Sciatic Nerve Mobilization

Dean found a research article stating that mobilization of the sciatic nerve can help poststroke hemiparetic leg pain.  I know about this.  Nerve glides.  It’s also called nerve flossing.  All of the nerves in the body are connected somehow to every single other nerve in the body.  It’s one giant system.  Think of a rope.  You pull on one end of a rope, the other end moves.  Same thing happens with your nerves.  You pull on a nerve in your neck it might affect a nerve at your fingertips.  Your nerves are one big rope in your body.  Everyone’s heard of the sciatic nerve.  It’s the big nerve that comes out of the spine at the low back and can cause pain there(this is why you’ll often hear people say “my sciatica is acting up” or something like that) and then the sciatic nerve runs down the back of the thigh and at the knee it then splits and shoots off like a million littler nerves.  Not really a million.

So Dean found this research that sciatic nerve glides can help leg pain after a stroke.  The study said that there were significant differences between strokies that just did leg strengthening and strokies that did sciatic nerve glides too.  Hey, can’t f’n hurt.  So here’s an awesome animation of sciatic nerve glides.  Here’s another way to do it.  And another.  There are a bunch of ways to do this.  Seated, laying down, whatever position really.  You just have to figure out how to get some tension then some slack on the nerve.  Go to YouTube and search for “sciatic nerve flossing” and a crapload of videos will come up.  As soon as you start to feel tingling, STOP.  You apply too much pressure to a nerve and weird things start to happen.  The more you do this, eventually you should be able to do more and more motion before those weird tingly feelings start.  By the way, do at your own risk.