Okay so sit down and lift one leg up until its horizontal to the ground (straight legged) and lean forward a little. Then just droop your head down so your upper back (i guess) becomes somewhat rounded. When I do this I feel a big stretch in my upper hamstring…where it ties in to the glutes. I don’t see any correlation between the position of the head and the area of hamstring stretched.
Can anybody explain this?
Edit: The position of the head makes all the difference for me. If I have my head up I’ll just feel a normal hamstring stretch in the middle hamstrings…but once the head is down I really feel it close to the glutes.
[QUOTE=UnlimitedSteel]Okay so sit down and lift one leg up until its horizontal to the ground (straight legged) and lean forward a little. Then just droop your head down so your upper back (i guess) becomes somewhat rounded. When I do this I feel a big stretch in my upper hamstring…where it ties in to the glutes. I don’t see any correlation between the position of the head and the area of hamstring stretched.QUOTE]
You are stretching your sciatic nerve. Tilting your head forward stretches the meninges that surround your spinal cord. This stretch is transmitted to the sciatic nerve running down the back of your leg, thus causing the sensation you describe.
There are more productive things you can do to help with freeing nerve movement.
Get into the seated position you mentioned, keep the head and chest up and raise your leg at the knee and dorsiflex, then as you lower it back down drop your head and flex through your thoracic, then straighten up as you once again raise the leg, repeat on the other side. This helps lubricate the nerve canal and break up adhesions that may impinge on it.
Yeah, Chek does that except you sit on a chair and put one leg up on a ball, as you lower your head down gently, you dorsi flex that leg (only as much as you needed).
Get into seated position with head/chest up and straighten leg
dorsiflex the foot Is this right? Or is something else to be dorsiflexed? I dont see how dorsiflexion of the foot would matter in this case.(except more of a stretch in the calf/hamstring area)
Begin to lower leg while flexing the neck down
4)reverse the process (raise leg while straightening the neck)
Did I get what you were saying?
If left untreated, what could this “nerve tightness” lead to? Hamstring pulls?
The term neural flossing refers to the gliding of the nerve through a pathway. The nerve can become ‘stuck’ for want of a better term or impinged and flossing it will free it.
IMO this is never a cure rather than a short-term fix, but that’s another story.
And yes - Holding the stretch over a period is not reccomended as the nerve can go to sleep or be quite seriously damaged.
I would rather than use the term ‘bounce’ use the term ‘glide’ as it infers a gentle gliding of the nerve through it’s route which is what you are trying to do.
Glide sounds better than bounce. remember also that this is a test as well. If a nerve is impinged, it might be from tight muscles around it. In this case, the culprit is usually the piriformis and that’s one reason you see so much stretching related to this area on the downloads like the GPP.
I was sent an athlete last night who has a ‘siactic issue’. The Physio gave him flossing ‘stretches’ and a few stretches to work on.
This is pointless - release the problem and the nerve will take care of itself in most cases.
