Glenn Dawson, a functional trainer, and his wife Brianna, a physical therapist, walk through a three-part routine for sciatic pain: glute and hip release with a foam roller and lacrosse ball, a two-minute knee-to-chest stretch with slow breathing, and sciatic nerve flossing exercises repeated 10 to 15 times.
If you're dealing with sciatic pain, by the end of this video, I want to show you exactly why it's happening and how you can relieve it at home. Now, this is a quick caveat. My name is Glenn. I'm a functional trainer with Reset U Fitness. We have a doctor of physical therapy on staff, my wife, Brianna Dawson, and we usually work from an assessment. So this video is my best, my best chance to help you without actually seeing your body move. So follow along. If it doesn't give you results, make sure you get a one-on-one assessment. Now here we go. The first thing we want to do is release the tissue. If you have a foam roller or a lacrosse ball, we're going to release the tissue first.
Usually your glute is tight and bound up around the hip capsule and it's creating this sciatic nerve impingement. We got to release the glute first, mobilize the hip joint, And then floss that sciatic nerve. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to do a cross-legged glute stretch or foam roll on your roller. So I'm going to sit on it, say it's my, my right side that's giving me the pain. For most of you guys, it's probably gonna be the left actually, so we'll do the left instead. Just, I realized that normally sciatic pain happens on the left. Um, so we're going to cross the left leg over the right. And then just roll back and forth nice and slow, just like this. And all we're trying to do is just relieve the tissue here. Pause the video now and do this for 90 seconds. Next, we're going to take that lacrosse ball and we're going to get into the very, very, very tight glute med. If you can feel the butt dimple in your low— in your butt, you go above that and then slightly backwards. You should feel this little muscle. We're going to put the ball right there. I'm going to line it up so I get into a side plank clamshell, put the ball underneath my hip right here, and then clamshell. I'm going to push my knee down, activate, hold for 5 seconds, and then release. It's not going to feel great. Do it again. Activate, hold. We're going to do this activate and release technique for 2 minutes, then move on to the stretching of the hip capsule. The first stretch we're going to do is just a simple knee to chest stretch. If you cannot grab your knee, then all you want to do is just wait for the next stretch. What we want to do first is grab our knee, bring our knee to our chest, and just hold this and breathe. This should be a pretty good glute stretch if you have sciatic pain. You're going to inhale into your diaphragm, into your belly for 3, hold for 3, exhale for 8. And I want you to do that for 2 minutes. The reason why we're doing all these for 2 minutes is that's how long it takes for tissue change, and I don't want you to speed through this. If you speed through, your body will naturally muscularly guard and grip. Like, whenever you feel pain, your body gets tight. That will not let us release your sympathetic nervous system, and it will not release your sciatic nerve.
Now, the last thing we're going to do is we're going to do nerve flossing.
So I'm going to come to the edge of my chair, I'm going to put my head down, foot down, And then extend my leg and my head up at the same time, like there's a string pulling my toe up.
Nice and slow.
For 10 to 15 times. If that doesn't give you the most relief, what I want you to do is do a different type of static nerve where you pull your toe up, head up, and then toe forward, head down.
And do that one for 10 times.
After that, retest, walk around, see if your body feels better.
If it does, comment and let us know. Thank you.
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