- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- By the way, that's Napoleon Bone apart.
(Brad laughs)
- All right, today, Brad, we're gonna show you
the top two exercises for someone who has sciatica
or a pinched nerve.
- Pain down the leg.
- Yep.
Pain down the leg.
Sciatic. The sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in the leg.
Largest nerve in the body, I'm sorry.
It goes, the pain often goes down the back of the leg,
- Mm-hmm.
down into the calf, can go into the top of the foot,
bottom of the foot.
It's pain.
- Right.
- This is real pain when you get nerve pain.
So we're gonna show you two exercises.
The first one, we're assuming
that the pain may be coming from your back,
a pinched nerve up there, maybe a disc,
some type of problem.
So if you're getting some back pain along with it,
this is the one you're gonna want to try.
- Right.
- All right, Brad.
- Often times, long term sitting will irritate it.
- All right. Yeah, bending, sitting.
So you're gonna start off what I first want to do.
And this is a Mckenzie exercise is what it's called.
And you're gonna start, you put your head off
to the side like this, and you're just gonna lay like this
for a few minutes, just to calm things down.
Some people, Brad, can't even lay like this, can they?
- Right.
- Some people actually have to start
with a pillow underneath them.
- Right.
Put a pillow under there.
- Yep. To lay that way for a while.
I've seen people like that.
Then if you can do this,
then you're gonna go ahead and get up on your elbows.
And you can do that for a minute or two.
- And the important thing about this is,
as you're doing this, the symptoms, the pain,
numbness, tingling that runs down the leg or in the foot,
they should be resolving or decreasing.
- Decreasing, the pain in the back might get worse,
- Mm-hmm.
- but the pain in the leg should get better,
or it should be unchanged.
- Mm-hmm.
- Right Brad, cause you may not even get any change
when you start off with this.
Now the final step of exercise number one
is you're actually gonna put your hands
underneath your shoulders,
and you're gonna start pressing up here,
and you're keeping your pelvis down on the mattress
or on the bed or on the floor, wherever you're at,
and you're gonna bend up like this.
And you want to go up as far as you can.
And again, you're looking for the same thing.
You're looking for the pain and the numbness
and the tingling to go out of the leg or out of the foot.
- Mm-hmm, right.
- And you're gonna keep pushing up.
And the further you can go up the better.
If you can go all the way up like this, fantastic.
And you can do 10 repetitions of this,
and move all the way up,
the further and further you can go, the better.
And you, again, you're looking
for symptoms to decrease in the leg.
If they're increasing in the leg,
you may need to see a therapist,
who's gonna have to give you some
of the little different specifics on this, on how to do it.
- Right. Exactly.
- All right.
This is a great thing to try.
If you're having sciatic pain.
The second one, Brad, is gonna be
what we call nerve flossing.
- Sure.
- And then you're gonna show that one, aren't you?
- Yes, Bob.
- All right, you're gonna be over here on the edge,
and I'm gonna go ahead and do some filming.
- Leopold, Teopold, whatever he is. Okay.
- [Bob] Napoleon.
- Napoleon. getting Napoleon out of the way.
All right.
Okay, now we've got a piece of tape on my foot.
So you can see specifically the movement
that needs to be done in the ankle.
- [Bob] Brad, can I say something first?
- Sure. Of course.
- [Bob] In this instance, quite often, what's going on
is that there's some scarring on the sciatic nerve.
Maybe some scar tissue and it's binding down,
and we're trying to get the nerve
to glide really well again.
So this is what we're trying to do here
is to break that scar tissue free,
and help help the nerve glide.
Same thing here.
You don't want to irritate the nerve too much.
- So when Bob says scar tissue, a lot of times, this is
with people that had a back surgery a few months before,
an injury, a bad back ache,
something has usually created the scar.
- [Bob] Exactly.
- Okay.
- [Bob] And usually you just start off
by kicking the leg out straight, Brad.
- Yeah.
- [Bob] No slumping. Yeah.
- And then if you can pull up like that,
now you may feel the calf muscle stretch,
and the hamstring muscle stretch,
and you know, muscles stretch.
But when you feel the nerve stretch,
it's gonna hurt in a different way.
It gives you that uncomfortable feeling,
and you're not gonna go too aggressively,
and we can repeat this and it should improve.
And actually I did have some nerve pain,
'cause I know what that feels like.
And it's getting better as I stretch.
I mean, it's real minimal.
I don't have any serious issues.
- [Bob] Yeah. You don't want the pain to get worse,
as you're doing this.
you can just bump up against the pain while you're doing it.
- So when we're doing this,
if you slouch more head forward more,
it's gonna pull more, when you pull the toe up.
If you're up here, it's gonna be a little less,
because that nerve actually connects up to the spine
and makes one long track all the way
up to the, to the brain actually.
- [Bob] So day one, Brad,
you probably just wanna straighten the knee,
and bend the foot up
- Mm-hmm
- [Bob] and do 10 of those.
- Yep.
- [Bob] Day two, if that's going well,
then you may want to go ahead
and bring the toe up and bring the head up.
We're gonna do the flossing now.
- Right, this is the flossing.
- [Bob] And then head down, foot down.
Good. Head, toe up, head up.
See how that goes?
Toe down, head down, toe up, head up.
It's a little complicated.
That's why we keep repeating.
Toe up, head up, toe down, head down.
10 of those.
And that's it, Brad.
That's the flossing.
Nothing to it,
but it can break that nerve loose.
- And again, it should respond by feeling better
as you do more of 'em.
- [Bob] Exactly.
- If you get sorer and sorer later on,
or the next day, you've overdone it,
and you need to either not do it,
or don't do it near as aggressively.
- Right.
And eventually, if that starts to feel better,
there are more aggressive stretches you can do,
but I just didn't feel comfortable in showing those.
- Sure. Right.
- There's some aggressive Mckenzie stretches they do,
but alright.
If you haven't already, you're gonna wanna subscribe to us.
We're great guys to watch, right Brad?
- You better believe it because we can fix everything,
and almost anything except for what, Bob?
- A broken heart.
All right. See you later.