds even just 10 seconds and it’s okay to get your feet down to hold yourself up and allow you to tolerate doing 10 minutes worth but that 10

And it’s a time decompresses your discs in your spine, and the joints in your pelvis and hips. And this can really take pressure off the nerves, especially that sciatic nerve. Another version of hanging is using an inversion table, go ahead and come on over. And so she’s already been sized up to this table.

If you have access to one of these, sometimes gyms have them, or people purchase them for their own personal use, using an inversion table like this can offer some distraction, because now it’s using the upper half of your body to pull the weight away from your spine rather than the other one where you’re hanging or you’re holding yourself up from your elbows, because that’s using your lower half.

Doing it this way is a lot easier on your hands and your shoulders. So this is another option for you, of course requires some more equipment that might be harder to get to or very specific, but accumulating 10 minutes like this with breaks, if needed, is definitely doable. And if you’re not all the way vertical, like where my friend is right here, it’s actually very tolerable.

You can hang out here for 10 minutes, maybe even longer. But if you go all the way vertical, it’s definitely more distraction, more decompression in your spine. But then you start getting more of a head rush and other symptoms that may maybe you won’t be able to tolerate for very long. So working at an angle like this is just fine. What’s more important is that you take some pressure off, and then you accumulate 10 minutes or more if you can.

Number four is finding a comfortable sleeping position. And that same fetal position, that knees to chest position that we covered back in number two, is a great sleeping position. If you can get into that position where your hips are bent, your knees are bent, and your spine is comfortable there. And you don’t have to hug your knees into your chest, just get them comfortable with your get your hands comfortable wherever you like to have them.

This tends to be the most comfortable position to sleep in. Now, if you can’t tolerate sleeping on the one side, because that’s where your sciatica problem is, then you can try the other side, show us what that looks like. You go and it’s okay to have your legs not perfectly stacked, it’s fine if they’re a little bit off.

Or even if you have the bottom line a little down and up just like that there isn’t a you don’t have to be perfect about this. Just get comfortable so that you can tolerate sleeping the whole night. It’s also fine to put a pillow between your legs right here so that you can get your hips in a better position if that works for you. But it’s not 100% necessary in order to find the most comfortable sleeping position.

Number five is shrugging this exercise right here where you’re standing up against the wall. And shrugging your shoulders up is a sleeper exercise for sciatica problems. What I mean by that is it’s a sneaky one that people never think about.

But if you think about the way that the nerves are connected within the body, because they go from the brain to the brainstem and the neck and the spinal cord all the way down to your feet, they are all interconnected the nerves, if you can get the upper body moving with the lower body safe and comfortable, you can begin to move the nerves on the inside of the body and get them more comfortable with bigger motions.

So a starting point would be to do a shrug against a wall like this and get the upper traps to go up as high as possible. Hold it for about 10 seconds, and then relax, go and relax. And repeat reps like that. I’ll usually tell people to do 10 second holds. And then repeat it for 10 times every hour or so. And this is a tiring exercise.

It’s it feels like your shrug muscles up here your upper traps are getting a good workout, but it should not aggravate any sort of sciatica problems down low. And as you get more comfortable with this and it’s not bothering your sciatica symptoms, of course you have to be able to tolerate standing up a bit more, then you’re going to move your arms slightly further up the wall.

Yeah, just like that. And then shrug from this position. Now, what you’re doing here is the nerves are running your arms, you’re taking up some of the tension with those nerves by moving your arms up. And then when you add the shrug to it, you take tension up a little bit lower and that helps your nerves from the inside out to move better in the sciatic nerve.

Once you get comfortable with doing it at that level, then you’re going to straighten out your arms and only your hands are going to be on the wall. And it’s okay we need to step up a little bit closer to the wall golden ticket like a half step forward. Yeah, just so that you’re balanced and not leaning on the wall too much.

And then do a big shrug. Just make sure when you’re at this point where you’re reaching all the way up that you’re sucking in your abs and flattening out your back and even tightening up the glutes a bit because that gives you tons of stability in the lower back area. Just make sure that you keep your back flat because that helps to keep your lower back stable.

It takes pressure off your discs and you might see her glutes starting to activate here that’s good because it gives the pelvis stability as well and so he takes pressure off that sciatic nerve in the lower back and the pelvis. I recommend doing 50 to 100 reps of this exercise holding for 10 seconds each rep and working your way up to that You might not start with that right away.

But if you can start with just 10 reps in a day, and then add 10 More in so that you got 20 and keep adding 10 every other day or every few days, maybe even every week, so that you can work your way up to 50 to 100. It tends to allow the nerves to move better down lower in the body in the legs, where the sciatic nerve is, you might try all of these exercises or a combination of them and find out what works for you best.

Not every sciatica situation is exactly the same. So it’s important to experiment and try different things out you can also try different amounts of the exercises, different intensities don’t go so hard to do it at 50% doing it 100% See what works for you. But you’ve got to listen to your body and make sure that nothing is making you hurt more.

If something’s hurting more, chances are it’s making your sciatica problem or worse. So make sure to stop doing that. Hey, if you thought this video was helpful, please give us a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel here and turn on your notification bell so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos we post every single week. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye