How to Heal Your Disc Herniation Without Surgery

What's going on everyone? Dr. Tom Walters here from Rehab Science. Today we're gonna talk about disc herniations in the low back. This is one I get a lot of questions about on my various social media channels. It's one that affects a lot of people. It tends to cause back pain and sometimes sciatica like symptoms where it goes into the butt, down the hamstrings, sometimes into the calf and into the foot. So what's really interesting about disc herniations that a lot of people don't know is that a fair percentage of them heal and can reabsorb if you give them enough time and you implement the right kind of exercises and you work on trying not to make it worse in your normal everyday activities. So today's post is really gonna be focused on the top three exercises to help reduce pain if you have this going on right now and the disc is really irritated and the sciatic nerve is irritated. So three exercises that will help calm it down and help the disc heal and hopefully get it to reabsorb. So the first exercise, I'm gonna do them on a table. You can obviously do them on the ground. You don't have to be up like this. So the first one is called spinal extension and we're gonna do a movement basically of the spine. Most people when they herniate a disc in their low back, they do it when they're bent forward. They're picking something up and twisting. So we're basically gonna do a movement that causes the opposite pressure on the disc and it's thought that maybe that helps kinda move the herniation back into the discs and the disc and helps it reabsorb. So again, you can be on the ground. I'm gonna be up on this elevated surface so you can see easier. Basically what you're gonna do is you're gonna lay down flat like I am now and then you're gonna come up onto your forearms or up even a little bit higher if your back can tolerate it. You'll hold for five to 10 seconds and then you're gonna go back down. Maybe even a shorter hold, two to three seconds. You're gonna do repeated extension movements like this and for a lot of people with disc herniations in the low back, this helps to reduce pain and you'll really know if it's helping you if it causes the nerve pain in your leg to slowly go away. So people will feel like that nerve pain moves up their leg and gets better. If that happens, it's called centralization. We're hoping that the pain leaves the leg. So if you have pain all the way down to your calf, if doing this gets the pain to move farther up your leg, you know you're doing the right thing. If any of the movements or any other movements in life cause the pain to go farther down your leg, that's called peripheralization and it basically means that you're irritating the nerve more. So you wanna really try to reduce those movements and activities that cause the pain to go farther down your leg. So again, just repeated extensions like this. I'll usually have people do 10 to 15 and again, just a small hold at the top and you can do these every day throughout the day when you're having pain. So that's the first exercise, repeated extensions to help reduce acute back pain and nerve pain from disc herniation. The next one, you're gonna lay on your back and for this one, we're gonna stretch the glute muscles and one of the deep rotator muscles called piriformis. Some of you have probably heard of this. It gets talked about a lot. Piriformis, if you look at it anatomically, it's really close to the sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve goes under the piriformis and in some people, the sciatic nerve actually goes through the piriformis. So it can spasm and get tight when you have disc pain and nerve pain, sciatica. So we're gonna stretch that. So what you're gonna do is lay on your back and if I have pain in my right leg, what I'm gonna do is bring that leg up. I'm gonna grab my knee with my hands and pull it towards my opposite shoulder and it should stretch down here. You don't wanna try and rotate your back. You're just moving your hip. Okay, and then because this is a muscle stretch, we would do it two to four times and hold 15 to 30 seconds. If this variation, this version is too easy, what you can do is bring the other leg up, cross your leg and then reach through and grab that other leg and pull up this way and that will increase the intensity of the stretch. For most people, when their symptoms are really acute and irritable, it's better to start this way. Just start this way, pull across the opposite shoulder and fill that stretch in your butt and in those deep hip rotators. Oftentimes, if you do this a couple of times, the pain will just get knocked down a few notches and with stretching, we wanna do it every day. So you just do it every day, two to four repetitions, hold each repetition for 15 to 30 seconds. Okay, so piriformis stretch, that's the second one and then the third exercise is gonna be a mobilization exercise for our sciatic nerve. It's called sciatic nerve flossing, kinda like flossing your teeth. You're gonna get the nerve to move back and forth and that has been shown to increase blood flow and nutrient delivery to the nerve. So that sciatic nerve runs through our buttock, down through our hamstrings, down our calf and down to the sole of our foot. So to mobilize it, you're gonna put your hands behind your thigh, you're gonna straighten your knee until you start to feel tension in your hamstrings or the back of your knee and then from there, you're gonna pump your ankle up and down like you're doing ankle pumps and what you'll feel is when your ankle comes down this way, toes to nose, you'll feel a big stretch probably in your calf, in your hamstring. Some people will actually feel it in their back if it's really painful. So you're gonna go back and forth like that, 15 to 20 times and then you're gonna rest and if that seems like it, usually I help people do one to two sets. What you can do is when you're having pain, this is another one you'll do every day to help things calm down. Do one set, 15 to 20 repetitions, maybe a few hours later, you go back to that position, it's kind of hurting again, you go back and then pump that ankle 15 to 20 times. When your ankle comes down this way into dorsiflexion, it's gonna put the nerve on stretch and then when you go this way, it puts the nerve on slack. So when we pump it back and forth like that, it basically helps the nerve move and it helps increase blood flow to the nerve. So those are the three exercises that are most effective when people have pain related to a disc herniation in the low back. So we've got repeated spinal extension, a piriformis stretch and then a sciatic nerve mobilization. So give those a try, let me know if you have any questions and I hope they're helpful to you. Talk to you next time.