Do You Have A “Pinched” Sciatic Nerve? How To Tell + What To Do!

hey everyone what's up it's dr charlie johnson physical therapist here in this video i want to answer a question i recently got i went something like this hey dr charlie how can i tell if a pinched nerve is causing my sciatica and what do i do about it so to clear up any confusion around this topic i want to let you in on a couple different types of sciatica and how you can test to see what type of sciatica you're most likely dealing with as well as where you should focus your efforts when it comes to the treatment and recovery of your sciatica also i want to help you answer this question and put your mind at ease by teaching you what you need to know about sciatica and how to do some basic detective work to figure out if your nerve is in fact pinched or not pinched uh so be sure to watch the end because i'm going to share with you exactly where i focus my efforts uh when helping people with sciatica and where you should focus yours too in case you're new to this channel again hi everyone my name is dr charlie johnson i am a doctor physical therapy and orthopedic board specialist and i help people with back butt and sciatica problems heal naturally by teaching them how to use movement as medicine be sure to hit the subscribe button as well as the bell for notifications when i post new content every single week if you want to learn how to fix yourself and fix yourself naturally so you don't need pill shots or surgery all right so let's dive right into it all right so how do you tell if you have a pinched sciatic nerve basically how do you tell what the heck is causing your sciatic nerve to be so aggravated so how do you tell what do you need to know and what do you do about it when you sort of figure that out so just get that sciatic is a broad term used to describe a problem with the sciatic nerve people with sciatica have pain and limitation doing many different things in life as you probably figured out but specifically doing this motion on their painful side and sometimes even on their non-painful side so we call this a straight leg raise um if you haven't already grabbed a free copy of my diy diagnostic guide that helps you understand all potential causes of sciatica and pain in the back butt and leg then please do that i'll include a link above but basically this test uh let's just say you do this test uh because your right leg has the pain numbness tingling um and you have no problem like it's like comparable to the other side and everything is good to go there's no issue or limitation with it it doesn't reproduce your sciatica type problem then we can be 90 or more sure that you do not have sciatica so uh this straight leg raise test is really good at screening and picking up on any sensitivity of the sciatic nerve so if you haven't already again go download that guide and or test this out so the point is though is that sciatic is a motion-based problem it can be reproduced with motion so this is super important i'm not going to dive into it this second but there will be more on this if you stay tuned later and this plays into how we treat it often times with people uh people with sciatica have been told or led to believe that they have a pinched sciatic nerve so uh if you have sciatica maybe you you think of it in your brain as something compressing or pinching the nerve so i want to clear up any confusion here because most of the time it's not due to a pinched nerve so because of this right they travel down a path to decompress the sciatic nerve or unpinch it so there's expensive decompression programs out there a lot of people go they buy inversion tables right and it sort of make logical sense you try to hang from a pull-up bar things like that and look they're helping great but um they're often not helping because your nerve is compressed and needs decompression but a lot of times if they believe they have a pinched nerve or they've been shown an mri that shows a pinched nerve they head down a treatment path to unpinch it and they ask me questions like this so dr charlie if i have a pinched nerve how can you unpinch it you're not a surgeon right if my disc is herniated to the number one cause of sciatica how can we get it to go back in place there's a lot of treatments to talk about pushing the disc material back in place uh hey i have an inversion table or maybe i want to try decompression is that something i should give a go or i should try and look they're all valid questions but they all stem from the belief that sciatica equals a pinched nerve and again it somehow needs decompressing but the truth is most people have sciatica don't have a nerve that's pinched at all in fact it's actually the opposite in most cases we're going to chat about that in a moment so real fast some good news to put your mind at ease because you're probably wondering as you have searing pain in your leg and you're getting frustrated looking around and seeing all the potential causes of sciatica and you're not sure what the heck's going on you might be wondering do i need surgery so good news again 97 of folks with sciatica which is the number one uh the number one cause being due to a disc herniation recover without surgery so we did a study uh it actually came out in 2021 so just recently i think september at the time of shooting this video like a couple months ago and the goal was to compare surgical versus non-surgical treatment for folks with disc herniations and sciatica and this is a huge number of people a huge study we call it a retrospective study we looked at it data back at data between 2007 and 2017 essentially 278 000 records of adult people uh with disc herniations um what we found uh the results show that 97 recover without surgery only three percent needed surgery so basically the end of the day look the overwhelming majority of people do not need surgery to fix these problems um no matter what you've been led to believe uh just time education and motion pretty cool so if your mind was headed in that deep dark direction your discus bulge or herniated beyond repair then hold your horses right pull your mind out of the gutter chances are very high that you'll do just fine without it so look it's still useful to clear up any confusion around you know sciatica what questions you may have what it is what you've got going on uh despite the fact that you know you're probably not going to need surgery so you can sleep better at night and feel confident in understanding what's likely going on and this is important because your mind what you believe what you think becomes um you know sort of what you manifest or what happened so it's going to impact how you heal just as much if not more than your physical body and what you do with it so look if you believe that your nerve is pinched without actually knowing what it is or if it's actually true right and that you need surgery to unpinch it then you're probably right so when we look at a lot of the evidence around um you know how people respond to certain treatments one of the biggest predictors of whether or not people will get better with chiropractic manipulation or massage or pt or surgery or things like that is the belief that that treatment will help them so the belief is very powerful all right so look i'd hate to see you get in your own way of healing and head down a path of treatment surgery injections things like that that isn't needed if at all possible so the goal of what i'm going to teach you here in a moment is to educate you and put your mind at ease right number two break any beliefs that you are broken things are pinched you need decompressing or some type of fixing and then finally my goal is to empower you and help you understand what you can do about your issue to put you in control right so let's get into it so again sciatica is just a term to describe something wrong with the sciatic nerve it doesn't tell us what's causing it uh just as something you know funky is happening with the nerve but clinically so when people come into sort of the office if you will you're examining someone at a christmas party it doesn't matter all right when you're in person with somebody sciatica presents two different ways and there are sort of two these aren't sort of official types of sciatica but in my experience you could take sciatica pain with a straight leg raise right nerve pain numbness tingling usually worse in the legs and in the back and then you can branch it and you can say this type of static or this type of static so we're going to clear that up right so there's sort of two types of sciatica if you want to think of it like that so again regardless of which type of sciatica you have chances are you won't need surgery but knowing which type will help you understand what you need to look out for what you need to keep an eye on in case you are one of those people who might need it and how you might go about finding relief so here they are so here are the two types right so one type is an unhealthy sciatic nerve and the other type is an angry sciatic nerve all right so which type of nerve problem do you have first things first we're going to talk about an unhealthy sciatic nerve alright so let's make this super simple when you feel unhealthy or unwell do you move faster or slower does your sense of taste and smell heighten or does everything seem just kind of blah and bland so if you respond how most people do when they're not feeling well your body doesn't want to move as fast right you slow down your senses become dampened and the same thing with a sciatic nerve that is unhealthy so one type of sciatica you could be dealing with is one where your nerve is physically unwell unhealthy and in this case the nerve may be experiencing some type of compression due to swelling or another structure this would be sort of the pinched nerve category all right so you want to think of sciatic nerve the sciatic nerve at a micro level sort of like a highway so this is a game i used to play um you can see it's frogger so you've got all those lanes on the highway sort of think of that roadway and all those lanes as the sciatic nerve but instead of traffic flowing down it you've got information such as feeling to the skin and movement to the muscles being transported from your back down your lake so again here's sort of that highway if you will and notice with the green arrows just like you know you're looking at a traffic pattern on the i don't know the news or the weather channel weather channel i don't think they have traffic on there whatever okay some news channel all right you see that's a healthy nerve so all lanes are in green like good to go there's no traffic there's no roadblocks so in this case of a healthy nerve feeling and strength are normal all the signals are flying down at normal rates nerve conduction basically how well again the signals are traveling how fast they're traveling from point eight point a to point b wherever that may be is normal right sensation that's just like the little hot red uh skin picture there and then muscle so uh nerves carry information such as feeling the skin and movement to the muscles but an unhealthy nerve you can see here look at the lanes a couple of those lanes are closed right so everything's good up to that point then you've got something going on a uh something pinching it or compressing it or placing pressure on it and beyond that point sort of like a traffic jam or an accident would cause you see slowing of signals so an unhealthy nerve there's some form of compression along the nerve which leads to closure of the lanes right at least temporarily and this prevents nerve signals of feeling and movement that information going down right from getting to its target so while i don't love the term one could argue that this nerve is being pinched and pinch sounds kind of like permanent but again as swelling reduces as we can move your body in different ways we can sort of we can unpinch it and again the majority of cases 97 so because this nerve begins to lose function uh so no mri or nerve tests are needed because we can test the function of the nerve not against mris nerve tests things like that it's just why do it when it's very obvious and we can actually do it without having so if we know that nerve send information such as feeling or sensation right and movement strength then we can test each of these things individually to make sure they're good so let's talk about feeling or sensations first so sciatica commonly causes weird feelings right so if you're having sciatica you may say hey it feels hot it feels cold feels like water's trickling down my leg it feels like ants are crawling around on it or it may feel burning electric like tingly it may feel like the circulation is being cut off or maybe intensified whatever more circulation feels full swollen um these are normal so these are completely normal when dealing with sciatica so the difference is that some folks with cycle will actually lose their ability to feel we're not talking just funky feelings right so weird funky feelings are one thing but true loss of feeling that is not changeable with motion is kind of there like hey my foot's been numb for like days right that is different true numbness so the sciatic nerve is made up of several nerve branches so it's helpful to have kind of like a really high level of overview of anatomy if you will so um there's sort of five bones in the lower back and you have different nerves that come out between them uh the sciatic nerve is made up of several kind of those nerve branches l4 l5 s1 is two and then they come together and they go down the leg um all the way down to the foot so the most common sciatic nerve issues sort of in this order um impact the l5 by the s1 first sacral nerve root l just stands for low back or lumbar nerve roots and then the l4 so l5 s1 and l4 levels are most commonly affected l4 not nearly as common that's why i put it last and these nerve levels give feeling to a specific area of the skin in the lower leg or foot so they own a specific kind of real estate roughly in the leg and we call these regions where these nerves supply feeling dermatomes that's a fancy medical term for it all right so you can see here right that the l4 sorry it's a little bit dull but the l4 kind of goes down the side to the right the front of the thigh maybe even to the knee right the inside of the knee and down to the inner ankle bone all right the l5 goes to the side of the knee and goes to the kind of the outer shin and then towards the big toe you say hey i'm feeling down my big toe feels a little numb or whatever that's l5 uh and then the first sacral nerve root s1 kind of goes down the back of the thigh to the back of the calf and then towards your little kind of pinky toe the side of your foot so let's test your ability to feel so what i want you to do is i want you to lightly brush the skin of your outer lower leg on the right side then the left side so what you would do is you'd say hey let me kind of feel what this is like and you compare that on the right side to the left side all right then you want to do the inside which we'll be testing so that'll be l5 compare one side to the other right and then you do the inside kind of on the bony part of your shin very lightly touch it all right so i was going a little rough out here very lightly touch it to see if you can sense what that feels like on the affected versus the non-effect or the good side right that's about l4 down to the inner ankle bone and then finally outside of your kind of foot to the pinky toe so just very lightly brush from like your heel stroke from the back to the front to the heel from the heel to the the piggy toe the little toe and that's going to assess um compared right to left your ability to feel or the sensation of the s1 that first sacral nerve root all right so just do it very lightly and you're trying to sense they're different side to side it's the exact same thing if you were to come into my office or go to a neurologist they would be doing this they'd say hey close your eyes and i'm going to touch here one side right in the l4 l5 or s1 area and i'm going to touch this side and tell me is there a difference right so you know if you have somebody to help you could have somebody else do this for you just teach them how to do this and you will be assessing light touch or your ability to feel one side versus the other okay so now do both sides feel roughly the same or different so if things feel the same on the affected compared to the non-affected side then your feeling or sensory fibers are working just fine and these are often the first to go because they're sort of towards the outer part of the nerve so um you're good to go if things felt the same if things felt clearly different dull numb or like you just can't feel it like you can on the other side on the problem that's an issue or on the side that's an issue then it's likely you have or had some form of compression to the nerve and your nerve is unhealthy or um you know was pinched at some point there's something closing those lanes on um you know the highway if you want to think of it like that so now let's check your strength so we talked about how nerve cell information such as feeling we just did that with the light touch now we want to talk about this kind of movement uh component or the strength component so the l4 nerve supplies the strength to the front of your thigh or the quad muscles which helps you get up and out of a chair the l5 nerve gives strength to your shin and big toe muscles which allow you to pick up your foot walk the s1 nerve gives you strength to your calf muscles which allow you to go up on your tippy toes right so let's test out your strength nerve root kind of level by level just as we did when testing your sensation um take note of any weakness or differences in strength side to side so here we go so check me out up here uh wherever i am in the video here for a second you want to take your good leg right you can hold on to something if you want and you can adjust the height of the chair if this is too difficult but you're just trying to pick up one leg take your good leg you're going to try to again a little help if you need it you're going to try to stand up okay on the one side and then what you're going to do is you're you're going to compare that to your other side the bad leg and try to again a little support you need to stand up okay now you should just from one rep or so get an idea of is there a difference side to side your ability to use those quad muscles supplied by you know plugged in um from that l4 nerve and if you need to do a bunch of reps you can compare how many times you can do it on one side versus the other but the idea is just to get a quick snapshot of is there a clear difference side to side so that's how you test the l4ner with a single leg sit to stand good versus bad side l5 test is super simple i'm not even sure i need to show this but the idea is you're down here and you're just walking on your toes all right you're just pulling your toes up took my shoes off so you can kind of see and uh i mean on your toes you're trying to walk on your heels because again the l5 nerve supplies that big toe kind of initiates pulling your foot up as well as the muscles on the front of your shin so test that out walk around and see is there a difference there and then to test the first sacral nerve as far as the strength you can do calf raises so one way you can do this kind of functionally is you can walk on your tippy toes so one way you could assess this you could walk around and see do you feel like one side drops and you can't do it or stand somewhere on the good side count how many heel raises you can do and the bad side you might notice if you have a pinched nerve right for some type of compression due to swelling or something structurally causing it that you can't go up on that one side so that would be a clear difference in strength side to side so hopefully that makes sense so again is there a clear difference strength side to side and look if strength is equal and the affected compared to the non-affected then your strength or motor fibers are working fine you don't have a pinched nerve you don't have an unhealthy nerve so there's nothing pinching your nerve at all if there is clearly a strength difference then it's likely you have you have or had some form of compression of the nerve and your nerve is not as healthy as we would like it so it's unhealthy at the moment all right so what if i've lost strength and some feeling dr charlie what do i do do i need urgent surgery so i bring this up again because a lot of people are like oh no like i can't go up my toe right or uh i can't go up on my toes or i can't um i notice some difference there side to side so good question my best answer is this despite having loss of strength or feeling most people still recover just fine without surgery so as the body begins to heal and swelling is reduced within the nerve compression is generally removed and the nerve begins to heal so you know something you might want to consider is just monitoring your strength and feeling on a weekly basis right so check it okay how many calf raises can you do if that's what's what you're limited in right and then a week later how many do you do now right you don't go crazy you're just trying to see are things moving in the right direction are you kind of stuck are they moving in the wrong direction right so um if feeling and strength are slowly slowly begin to return it's a sign that your nerve is healing your head in the right direction why would you change a positive trajectory right so if it's not then surgery other interventions or maybe it's going the wrong way you're getting weaker and weaker um then you might need something to decompress the nerve all right so look there's little evidence suggests that any surgery for sciatica must be urgent so a lot of people before they try their things they go to their doctor like man you need surgery i just had somebody yesterday reach out to me and said hey i went to a chat with somebody a neurosurgeon and they said i need surgery but they told me in their email they're getting better that doesn't make any sense so um there's a another study that we looked at and essentially looked at the timing of surgery as it relates to again the number one cause which is a disc problem as the cause of sciatica and uh what they felt or what they found is that while people who had surgery within six months uh you know of showing signs of weakness and things like that had better outcomes than those who waited longer it wasn't really all that significant and essentially they felt that at this point uh time alone should not be the basis of recommending surgery so the practice of telling patients that they need urgent surgery right for pain due to a disc problem as well as you know function loss has really no scientific basis all right uh so you know the other thing that a lot of people uh have questions about is this idea of like if i don't have surgery am i not going to regain my function like do i need surgery to get back to life basically so there's not good evidence that or clear supportive evidence that surgery to relieve sciatica is any uh better than natural treatment long term right so again this is good news if you want to heal naturally so here in the british medical journal they looked at conservative care so natural treatment versus early surgery you've got to have this surgery and people with sciatica due to a disc herniation they looked at it over two years and here's what they found so you've got two lines here you've got the blue line which is kind of conservative exercise exercise based uh natural treatment and then you've got the red line which is those who have surgery you can see basically on the left side is sort of the pain score so zero is low a 70 being very high in this right or probably went to up to 100 but and then you have time so uh 26 weeks is basically six months you can see that's in the green i circled that uh in the uh pink that's one year 52 weeks or so and a hundred and fourths of two years again that's circled in the uh yellow and what does this chart really means you can see that at that six months that green circle uh people are pretty much at the same pain levels for leg pain back pain so basically what this means is this so studies show that surgery for sciatica does seem to result in quicker relief of leg pain than no surgery right so we look at that right so it looks like there's a quicker drop but it's not really all that significant maybe a little bit um so it does seem to result in quicker relief of leg pain and no surgery however outcomes are no better for back and leg pain or function it's the six month one and two year marks all right so in simple terms studies show some evidence for quicker pain relief with surgery but long term six months and onward uh those who choose natural treatment do just as well as those who have surgery and this is without the risk of surgery right so look one instance where loss of feeling and strength could require urgent surgeries if you notice loss of feeling around your buttocks your rectum trouble with bowel bladder movements uh these are signs of something called cauda equina syndrome uh and it's not common but something to just be aware of so let's summarize real quick so here are signs you have like a pinch or unhealthy nerve and again it's not very common but you would notice you'd be able to assess without a test a nerve test an mri anything you would be able to assess this just by using motion and or somebody feeling your legs right this idea of you will see some type of loss of function because the nerve the lanes some of the lanes on the highway on the nerve right that kind of house that feeling and movement signal uh those signals aren't going to be able to get to the targets right which is again to the skin to the muscle things like that so you're going to notice a loss of strength you're going to notice a loss of feeling you might notice some changes in your ability to control your bowel or bladder function nerve test emg electromyography right nerve conduction velocity basically a test where they they shock you if you've ever had this and essentially what they're doing is they're they're seeing the racing signals down the nerve to see right to left which one goes quicker if there's any slowing of the velocity or how quickly these nerve signals are firing it's going to be positive it's going to show that hey like you've got traffic jam somewhere along the nerve and again this will be kind of termed or consistent like this pinched or compressed nerve type of um dialogue so how do you test you have an unhealthy scientific nerve we just went through it so this idea of light touch you want to try it yourself you can't get into those positions totally understandable have somebody else watch this and do it for you uh muscle strength so we talked about the sit to stand for l4 l5 heel walking and s1 calf raises or toe walking and what do you do if you find that you have this we want to monitor strength and feeling week to week um so you do not stretch an already unhealthy nerve you reduce oxygen to it you'll make it more angry um fine positions in motions of comfort yummy motions and yummy positions so this is the first type of sciatica so a sciatic nerve that is unhealthy where nerve signals are flowing at a slower rate than normal and is therefore experiencing loss of function usually due to some type of compression um we talked about how to test it and some things to consider and keep an eye on so now let's talk about the second type of cytokine this is sciatica that you know everyone thinks their nervous pinch but really this is usually what's happening an angry sciatic nerve so when you feel angry does your body relax and move slower or does your body go into high alert and your sense is heightened they respond how most people do when they get angry right your body goes into a flight a fight or flight response it becomes extra sensitive and extra reactive so same thing with the sciatic nerve that is angry so the second type of sciatica you could be dealing with is one where the nerve is not unhealthy or pinched but rather just hot and bothered so it's angry in this case there is no compression of the nerve and the nerve is healthy but aggravated i'll explain you what i mean so again if we think back to the analogy of your nerve as a highway right you've got all these lanes everything's going in green you know no traffic jams no traffic jams lanes closures anything like that feeling and strength are normal nerve conduction those nerve tests look completely good and now here's an angry nerve notice it looks exactly the same so an angry nerve shows no signs of damage or compression or anything in the sense of slowing of nerve signals so the nerve by definition is healthy right nerve test will be normal because there is no form of compression or pinching of the nerve so what the heck's going on so because of this there is no true loss of feeling or strength and again no mri or nerve test needed because we can test the function of nerve to see if it's unhealthy or just angry by now you should know if it's unhealthy because you've gone through the test for that so again for this let's do the same thing so feeling our sensation first so this is the mapping the real estate of where these uh sort of nerve roots um you know control or give feeling too on the skin let's test your ability to feel again so have somebody else do it or do it yourself remember lightly brush the skin on the outside of your lower leg on the right and left sides that's l5 then on the inside kind of your bony shin part l4 and finally outside your foot from your heel to your piggy toe your small little toe right and sense that right compared to left do both sides feel roughly the same or different angry sciatic nerves will cause a heightened sense of feelings this is important to differentiate skin will seem extra sensitive to touch so for example the brushing of your pants and your lower leg might feel uncomfortable you may have said this to maybe your doctor or someone else or like man it just feels like even just just rubbing anything it just rubs on a little bit just irritating right it may feel like the sensation you get when you're sunburned extra sensitive skin so unhealthy nerves cause a loss of feeling it feels dull diminished you know you poke it with a needle and you just can't feel it so it feels less than the unaffected side versus this feels heightened extra sensitive it's an angry nerve so let's check your strength just as we did when testing your sensation note any weakness or differences side to side you know do your sit-to-sand test i showed you earlier go ahead and do it pause the video for a moment and do it now tech test l5 so that was l4 set to san l5 heal walking see how you do calf raises go ahead and do it so is there a clear difference in strength side to side remember that unhealthy nerves that are losing function show signs of muscle weakness with these tests because all the nerve signals are not getting to the muscle because of the sort of compression to the nerve but an angry nerve is just angry the nerve itself is completely healthy and therefore there is no strength or feeling loss so let's summarize what we've learned about an angry irritated sciatic nerve signs you have an angry nerve gain of function remember an unhealthy nerve has loss of function this has a gain of function the volume is turned up on the alarm system here right there's normal strength but there's extra sensitive feelings or heightened sensations so there's no changes in bower bladder function again because the nerve control is fine nerve tests so the emg the ones where they put little needles right neuro conductions where they shock you um are normal but they will often be very painful and will cause a flare up if you're not careful um you could avoid it if you watch this video but if you've been recommended you go through it and have this type of nerve you will notice that things will be flared up for days maybe a week um it's not uncommon to kind of have that experience because it's like poking needles into a sunburn all right so there's no pinching your nerve compression here the nerve is just really ticked off and irritated so how do you test same thing light touch muscle strength things like that and you know just kind of your descriptor wow extra sensitive to certain things feelings things rubbing on my skin again kind of light touchy right so what to do same thing as what you do with the other type of nerve right so do not stretch an angry nerve because again you'll reduce blood supply and oxygen find positions and motions of comfort yummy emotions and yummy positions now let's compare the two types of sort of sciatica if you want to call it that side by side so again unhealthy nerve kind of got the x is over his eyeballs loss of function loss of strength loss of feeling changes in vowel bladder function the nerve tests again are going to be positive because they're going to pick up on the fact that some of the lanes are close as you can see there this will be again termed like a pinched or compressed nerve right an angry nerve is going to be a gain of functions it's going to be normal strength extra sensitive feelings heightened sensations no changes power bladder function the nerve tests are going to be very aggravating but completely normal and you're going to say you know hey there's nothing wrong with you there is your nervous sensitive all right but there's nothing damaged about it there's nothing compressed about it right um so there's no pincher nerve compression the nerve again is just angry so now here's what's cool only in the rare instance or case that there is some form of strength or feeling loss that does not improve naturally or bower bladder function issues the treatment for these cases remains exactly the same maybe not the same as part of what emotions you do or whatnot but natural non-surgical on 97 of cases so the focus of natural treatment is to optimize the healing environment combining combined with finding motions that reduce pain and improve our ability to move and function so remember this slide from very beginning sciatica is a motion-based problem can be reproduced with motion right and that's what i mean by motion-based problem can be reproduced with motion can be made worse with motion this is super super important more on this later uh we are here this is later all right so thanks for hanging on in there uh the reason this is so important is because your sciatica is reproducible with motion 99 of cases of people have sciatica if it's true sciatica uh will be reproduced by doing a certain motion and this one specifically all right so it is almost always reduce world motion if it's reproducible with motion so a problem that is reproduced with motion is almost always reduceable with motion we just have to find out what that motion or what those motions are that work for you so think about it life is motion life is just a bunch of individual motions strung together in certain order of sequence right so you can move throughout your day so if you have trouble doing this motion or any other motion then your ability to live life will be limited or locked so this leg raise look up here hopefully you can see my little um mouse my little pointer kayak well that's just a leg raise you doing this little yoga move or some abdominal hollow if you do i don't know crossfit or something that's a leg raise if i spin myself and i'm doing a down dog that's a leg raise if i'm running yeah no wonder you can't sprint or run or anything because that's a leg raise in life you can't even chill on the beach because you're in a leg raise and if you want to play with your kids do things outside garden or whatever that is a leg raise so if the leg raise is on lockdown you're not going to be able to do those things all right so now the only focus the primary focus the main focus of treatment is on fixing the leg raise and making it less yucky by optimizing how you live your life and your environment being a detective and by finding yummy emotions that allow you to move with more ease then you unlock your ability to live life right so once you can unlock it boom you can make the leg raise better everything else naturally gets better along with it so hopefully that makes sense right and if you can do that then game over that's it you've won you've figured it out you've solved your sciatic problem okay so key takeaways and nuggets right so folks with sciatica have yucky leg raises and other emotions that show up in life certain ways to keep them from living life right most sciatica is not caused by a pinched nerve usually the nerves are just angry so erase those mental images and scary thoughts from your brain right they're not going to help you heal uh don't worry be happy there's a 97 chance you will not need surgery to correct this fix your yucky motions that's where you should focus right fix your yucky motions that are locking your ability to live life by optimizing your environment again being a detective in your life and finding motions that improve how your body moves and game over again you win the game um so instead of spending your time energy and money and on expensive tests and other people to fix you kind of problem oriented focus on solutions and learning how you can self-evaluate and fix yourself using motion i do it every day i've seen people in my programs do it every day i know that you can too so that is it and here are some resources we want to check them out of what i refer to or references that i refer to in the video so that's it everyone that's all i've got that's what you need to know about sciatica again there are many causes you can check out my diy guide but at the end of the day right really cool because it gets really complicated charlie's talking about like unhealthy nerves and and angry nerves and this and that you got to do the same thing all right at the end of the day to solve the problem you've got to optimize the environment for healing right do some detective work figure out what's nicking the scab and keeping it from healing and you've got to find motions to improve how you move um you know the reduce the sensitivity of your nervous system mentally and physically using motion and or using other strategies on the mental mindset side of things and hopefully uh this presentation puts your mind at ease as far as again sort of the cause of sciatica and or what type you're dealing with and where you need to focus your efforts to get better so hopefully it was helpful until next week this is dr charlie have a great one we will chat soon

Channel: Dr. Charlie Johnson, PT

Views: 20,903

Keywords: physical therapy, dr charlie johnson pt, sciatica, sciatic nerve, pinched nerve, pinched sciatic nerve, pinched sciatic nerve relief, pinched sciatica, pinched sciatic nerve test, types of sciatica, different types of sciatica, sciatica treatment without surgery, sciatica surgery pros and cons, decompress sciatic, decompress sciatic nerve, inversion table, sciatica pain relief, sciatica treatment

Id: GP2qNGTKgeo

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021