Piriformis Syndrome Stretches & Self Massage

Do you have pain that starts in the buttock area and goes down to the thigh, knee, and maybe even the foot area? You may be experiencing what is called

piriformis

syndrome

. Hello, my name is Leon, from backintelligence.com, where we help people correct their postures and manage their back pain from home and if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, be sure to hit the subscribe button to watch videos like this, so today I wanted to talk to you about

piriformis

syndrome

, what it is and then I'll also give you three exercises, but first let me explain what it is specifically so you can really understand that the piriformis muscle is a stabilizer of the hip, its location It is deep in the gluteal area, below the gluteus maximus muscle, this muscle is responsible for the hip. external rotation, that is, doing this type of movement with the hip, as well as abduction, that is, taking the leg out and extending it backwards, so this muscle is involved in many things and now it is also just a general stabilizer of the hip.

What you need to understand is that the sciatic nerve runs directly under the piriformis muscle, so as you can imagine, when the piriformis muscle becomes tight, it shortens and begins to pinch the sciatic nerve, causing painful symptoms such as tingling, numbness. , weakness and also pain that can go down the thigh, knee and foot because the sciatic nerve goes all the way down, believe it or not, it is the largest nerve in the body. Many people confuse sciatica with performance syndrome. Yes, it causes basically the same symptoms, but sciatica is the real thing. It is caused in the lower back or lower back area, it is usually caused by a disc bulge or a herniated disc and for that condition you need to treat it slightly differently, but in this case in piriformis syndrome the performance muscle becomes tight and that's what affects that. nerve, so obviously you want to treat it in a different way.

The main causes of piriformis syndrome include some trauma to the buttock area, as well as general overuse of this muscle, so let's talk about how you can treat this condition well. What you need What you need to do is release this muscle, okay, so you can do it by foam rolling it and you can do it by stretching it, so I'll show you both. We're going to start with a foam roller and then. I'm going to show you two

stretches

for it, okay, let's do a foam roller with this performance muscle, okay, so what I'm going to do here is I just have my foam roller, you just want to try to find a tight spot in the area. of your glutes.

Yeah, so just roll once you find that tight spot which is normally going to be your performance muscle just hold it in that spot for about 30 to 60 seconds okay and the user the reason we use a foam roller is because, huh. It's a larger object, so I don't recommend starting with a

massage

ball right away because it might be too much. Right off the bat, it's a smaller object, so I recommend doing the foam roller first. Okay, it's a bigger object, it won't be as intense. and then if you want to try a

massage

ball, that's fine, but I would definitely start with the foam roller, and once you find that tight area, keep it there and I would recommend foam rolling the entire butt area so that the gluteus maximus gluteus medius all that because those muscles might also get tight because of this piriformis syndrome, you know, muscles sometimes contract and go into spasm when a muscle gets irritated, so it's a good idea to just do a foam roll in the whole area here yeah so try find another spot another tight spot and just hold it there again for 30 to 60 seconds once you find that narrow area and then move on to the next once you find a spot hold it there and just breathe normally, okay, this is how you foam roll the piriformis muscle let's move on to the piriformis stretch here, so what we're going to do is, uh, this is called the line four stretch and what you're going to do is just place this here, you can rest your head, you can press down with your hand, you should start to feel it right here in your butt area and now, if you want to do a little bit deeper stretch, just bring your other leg in, so right now I'm going to bring my right leg a little bit closer, you can see that. bring my left leg a little bit more in and towards me so it's going to increase the stretch here so you can see my leg sliding towards me and hold it for a good 30 to 60 seconds you can do it even longer if you want and then you can use this other one hand to put pressure on it and that can also exaggerate the stretch.

Now, if you want to make it even more intense, you can take both your hands, lift your leg and pull it towards you, yes, that will really increase. the stretch here, oh yeah, sorry, so that's another way to increase the stretch even more and another way to stretch this muscle is just using a chair, especially if you can't really lie down, it hurts too much to even go. Down there what you can do is just take your leg and a similar position to what we had on the floor and bring it towards you as much as you can using this hand, you can apply a little bit of pressure towards it and you could I feel like you're already stretching just by To do this, if you want to make it even more intense, just start bringing your entire spine forward, okay, so lean forward, try to keep your back straight, okay, you don't want to bend it, okay, you want to keep it. your back straight, so stretch and then move forward, okay, you can go as far as you can, as far as you feel comfortable, okay, start again here and if you want to increase it, just go further to increase the stretch and Can you use this hand to move the knee away and also move forward?

It's okay, and you want to do it again. When you do this, hold it for about 30 to 60 seconds at a time. Okay, that's all. These are some of the ways. you can treat your piriformis syndrome and get out of that sciatic pain that you are experiencing and if these tensions and releases helped you, leave a comment below and let me know, like this video and subscribe to this YouTube channel, also, we would love send you three posture correction exercises that you can do at home. These are step by step videos that will show you how you can start correcting the posture of your hunched shoulders and forward neck, so if you suffer from that type of hunched position and would like to get some great exercises to start reversing that hunched posture .

I would love to send you these videos right away. There will be a link to get them somewhere here or in the description below.