01/24/2025
Nice explanation! Stretching and foam rolling everything that "feels tight" isn't always the answer! Come get assessed and let's figure out what isn't working as well, and get rid of your compensations.
The biggest challenge with sciatica pain is not knowing what you don't know.
The Inconvenient Truth
Your thinking brain isn't made aware of the fact that ninety-nine percent of the practitioners who work with the musculoskeletal system lack the skill set to differentiate tight muscles from muscles that are underperforming.
Without the ability to determine the state of a muscle, your guess is as accurate as the practitioner, who is seen as the expert, the one with the answers.
When Your Feeling Brain Takes The Wheel
As counterintuitive as this may be, when muscles feel tight, that's not a clear way of knowing they're tight. In other words, relying solely on "feel" is not grounded in science.
Whether your muscles are tight or not is of no concern to your feeling brain. Your feeling brain, driven by emotions, has you targeting muscle tightness with one-size-fits-all stretches and releasing muscles and fascia with a foam roller or a lacrosse ball. Meanwhile, fascia is a mere distraction and muscle tightness is a symptom and a sensation that serves as a distractor.
You can't have tight muscles without underperforming muscles. If you're wondering what happens first, it's the underperforming muscles. See, your brain (the control center) is hard-wired to call upon tight muscles to protect the area it perceives to be vulnerable to an injury.
The Vicious Cycle
Stretching, rolling on a lacrosse ball, and attempting to release muscles with deep tissue massage ends up collecting muscles that are performing to the best of their ability. This approach increases instability (aka the threat). So, of course, by the next day, the tightness and symptoms return.
Compensation Is Cumulative
Tight muscles compensate for underperforming muscles. Because practitioners haven't been able to identify an underperforming muscle for decades, every injury and surgical procedure you've had has increased compensation and, ultimately, fragility.
The Best Strategy
When it comes to sciatica pain, the strategy that allows for the best outcome in the shortest amount of time is this: stop chasing pain and improve the neurological input to the muscles that are found to be underperforming.
Then, like clockwork, your brain recognizes stability, allowing for the relaxation of the muscles that are no longer required to pull the weight of the underperforming muscles.
The result I described in the previous sentence isn't possible without the ability to differentiate muscle tightness from muscle weakness. With over twenty years of experience ignoring muscle tightness and, instead, improving the neurological feedback between the brain and the muscles that are found to be underperforming, I'm confident when I tell you that, in most cases, the piriformis isn't tight. Yet, it's a muscle that can have the sensation of feeling tight. Another muscle that regularly feels tight but often isn't is the upper trapezius, a neck and shoulder muscle (hint, hint).
