A common complaint we hear as physiotherapists is that a client has a pain in the butt! Not a loved one who is giving you a hard time, but a real pain. Our body has natural mechanisms that we use when we have an injury. Often times that can be the muscles around the injury tightening up to protect themselves. When that happens, we can see that the muscles are doing too much worse and we need to get them to relax.
The piriformis and glute muscles are one of the muscles that can flare up and tighten when you have low back pain or SI joint-related pain. One of the things we as physiotherapists need to figure out when you come in with back pain especially something like sciatica is if the pain is coming from the back or if it is coming from the hip muscles.
Sciatica is a nerve pain. The tell-tale sign of sciatica is a shooting pain that travels from the middle of the bum to the back of the calf or foot. Sciatica can come from pressure on a nerve right in the back. It can also be caused by the muscles in the glutes being tight and putting pressure on the spot where nerve passes. If it is the tight muscles than this can create a “pseudo sciatica”. It’s called pseudo because it is the muscles putting pressure rather than something structural. This can also be called “piriformis syndrome”.
In this video, we talk about one way to relieve some of the discomfort created by those tight muscles. With the pain down, we can start to strengthen your lower body to keep that back pain away for good!
Have you seen our other back pain videos? Check out this one on what happens when your back “randomly goes out”
Or this one on low back pain and sitting
