Herniated Discs, Degenerating Discs and Sciatica

Bad Discs, Pinched Nerve, and Sciatica
How To Fix Them Yourself

Dr. Jolie Bookspan's methods to fix back pain are so successful, that
Harvard School of Medicine clinicians have named her, "The St. Jude of the Joints."
Her innovative method, The Ab Revolution™ No More Crunches No More Back Pain,
is used by military and top spine centers around the world.

Don't Worry - Disc pain and sciatica are easy to fix. This article will show you how to easily and quickly stop the source of the pain. Then you no longer will get the pain and your back and discs can heal.

A bad disc, or pain down the leg (sciatica), can be painful and frightening. Despite the fact that herniated discs, degenerating discs, and sciatica usually can heal quickly and easily, people are commonly told that it is a difficult and long-term condition. They are told to accept and "live with" pain and reduced ability. They may stay on pain and anti-inflammatory drugs for long periods. Commonly used modalities like acupuncture, strengthening, therapy, surgery, massage, and chiropractic often fail. Recent news reports from Time Magazine and The New York Times quote spine specialists as saying that back pain is mysterious, and that no one knows why back pain occurs. However, the case is that back pain is usually simple to understand, and simple to fix without surgery, prescription medications, repeated treatments, or special beds and equipment.

Back Pain Is Not Mysterious
People do an astonishing number of things every day to strain, weaken, and pressure their backs. You know you shouldn’t lift wrong, but you do – all day, every day – picking up socks, petting the dog, for laundry, trash, making the bed, looking in the refrigerator, and all the dozens of times you bend over things. You work bent over your desk or bench. You drive bent forward. If you go to the gym you probably lift weights bent over, stretch by touching your toes, do yoga by bending over at the waist, then bend over to pick up your gym bag to go home. No wonder your back hurts.

Most people know that bending wrong will injure your back. But they stand, bend, sit, and lift wrong many dozens of times a day, day after day, then compound the problem with holding muscles tightly, and doing bad exercises. They may do special "back exercises," but not be aware that strong muscles will not automatically give you good posture, make you bend and lift properly, or make up for all the things you do the rest of the day to hurt your back. They wonder why they still get pain even though they take their medicine and "do their exercises." Many wind up in back surgery, or long term or recurring pain, not understanding why their physical therapy, pills, or yoga "didn't work."

What Are Discs?
Discs are tough fibrous cushions between each of your vertebrae (back bones), all the way from your neck, down the middle of your back, to your low back. You also have two discs in each knee. A knee disc is commonly called a meniscus. You even have a little disc between your lower and upper jaw bone at your temporo-mandibular joint (TMJ). Discs are living parts of your body. They do many things like absorb shock, and keep your bones from grinding against each other. They are not really like soft jelly donuts, as commonly said. The outer covering of your discs is strong and firmly attached between each vertebrae. It doesn't easily slide around. That's a good thing, since discs take a lot of pounding. But after many years of bad bending and lifting habits, they can finally start to fray and break down.

How Discs Herniate
The pressure of your own body weight on your muscles and discs over years of poor sitting, standing, and bending habits is enough to injure your back as badly as a single accident.

Years of forward rounding, squashes down and degenerates your discs in front, and pushes them out toward the back. The discs eventually break down (degenerate) and push outward (herniate). Think of braces on your teeth. After years of pushing, things eventually move. Like a water balloon, when you squeeze the disc in front, it bulges out toward the back.

Chronic forward bending (flexion) also overstretches the muscles and long ligament down the back, which weakens the back, and makes more room for vertebral discs to protrude.

Left - normal disc between two vertebrae.
Right - disc pushed out (herniated)
from years of bad bending.

Like sitting on a balloon, squeezing the disc in front bulges it in back. Chronic forward bending gradually pushes discs out.

Sitting with your lower back rounded is like bending a ruler between your hands. It pressures the rounded part, which is your low back discs. Sitting rounded can eventually push your discs outward enough to degenerate and herniate. Sit, lift and bend properly to avoid pushing your discs out of place.

Why Does Pain Go Down One Leg (or Arm)? What Is Impingement and Sciatica?
It takes years of bad bending habits to make a disc start to break down (degenerate) or push a backward so that it finally bulges out of place. When the disc is damaged, that alone can hurt. If you are lucky, you will get this small warning sign – some small pain or pressure in the side or middle of your back and top of your hip. By fixing your positioning to healthy habits and doing the extension exercises described later in this article, you can stop disc damage and pain and keep it from coming back.

If you let more time go by with damaging sitting and body positioning habits, the disc can begin to push outward, and press on nearby structures, like nerves. That is called impingement because the disc impinges on (presses against, or take up the space of) the nerve. That spreads more pain to other places. After years of damaging the disc, you may suddenly feel the pain shoot like electricity when bending wrong just one more time, or just reaching for something small, or sometimes, the disc is so ready to give out, you be just standing or sitting there, thinking you have done nothing at all to bring on the sudden bolt of pain.

The lowest discs in your spine usually get the most punishment because the low back bones and discs are the ones to bear the weight of the body when it bends wrong day after day, year after year. If one of your lowest discs herniates, it presses on the nerve that goes down your leg, called the sciatic nerve. That sends pain down your leg.

Why down one leg? Discs don’t usually protrude straight back. Their path is blocked by a long, tough, band running down the back of your discs called the posterior longitudinal ligament. That is good because that helps keep them in place and protects your spinal cord, which lies behind the discs. Since the disc can't bulge straight back, if you keep pushing it out, it has to go somewhere and it squeezes out sideways. The long nerves going out of your spine to your legs are also on the side. When a disc bulges against these nerves, pain extends down your leg. The most common nerve to be pushed on by bulging discs in your low back is the sciatic nerve.

Your sciatic nerve works both for feeling and movement of your leg. That means if you squeeze it, it will hurt and may also reduce the function of your leg. In the most serious cases, discs can protrude directly backwards against your spine, disrupting your ability to move from that level down, and control your bowel and bladder.

Pain Down Your Arm
If you squash and push the discs in your neck with a forward head posture - letting your head tilt "chin-forward" instead of holding it up straight, the disc in your neck may herniate the same way as discs in your low back, and press on nerves that go to your arm, sending pain down your arm. For what to do to fix that, go to the article on how to fix neck pain, bad cervical discs, and upper back and shoulder pain.

Sciatic Pain Not From Discs
You can get pain down your leg even when scans show your discs are not involved. Tight muscles in the low back/hip from years of poor positioning, and keeping your hip bent which shortens the muscles, can also press on the same nerves, mimicking sciatica. One way this happens is standing and sitting with your feet turned out - duck foot. The muscles that turn your leg and feet out are in back of your hip (in your behind). They fasten from the back of your hip bone to your upper leg bone going sideways. The sciatic nerve passes behind, and in some people, through one or more of these muscles (mainly the piriformis muscle). When these muscles get tight from years of walking, sitting, and standing with your hip bent and your feet turned out, the tight muscles can press and add to sciatic pain. Not all pain that goes down the back of the leg is from the sciatic nerve. It can be from other nerves too, and can be fixed with stopping unhealthful movement habits.

Hunching and bending forward all day pressures your discs until one day, they finally break down (degenerate) press outward (herniate). Standing with your hip bent or turned out shortens the muscles around the nerves in your legs, which can also pressure them. These problems are easy to avoid and easy to fix.

Another thing commonly mistaken for sciatic pain is a hamstring strain. The pain may be in the backside and can go down the leg. See if the pain is really around the the bump you sit on where the hamstring attaches and goes down the thigh along the hamstring muscle. Check if you are doing conventional hamstring stretches by sitting or standing bent forward. They are not good for discs anyway. There are far better and more functional ways to stretch the hamstrings, described below, in other free articles on this web site, and in the books.

Not A Disease
An unfortunate situation is that someone with a slipping or degenerating disc, or sciatica from any reason, is often told they have "degenerative disc disease" or "disc disease." But it is not a disease. The condition is misnamed. A hurt disc is a simple, mechanical injury that can heal, if you just stop grinding it and physically pushing it out of place with terrible habits. It will heal and stop pressing on nerves. The disc pain and sciatica will go away. It is simple, and depends a great deal on how you hold your body when sitting, bending, and exercising.

Discs Can Heal
Disc injury is not a life sentence. Disc degeneration or slippage (herniation) can heal and stop hurting- if you let it - no differently than a sprained ankle. Stop damaging your discs with bad bending, standing, and sitting habits and your discs can heal. It takes years to herniate a disc, and only days to weeks to let it heal it by stopping bad habits.

When Pain Isn't From Discs
Often, a person may be in great pain from simple damaging bending and movement habits. They may go for an x-ray or MRI, and the scans show a degenerating or herniated disc. The pain may not be from the disc, but from the strained, tired muscles from bad habits. Just like car tires that are mid-life, but perfectly good, some wear easy show on exam – but may be unrelated to the pain. Pain is falsely ascribed to the disc. Pain continues, but from the poor mechanics. This is no mystery. Change the bad habits to change the pain.

Sometimes, people go for surgery for the "bad disc." But their pain persists or returns– because they never corrected the bad mechanics that caused the pain. Or they may herniate another disc for the same reasons they herniated the first one – bad sitting and lifting and all the other bad habits that they did not easily change.

What To Do Every Day To Stop Ruining Your Discs and Let Them Heal
- First thing every morning, don't sit on the edge of the bed. Instead of sitting and rounding your back, turn over and lie face down. Prop gently on elbows, but not so high that it strains. It should feel good and help you start your day with straighter positioning. Get out of bed without sitting.

- Lie face down, propped gently on elbows, several times a day. Don't force upward, just lie so that it feels better.It should reduce the disc pain. If it makes you feel worse, don't do this.

Lying face down propped on elbows unloads your discs. It should not hurt, but help you feel better.
If your front hip and thigh muscles are very tight, lying face down may be uncomfortable.
Stretch your front muscles with the lunge exercise, described later in this article.

- Count how many times you bend each day. For most people, it will be several hundreds of times a day. Imagine the injury to your back by bending wrong that many times each day.

- Lift using the lunge or squat, not bending over. Keep both heels down and your body upright. This is the most important thing you can do to heal your discs. Bending wrong hundreds of times a day pushes your discs out, no matter how many "back exercises" you do. Let your discs heal and get free leg exercise at the same time.

Bend properly, heels down, knees back for all the hundreds of times a day you bend and lift. Don't just do squats and lunges as an exercise, but as the way you really move all day for real life. You will save your back and fix your knees at the same time. Done properly, with heels down and knees back, you will strengthen your legs and keep your weight off your knee joints.

- Don't use bad knees as an excuse to wreck your back. Bending properly will strengthen your knees as well. Use a lunge position with one foot in front and one in back. Keep your weight on your leg muscles, intending over resting your weight on the discs of your back.

- Sit without rounding at your desk, car, and everywhere. Hold comfortable, natural, straight position. No need to be ramrod straight or hold muscles tightly. That only makes more pain. Raise your computer monitor up so you don't bend over to read. Move your TV up higher. Stop curling downward and forward to watch. Use a lumbar roll (jacket or towel will do) to pad the backward-rounding space in most chair backs. Sit up and lean slightly back. Don’t round against the lumbar roll. For more on healthy sitting, see the article, Healthy Sitting Without Back Pain.

- Stand and carry loads without forward head, or rounding your low back. (Don't lean backward either, to "balance" the weight – that causes problems of its own. Just use your muscles to stand straight. To see common lifting and carrying bad habits that contribute to back pain, and watt do instead, see the article on this web site on Lifting and Carrying Without Back Pain.

- Don't do bad exercises (described below).

- Use good exercises to retrain bending habits and how to position your body in healthy ways when moving around (described below).

Don’t Exercise in Ways that Damage Your Back
People exercise for the health, then often exercise in ways that are not healthy.

- When sitting to lift weights, remember that sitting is harder on your discs than standing. Sitting rounded multiplies damaging pressure. A common exercise injury occurs when sitting rounded on weight machines. After years of unhealthy sitting position, adding pushing against a leg press or other resistance can become too much for the discs and other low back structures, sending pain into the behind and down the leg.

The problem is not the amount of weight you lift, or that you are exercising, it is your positioning. Don't let your hip and low back round when you bend your knees toward your body to lower the weight. Instead of pushing your low back against the seat or pad, lift up to sit straight and push your upper back against the seat.

Many people hurt from excessive forward bending. Unfortunately, many exercises they do for their back often involves more forward bending: toe touches, knee to chest, leg lifts, and crunches. It is important to strengthen the muscles that pull the back the other way. These are the extension exercises (to follow).

Bend properly for everything, even the water fountain, to pick things up from the floor, to look in the refrigerator, or take things out of the dishwasher. Keep your torso upright and bend your knees. Keep your knees over your feet, not slumping forward, which is hard on the knees.

Don't stretch by bending over at the waist. Many people are surprised to find that they injure their back doing forward yoga stretches. You wouldn't pick up a package that way. It is not really a surprise. For more interesting information on what exercises harm and which help, read this article on How to Avoid Bad Exercises.

Ineffective Exercising
Strengthening and stretching are crucial, but alone will not change posture or lifting habits, and so cannot “cure” back pain or posture problems. Many contribute to the original problem of over rounding and bad posture. Just look apron the gym to see people hunching forward and bending over to lift things. This just pressures discs further. Back exercises are supposed to be used to retrain you how you hold your body all the time. Doing exercises for back pain is not like getting a shot of penicillin or going to confession. It does not “fix” bad habits the rest of the time.

One common example is doing "pelvic tilts," then stopping your "back exercise" and walking away, letting your back flop into any old bad posture, instead of keeping the proper tilt you just practiced. Back exercises are supposed to be used to retrain your thinking and habits when you get back up off the floor. This does not happen automatically. This is where many people have missed the point of back exercises. Strengthening has no effect on posture if you don’t apply the strength the rest of the day to control joint angles for all activities.

Exercises to Strengthen and Retrain Muscles
Back pain exercises are misunderstood. People often injure their back all day then hope to fix it with a few exercises. They don't understand when this does not work. They lie on the floor to do exercises, then stand up and walk away with no use of the positioning or strength they just practiced. It is like eating butter and sugar all day, then doing 10 minutes of exercises and wondering why it doesn't "work." The key is what you do all day.
Try a small number of these exercises slowly. See how you feel the next day, then increase. Use these back exercises to retrain how to stand, sit and move all day.

- Lunge. You know not to bend wrong to pick things up, but you do it. Every day. Hundreds of times a day. Instead, bend your knees. You already know that. But most people don't do it because their legs are too weak. The lunge exercise retrains bending habits and gives you free leg and back exercise at the same time:

Bend properly using the squat, described earlier in this article, and the lunge, shown in this drawing, for all the many dozens of times you bend every day. Keep your front knee over your ankle (left) not forward (right).

Stand up, feet apart. Slide one foot comfortably back, keeping foot straight not turned out. Tuck your hip under to reduce the arch in your back, and to stretch back hip. Don't lean back. Bend your knees to dip to the floor without touching the floor. If you can't dip all the way down, at least dip a few inches. Don't let your front knee come forward. Keep front knee over ankle. Don't arch your back. Tip your hip under to prevent arching and straighten your posture. Don't lean back. This is a great exercise to strengthen your legs and practice proper bending and lifting posture. You already know you should use your legs like this to bend and lift. Now you will be strong enough to do it.

- Upper back extension. Most people stretch their back by forward rounding but never strengthen the back muscles that hold the back upright. Upper back extension is an important exercise to strengthen at the same time that you practice moving your back in the other direction. Back extension exercise exercises the back muscles at the same time that it unloads the discs. Discs are pushed outward by forward bending. Extension bends the spine the other way, which is good to help you learn to straighten out, without compressing the spine under body weight. It is a far better exercise than standing on hands and knees and lifting one arm and leg.

Lie face down on the floor, hands and arms off the floor. Gently lift upper body without hands. Don't force. Don't crane your neck, keep it straight, just lift using upper body muscles.

Upper back extension

- Lower back extension. This is another important exercise to strengthen the back and practice extending the hip. Learning to use muscles to extend the hip helps counter the shortened, bent-hip posture that contributes to tight, painful posture. Bending the hip forward is all too common in most exercise. Lower back extension exercises the muscles without loading the discs, which happens with forward bending. Lie face down, hands under your chin or wherever comfortable. Gently lift both legs upward, knees straight. Don't yank or force. Don't pinch the low back, just use lower body muscles.

Lower back extension

- Isometric Abs. Most people exercise their abdominal muscles by bending forward. Bending forward is a main way you pressure your discs outward, eventually degenerating them. The following exercise teaches how to use your abdominal muscles without forward bending. It is a better workout than abdominal crunches. It is also a myth that strengthening abs will fix back pain. That may sound strange. But stronger abs does not make you stop bending and standing wrong in the ways that injures discs. In fact, most of the abdominal exercises taught are the very forward bending exercises that injure discs and pressure the back more. It is another myth that tightening abs and pressing navel to spine helps in fact, it can make more pain. You certainly can't breathe in or move easily if you tense your abdomen in the way commonly taught. So what do abs do to help prevent pain?.

A major purpose of your abdominal muscles is to hold your back from arching backward when you are standing up. Many people don't know this and don't use their abs, and allow their lower back to sway inward or arch inward too much. This is called lordosis or swayback. Arching is not the kind of force that injures discs. It does make another kind of lower back pain in the soft tissue and joints called facets. People with this problem get pain after long standing and running. This is different from the usual disc pain that comes on from long sitting. They may do "ab exercises" for this by lying on the floor or standing against the wall and pressing the low back (pelvic tilt) to reduce the curve. But that does not change your positioning the rest of the time, and so, does not heal the back pain that is common from overarching. You are supposed to use the tilt when standing to keep your back in position to preventing arching. This exercise strengthens your abs and back at the same time you retrain how to hold your back without arching:

Learn to use your abs to control the posture of your back -
keep your low back from arching even against moving resistance, simulating real life activity when standing up. Then learn to do this with the legs straight without arching. Yes, people say you must bend the knees to protect the back, but how are you supposed to stand up and walk away? You need to learn how to position yourself while standing straight. Practice lying straight.

- Lie face up, arms overhead on floor, biceps by your ears.
- Press your low back toward the floor to remove the arch. You will feel your abdominal muscles working to prevent your back from arching.
- Hold hand weights an inch above the floor, without arching your back. Keep your low back against the floor by using abdominal muscles to straighten your spine.
- As you get better at this, gradually straighten your legs so that you can practice posture the way you need it for standing up - spine held at healthy position without bending knees.

This is how your abs should work all the time, when standing up, to prevent too much arching. Use this exercise to practice using your abs to control the posture of your back, even against moving resistance, simulating real life activity when standing up. Notice that you don't need to tighten your abs to do this. Just use your abdominal muscles, like any other muscles, to move your body to healthy position.

Hold a push-up position.This is another exercise to work your abdominal muscles without forward bending. It is a far better workout than abdominal crunches, and has the advantage of retraining you how to use your abdominal muscles to put your spine in healthy position when you stand up.

In a push-up position (hands and toes, not on knees) tuck your hips under so that your back doesn't arch. You will immediately feel your abs working when you do this. You will also immediately feel the pressure in your back disappear, that was caused by arching. The purpose of this exercise is to train your abs at the same time you relearn how to hold your back when you are standing up. Keep your back straight, not letting it sag into an arch like a hammock. Tuck hips as if you were starting a crunch, but don't hike your behind up in the air or drop your head. Make your posture as straight as if you were standing up. Use a mirror, if available, to see yourself and learn what healthy position feels like. Use this new healthy position all the time, particularly when you stand and reach overhead. Don't let your back arch to reach overhead. Use the principle of this tuck exercise. For more about ab exercise and preventing the pain from arching, see the abs article The Ab Revolution No More Crunches No More Back Pain.

Tuck your hips under to remove the low back arch.
You will immediately feel your abs working and pressure gone from your back.

How to Stretch Your Hamstrings Without Ruining Your Discs
Tight hamstrings are commonly thought to contribute to back pain. This is turning out not to be completely true. Worse, hamstring stretches are often done in ways that round and strain the back and squash discs. Leaning over at the waist for toe-touches does stretch your back and hamstrings, and may feel good, but it is terrible for your back. This is true even for yoga stretches where you bend over at the waist without supporting on your hands. You know never to bend over like that to pick things up. It doesn't magically become good for you by calling it a stretch.

- Lie on your back and hold one leg in the air, keeping shoulders, head, and hip flat on the floor and back straight.
- Keep your other leg straight and flat against the floor too. If the front of your hip is too tight, your bottom leg may rise along with your top leg. To fix this common problem, stretch the front of your hip using the lunge.

It is not true that you must bend the other knee when stretching your leg overhead.
Get a better stretch and move functional training by keeping the other leg flat on the floor.

When Walking and Exercising
- Walk with feet parallel, not turned in or out. Weight on sole, not arches.
- Walk, move, exercise and sit down with shock absorption.

How Long Does It Take To Fix Disc Pain, Pinched Nerve, and Sciatica?
You should begin to feel the difference the same day as you try everything presented above. If you're not feeling better right away, check what you are doing compared to what you have learned above and in the other free articles.

It takes years to hurt a disc, but only days for it to start healing once you no longer are bending badly and pushing it out. Make sure there is not something else contributing to your pain. It is is almost always quick and easy to start getting your life back and start feeling better right now. Don't wait.

Summary
A herniated or degenerating disc is not a mysterious "condition" or a disease. It is simple mechanics. People spend their day sitting, working, walking, and driving in the very hunched posture that pushes discs out the back. They hunch over the computer, lifting and bending wrong all day, walking heavily, and slouching all day, and then exercise in ways that strain and pressure discs and muscles. They do yoga and Pilate's exercises that forcibly pressure discs. They try remedies that do not address the cause of the problem, do physical therapy in ways that exacerbates the original problem, give up favorite activities, have surgery then return to previous injurious habits, then everyone is astonished that they "tried everything and nothing seemed to work." It's like eating butter and sugar all day, then waving your hands in the air for 5 minutes and saying "I don't understands why I don't lose weight, I do my exercises." How is your body positioning right now? Use your muscles to stand and bend properly for all daily tasks to stop pushing the disc out to the back, degenerating and herniating it. Do back extension exercise to take the pressure off your discs and help them heal. Bonus: beside fixing injured discs, standing and moving in healthy ways for real life burns calories, strengthens, and is a free workout. You Don’t Have To Live With Pain

Homework
- Watch other people’s posture, gait, and movement habits.
- Notice injurious postures doing "fitness and health" moves featured in fitness magazines
- Notice your own habits.
- Use principles learned to identify and eliminate the cause of your own pain.
- Send me photos showing the principles in action, Possible prizes for best candid.
- Send me your success stories about using these principles.

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What To Do Next:

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