Top 5 Exercises That Help Get Long-Term Pain Relief From Sciatica

Getting long term relief from sciatica requires you to fix the root problems that cause sciatica. Treatments that focus on symptoms are great for getting short term relief from sciatica. I’m talking things like pain medications, injections, and even stretches. And they’re definitely helpful in allowing you to feel like you’re better able to walk and move around, especially when Sciatica is really bad, and you feel debilitated.

The problem is they don’t treat the root problem which is getting stability in your lower back, and hip or pelvis bones. In this video, I’ll be covering the top five exercises that you need to be doing to get long term relief for sciatica. Just to give you a quick review of the root problem of sciatica, there’s usually a pinched nerve in the lower back and one of these nerves right here.

That’s why you need stability up in this part of the back. And you can also have a pinched nerve where the sciatic nerve comes out on the edge of this bone right here where my fingers wiggling. The root problem of sciatica is often that one of those two areas or both at the same time, are getting impinged. And it’s because of a lack of stability.

So that’s why these exercises that you’re about to learn are critical for taking pressure off the nerves in these areas. Exercise number one is a hand to heel rock exercise. Now I love this one because it takes pressure off the low back, and the pelvis bones and joints where they connect to each other in the back of the SI joint region.

So all you do is get on your hands and knees, on your bed on the floor wherever you feel most comfortable. And then you’re going to rock back and forth at a slow easy pace and only move to the motion that you feel that you can comfortably without making things hurt worse. So if you feel like you can only move little bits like this, that’s fine. And just rock back and forth nice and easy.

You can go all the way back as you get more motion. Very often when I start patients with this exercise, they start with little motions because they’re uncomfortable, they haven’t been able to stand up straight or move well. And as they keep going within the same first time they’re doing this exercise, they ended up going all the way back they get some more mobility, this exercise is super easy to do.

And as long as you can get up and down onto a batter or the floor, then it’s easy to do it often, which is what’s important. Many people think that doing this exercise once or twice is enough to get the relief the benefit of the exercise. But really, that’s a tiny dose, you need to be doing this outwardly.

If you’re very severely flared up with sciatica, I would look to do 30 to 60 reps, which will just take you a few minutes depending on how fast you go. And I would do that every hour while you’re dealing with a flared up sciatica situation, it’s important to deal with that frequently because those joints in your low back and in your pelvis, the hip bones, they need that frequent mobility in the muscles also gets stiffened up because those nerves that are affected end up connecting to the muscles and the muscles can tighten up and not move very well.

So you need to free up the muscles and the joints using this exercise. It’s an offloading exercise. So for 99% of people with sciatica, they should be able to do this as long as they can kneel and move just fine. And if you’re having trouble kneeling, you can do a standing version of this that looks just like this, you would stand and lean on something like so. And just rock back and forth as much as you can. Comfortably. It’s the same concept.

Except it might be a little more aggravating if you do it in standing versus in kneeling. So really encourage you to try to get to kneeling and if your knees bother you get some pills into your knees so that it’s more comfortable, figure out a way to make it tolerable on your knees.

The reason why standing is not as recommended as the kneeling version is because when your legs are straight, like when you’re standing, it actually puts a bit more tension through the sciatic nerve plus your more weight bearing.

So it’s not the ideal situation, but it can still be very effective for somebody who’s just in desperate need of some movement and can tolerate standing just fine. The second top exercise is lower abdominal squeezes. This is one that you just need to figure out. It’s more of a brain exercise. It’s how your brain connects to your abdominals. You’ve got to figure out how to get your lower abdominals working. And here’s why there’s a little bit of science behind this.

There’s science behind all of this. If you think of your abdominal muscles, they run from the bottom edges of the ribcage and down to the top edges of your pelvis bones right here and they fill in all this space. And if your belly buttons right here in the middle, then you can cut the abdominals into an upper half and a lower half.

Well, most people when they suck in and tighten up their abs, they’re tightening up from the top part right here and the muscle fibers that make up the abdominal muscles right here. those muscle fibers attached to the ribcage of course directly and they have attachments that go to the upper part of the low back So if you’re working on abdominal exercises and you’re feeling your upper abdominals working all the time, then you’re getting a lot of stability for the upper back.

But usually in sciatica, it’s the lower part of the low back that you need to get more stability in. That means you need to get those lower abdominals below the belly button to work better. And the other benefit of getting the abdominals down here to work is that they have attachments to the rim of these pelvis bones, which offers stability to the pelvis bones too.

So the first thing that you need to do is just sit somewhere comfortably. And ideally, where your legs can go away from your body a little bit. So like I’m on a treatment table here, but my legs are down, they’re not up here. The reason for that is so that you can feel your abs and make sure that they can work.

So put your hands on your pelvis bones right here. And then slide inwards where the muscle is, and suck in your ads and just play with how your abdominals are contracting and see if you can feel the lower abdominals work better. And usually you’ll get them to work better when you slouch a bit if you see my shoulders, my head and my chest right here, when I suck in my abs and bring myself down like so. It looks bad. It looks like I’m doing a bad slouch.

But the purpose here is to get the abs to work not to be in the best posture ever. If you can feel your lower abdominals starting to tighten up, then you’re headed in the right direction. Now you’re probably also feeling your upper abdominals working quite a bit. That’s okay when you’re starting out.

But what you need to practice here and get obsessed with because it’s going to matter for later exercises is you need to make sure that you can consistently tighten up and even hold your lower abdominal muscles in, it should feel like you’re sucking in the lowest part of your lower abdominals right above the pelvis bones.

Now do this and sitting like I am right now. And then try it lying down and when you lie down, you have to do that same slouch maneuver that I’m teaching you, but it’s going to look a little bit different because you’re going to feel like you’re pushing your back down against wherever you’re lying down.

So lie down, you can have your knees bent or straight, it doesn’t matter I tend to teach. Teach people with their knees bent first. Then flatten the back out just like that. See what it did. I’m just smashing my back down and holding it and getting the abdominals to activate. The lower the lower abdominals need to activate more than the upper abdominals.

You’re never going to get your upper abdominals to separate from your lower abdominals and be able to fire them independently or be able to fire the lower abdominals without the upper abdominals ever working to the point here is just to bias or to get the lower abdominals to fire more to wake up better so that when you go do any abdominal exercise, you’re using your lower abdominals and helping get more stability in your the lowest part of your low back and the pelvis bones that you can do this and standing to so once you learn this part, you can do this virtually anywhere.

Once you stand up or you’re going to do is stuck in the abs, and you’re going to tip your hips forward like you’re doing a forward hip thrust. You might even feel your glutes working, which is actually the next exercise, but focus on just the lowest party low abs, my belly buttons right here. So lower abs or below that I’m trying to draw in from this part to get that to tighten up.

This should feel comfortable. It should not aggravate any sciatica symptoms, nothing. Nothing on this video should aggravate sciatica symptoms. If it does, you’re doing it too hard, too intensely. It could just be that your nerves are very irritated in anything you do is going to irritate them.

So you don’t want to be doing these exercises, even though they’re a good thing for the long term relief of sciatica. If you’re very flared up, back off, let yourself rest and calm down for just a few hours, maybe a day or two at most, and begin to do light versions of these exercises so that you can get relief eventually, you need to master getting these lower abdominals working well. So you need to do this very frequently.

I tell my patients to do this every hour, I tell them hold it for 10 seconds. Feel your lower abdominals working, whether you’re standing sitting or lying down, it doesn’t matter. Just get those abdominals working. Hold it for 10 seconds and repeat it 10 times every hour that you’re awake and do this for as many days as it takes for you to get your lower abdominals working very well and not overpowering every abdominal motion with your upper abdominals.

Exercise number three is isolated glute squeezes. Now this one is just as important as getting the lower abdominals to work and you might have already been feeling your glutes working, which is great. That means your body’s coordinated, but many people that have sciatica, don’t have the coordination that you need. And that’s what we’re building here.

We need to get the lower abdominals and the glutes to give you tons of stability and your lower back. So they need to be working together simultaneously most of the time, and I’m teaching you to fire your lower abdominals and then fire your glutes. But if you feel both working at the same time, that’s just fine.

That’s where we’re headed in the way you just need to develop the awareness, the consciousness of firing each muscles so that when you’re going into more advanced exercises because these aren’t, the only exercises you need to do this is just the beginning.

Fixing sciatica for the long term is a progression over time and making sure that you maintain your strength over time, so that you’re not going back into having recurring sciatic every few months to glute muscles back here, they cover the SI joints, which is a common problem in sciatica issues.

If you can get great glute strength, then you can provide tons of stability to the area and even free up a locked aside joints, the easiest way to do it is in sitting, wherever you’re sitting, if you’re sitting right now, just think about tightening up your butt muscles, you’ll see my body go up a bit, that’s what should happen.

And if you need to get in a more comfortable chair, get your feet on the floor and just squeeze your glute muscles, tighten them up and hold it for 10 seconds, that just make sure that you’re not also tightening up your thigh muscles on the front of your thighs, even in the back of your thighs, your hamstrings.

The reason why you don’t want to tighten up your thigh muscles is because those thigh muscles attached to the this pelvis bone here, and you can shift it out of position and actually cause more compression on the sciatic nerve. So just using your glute muscles is the goal here. So only squeeze as intensely as you can without also making your thigh muscles work.

If you think of 100%, glute contraction, back off to 9070, maybe even 50 or 20, so that you can get your glutes to work and hold it hold it for 10 seconds. And don’t let your thigh muscles start to overpower the contraction. And this isn’t just a seated exercise, you can do this in lying down on your back or in standing as well.

You can virtually do it in any position you feel that you can activate your glutes and but I’m teaching you practical ways to do this throughout the day. Because these exercises are to be done throughout the day, you need to be able to translate this into standing at the grocery store or, or maybe at work if you’re sitting or standing, you need to be able to do these things there so that you can get more consistent sciatica relief and train your body to hold itself up right to support itself so that you can get long term relief and you’re not getting recurring sciatica problems.

So try this line down on your back. Just like this, you can have your legs bent, or straight, just like the abdominal one. I’ll start people with legs bent typically. And you do want to flatten your back and get those lower abdominals to work. And then squeeze your glutes here, tighten them up. And try not to use your thigh muscles and probably going to fit your thigh muscles working right away.

So you have to really concentrate focus, you might pause this video to not hear me talk for a moment. So you can just be with your own thoughts about getting your glutes to work. And just squeezing, it helps also to open your knees up like a birthing position and squeezing from there. And some people just do better with their legs straight, I actually feel a lot better with my legs straight. And trying to keep the knees just relaxed.

Don’t try to straighten out your knees because then you’re definitely going to use the front of the thighs. So for me, when I fire my glutes, my knees actually bend just naturally. They just they just kind of want to bend and I’m tightening up my glutes, they’re very well and my thighs are pretty relaxed. Hold this for 10 seconds, do it 10 times. And now we get obsessed with this one too, between the lower abdominals and the glutes.

You need to be doing this all day long, every hour every 30 minutes, if possible, holding it for 10 seconds. And I tell people do it 10 times like 10 times in a row take a little rest break in between. But the patients that I’ve had that have that are most successful, they say you know what, I don’t even count I don’t even have an alarm going off like I used to.

I just consciously am doing it throughout the day, my glutes are tightening up, my abs tightening up and I’m actually sore and tired and my glutes and ABS but the end of the day not more painful than my sciatica. I’m just tired of my muscles. And I always tell them, that’s what we need tired muscles, you’ll recover from really fast, sciatica aggravated nerves, that’s not going to be a fast recovery.

To do this and standing to you can just stand up, you have to tilt your hips just like this so that you suck in your abs, your chest and shoulders are going to come down potentially, and then you should feel your glute muscles working. And as you hold it for 10 seconds and as the reps go by, you should feel like you’re fatiguing a bit. It looks like this from the front, you’re just shoving your hips forward and you can do it real subtle. I’m kind of exaggerating right here.

But you can do it in a way that nobody’s really noticing that you’re doing it so that you don’t feel weird about it. Once you feel like you’ve got your lower abs and your glutes working well it’s time to strengthen them.

The past two exercises the abdominal holds and the glute holds are more getting the coordination getting your body to figure out how to fire the right muscles and the very first one is just a mobility exercise that’s just getting your movement back so that you can then work on the coordination.

These next two are We’re going to be strengthening exercises. So the first one is a lower abdominal strengthening exercise, you’re going to be on your back just like this knees bent, fire those low abs, your glutes might work too, that’s fine, then you’re going to reach your hands out towards your knees. And then you’re going to lift your head up, bring your chin, your chest, and start to pick up your head and shoulders.

So you’re going to do like a crunch motion, but you’re going to hold it for 10 seconds, it looks like this. Keep pushing your back flat, and keep that head down, looking between your knees because it makes your lower abs really work.

And the point here is not to come up all the way, it’s to come up enough to make your lower abs work, because if you start coming up all the way, there comes a point where it kind of gets easier and your body gets more upright, and it just stacks itself, you don’t have to work your muscles as much.

The point here is not to do a full on setup, it’s to get your lower abdominals to tire out fatigue so they can get stronger as the days go by. So fly in your back, reach your hands out, chin to your chest, come up to your feet down, hold it for 10 seconds, and you’re going to get shaky, I’m shaking already. After seven seconds, you can relax.

And if you’re not feeling any of your lower abs, you need to go back and work on the lower abs stuff, you may not be ready for this, don’t proceed into this if you’re if you’re using your upper abs because you’re going to be make it worse. And some people will do this with their legs down. I caution you on doing that if your sciatica is very flared up, because when your legs are down like this, it actually adds more tension to your sciatic nerve, it might be aggressive on your sciatic nerve.

So knees bent is usually the first place to start. But if you can tolerate it just fine, and your sciatic nerve is not talking to you. It’s not getting worse, as you’re doing this with your legs straight and it shouldn’t be okay to if you’re doing it with your legs straight, you’re going to push your back down the same way my knees are bending here, reach towards your knees and everything else is the same.

Keep your feet down, they’re going to float up. You don’t want to let your feet up here, because then you’re going to activate the hip muscles in the front right here. That’s what helps raise your legs. And it’s going to tip your pelvis incorrectly and just make it compensate in ways that you don’t need to be compensating, it’s going to add to the sciatica problem, you should do 10 reps of this all in a row, as long as you can do it, don’t force it.

If you feel like you get to rep three, or six or seven, and you feel like your sciatic nerve is talking to you more. That’s not good. Don’t force it. But if you can get to 10 reps, then great if you do whatever you can, if you only can do three reps at a time, that’s fine and progress from there.

After you can do 10 reps, then start doing this in sets throughout the day, it’s important for you to start doing it like every two hours even every hour, so that you can get that stability back to your pelvis and take pressure off the nerves.

I tell them my patients to work up to doing this 100 times in a day, the next exercise is a glute strengthening exercise. Now the requirement for this is that you have mastered being able to fire glutes without your thigh muscles all working too. So make sure you do that. Go back to the other exercise where I’m teaching about your glutes so that you can get your glutes working independently.

Your abs can work with the glutes, that’s okay, just don’t want your thigh muscles to dominate a glute exercise. So you’re going to be on your back just like this knees bent, same position as the last one. Except you don’t need to reach here, you don’t need to pick up your head, or you’re going to do is push your back flat and squeeze your butt muscles and lift just a tiny bit.

This is a bridge exercise. But you’re holding your glutes just barely off the table here. I mean, I could barely slide my hand under and I’m still trying to force my low back down against the table. This position right here causes the glutes to really get worked out. Now what you don’t want to do on this exercise is tighten the front of your thighs or the back of the thighs.

You also don’t want to stretch because if you come up higher here, it puts a big stretch on the front of the thighs right here. And that’s a bad thing. It’s actually going to compress the hip joints in the pelvis joints and can feed into your sciatica problem. So you only want to go up a little tiny bit high enough to get your glutes working.

In some people, I don’t even have them lift because that shift in the joints adds a little too much compression for their current level when they’re a little flared up. They can do it right now. So I’ll just tell them, push the back down, squeeze the glutes. Don’t lift and just hold it there. Hold it with the back flat and the glutes squeezing and doing 10 reps like that who It tires them out.

Like I feel like glutes going right here. Getting in a birthing position like opening up your feet and knees. Turning your toes out sometimes helps to get your glutes working better try that out. And the point here is not to lift as high as possible over time. That’s not how you want to progress. You need to get your glutes more tired over time.

If you can isolate your glutes work in here and really strengthen In the glutes, you’ll be in a position to where you can get that pelvis stability and the low back stability going and take pressure off consistently from your sciatic nerve.

Do this exercise, like the last abdominal exercise where you’re holding it for 10 seconds at a time, and work up to doing 10 reps. And if you can do 10 reps without any more pain, any more problems, then work up to doing 100 reps in a day spread out over time.

Eventually, as you get better at the abdominal and the glute exercise, and you’re getting towards 100 reps, you can begin to do the all the reps together. But it’s important at the beginning to spread it out over the day. So you can get consistence the stabilization of your lower back and pelvis round the clock, hey, we got a bonus exercise for you.

This one requires some equipment, that’s why didn’t include it in the top five. This one’s a little harder to access, you know a device like this you may have in the gym, or maybe you do own one at home, you need some place that you can hang your bottom half from.

Now I get asked all the time is inversion table upside down hanging, good for sciatica, and it can be but it’s not as good as this, this, in my opinion is the best because it doesn’t flip you upside down so the blood isn’t rushing to your head. And it also allows you to do some exercises using those glutes and abdominals, like we just talked about.

So if you can get an a device like this, and put your elbows on here, and dangle your lower half, and then do that same abdominal exercise that I showed you, where you’re, you’re doing this motion, where you’re sucking in your abs, pushing your back flat and squeezing your glute muscles, it should feel like the glutes are tightening up a lot and your abdominals are tightening up.

Now, I like this device specifically because there’s a pad back here. So I’m pushing my low back into the pad. So that gives me some direct feedback. But if you’re not if you don’t have a support like this, and you could just push your back backwards without a pad there and you’ll be fine as well, just as long as you get the right muscles, activating those lower abdominals and the glutes.

If you have a hanging bar, like a pull up bar, this could work too. If you just hang from here and you do the same motion that flies to you, you’ll be just fine with that. That just requires some grip strength, which not everybody’s got. So I like the elbow supports the best. These are a little long for my elbow, so I just don’t use them. And I’m just sucking in my abs, pushing my back flat legs can just do whatever they want.

I am focused on squeezing my glutes here in my abdominals, holding it for 10 seconds more if possible. And I love this because it’s taking pressure off the low back, it’s decompressing the SI joints as well. And it’s forcing you to use your most stabilizing muscles and I feel it that here’s my belly button right here, everything below my belly button, it is activating extremely well, and I get my glutes working to a lesser degree but they’re working too.

So one more time you put your elbows on here that the legs just can dangle just bending them so they’re not touching the floor here. But you could do this with your feet on the floor. By the way, right here. I’m on the floor and just do the same motion. I’m touching the ground here, and this works too.

But if you take your legs off, it just makes it more intense than those abs. You could touch with one leg or just barely touch with your toes just a teeny tiny bit to make it still more aggressive on your lower abs. This should not hurt your sciatica it should feel beneficial for it. If you feel like it’s making your sciatica symptoms worse, you’re just not ready for this.

This is a little bit more advanced. But if you can get to hear it can really save pressure on your discs and joints in your hips and pelvis and your low back head. Hope this video was helpful for you give it a thumbs up if you thought that it was don’t forget to share this with somebody that you think is suffering from sciatica and need some help.

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