I still haven’t started training for my marathon, and I’m now a week and a half behind schedule and the clock is ticking. My problem is that I’m experiencing quite a bit of pain in my left leg, but I’m not sure if it’s a pulled or strained hamstring muscle, or a pinched or irritated sciatic nerve. I’ve been doing the research online and talking with a physical therapist and evidently the two are commonly confused and with me that makes three.
Your hamstring, of course, is the big muscle on the back of your leg (actually there is more than one hamstring muscle, but let’s not get technical). It lifts your leg up when you take a step. I believe I strained mine by doing some unexpected sprinting, which means I was hastily moving my leg forward and upwards and overworked the hamstring muscle beyond what it was used to.
The sciatic nerve runs from your spine down through your behind, your hamstring, past your knee, into your calf, and then your foot. It’s a big nerve, about as big around as your finger, apparently.
Sometimes your sciatic nerve can become irritated if you have disc problems in your back, and apparently if you overwork your hamstring, since the nerve goes through it. Although I’m not sure, I believe I injured my hamstring which led to irritation of my sciatic nerve. But there are a few reasons why I’m confused.
First, supposedly you can detect a sciatic nerve injury by laying on your back and having someone else lift your leg up straight until you feel the stretch, and then they bend your toe towards you. This is supposed to cause excruciating pain if you have a sciatic nerve injury. But my wife did this with me last night and it didn’t hurt at all. Not one bit. In fact, my leg felt quite a bit better after this.
So is it a hamstring injury? Well, hamstring injuries aren’t supposed to cause pain anywhere but from your behind down into the back of your leg, but I’m having pain on the outside of my knee, in my calf, and even going towards my foot.
These are just some of my symptoms. In reading through all the symptoms of hamstring injuries and sciatic nerve injuries it seems I have some symptoms of each, but I appear to not have some of the most basic symptoms of each.
So what am I doing for treatment? Nothing, mostly. That is, I’m sitting around and resting, sitting on a heat pad, and trying not to do anything that makes my leg hurt. But I seem to keep hurting it anyway. I haven’t been swimming for a few months, but my parents have a membership at the gym and we’re visiting them for Christmas so I decided to go with them, since I’m going crazy not being able to do anything and figured swimming should be safe. How wrong I was. Even though I only kick as much as I need to in order to keep my legs from dragging in the water, that was enough to aggravate my leg pain to the point where yesterday ended up being my worst day so far. The night before I had jogged 50 feet or so and felt ok, and was thus planning on going for a run later in the day, but after swimming I tried to run and on the first step I felt like I was tearing something and had to immediately stop, after which point it was difficult to even walk without pain.
The pain is only triggered by movement. It doesn’t ache or anything, it’s a sharp, shooting pain that’s triggered when I move in certain ways, which includes most ways I can move. There are few movements I can make that don’t hurt, and I haven’t memorized them yet, so I’m commonly in pain if I’m moving at all.
I’m hoping that within a day or two I’ll have recovered enough from swimming that I can go for a short jog, which doesn’t appear to aggravate the injury. I’m hoping that the blood flow from that will aid the healing that that I’ll soon be able to get fully involved in my training. But if this goes on for a few more weeks, I’m thinking I’ll probably need to cancel my plans to run in this marathon and hope for a later one.
I’m going to try the tennis ball massage technique today. That is, sitting on a tennis ball and rolling around on it to give myself a deep tissue massage.
I’m having the same problem. I injured my hamstring a year ago, stopped running for a few weeks and then went back and have had pain ever since. I developed the sciatica (pain going into my foot) about 4 months ago. I run in pain because I don’t want to quit. I run slow, much slower than I did before I had this and have to stop frequently. But, it’s the sciatic pain into my foot that’s the worst. I should stop running for a few weeks again and see if some healing will take place, but I don’t like other types of exercise, so it’s hard for me to stop. Lucky I don’t like swimming or I could be worse.
I’m not a physical therapist nor do I play one on TV, but one thing I know is that you’re not supposed to run through pain. That is, sore muscles are one thing, but real pain–nerve pain or injury pain–is quite another, and the more you cause that pain the more damage you may be doing. I would find a physical therapist in your area who is an avid runner and make an appointment immediately. Better to take two months off of running in order to do therapy and let things heal than to keep on running and end up with a more serious problem that may require surgery and six months of no running.
This sounds eerily like my injury, although mine is in my adductor magnus on the inside of my thigh. It started from pushing too hard on my bike without proper warmup and training years ago. It has come and gone since then but this time is debilitating. The problem is that the pain doesn’t come for a couple days so I can do real damage to it without realizing it but I have learned to recognize the sensation and immediately stop. My mistake was going to a physiotherapist who made me do exercises .. very bad idea. Then I couldn’t even limp along without hurting it. Then I couldn’t even use crutches anymore because I couldn’t hold my leg up. I was totally incapacitated, after having pulled it 11 times. Interestingly, anywhere from a week to 2 weeks after pulling it the pain would completely go away and I’d feel great and happy. Then I’d use my leg in a non strenuous way and I’d feel it go, and I’d be right back to square one, but a little weaker every time as the muscle degenerates from lack of use. I guess it takes the nerve much longer to regain its strength than the muscle, so it is more susceptible to reinjury if you return to activity too quickly. Unfortunately, this means that your muscle will waste away. Interestingly, I did manage to get up to normal walking abilities a couple months ago and went kayaking. I was actually carrying 100 pounds on my back, and that didn’t bother it. What reinjured it was when I was waiting for the bus and I did a very light short jog over to the washroom. Since then it has been a downhill spiral. At the beginning of April I had to move into my mom’s house, leave work, and do nothing. I was getting better then I made the mistake of seeing the sports doctor. Ouch… Then 2 weeks later I saw another sports doctor closer to where my mom lives …. ouch. A month has now passed and I am regaining some strength and it doesn’t hurt anytime I move it. I still can’t walk or put weight on my foot due to lack of use. Next week I am seeing an EMG doctor in the hospital but I am going to try to talk him out of doing one due to my improvement over the last few weeks from resting it. But my foot has gone purple, cold, swollen, and developed a rash.
With me I think it is the tibial nerve, which is a branch of the sciatic which goes along the lower adductor magnus.
I had a similar thing. I am training for a half marathon and all of a sudden had pain when I was driving. The pain would be in my butt so bad I couldn’t drive. I kept running and then it was painful to run. I went to the accupuncturist and she told me I have a inflamed sciatic nerve. I have had 3 accupuncture treatments and I am almost pain free. The doctor said I will need 6 treatments and take 2 weeks off of running. So far it is working.
Similar problems for me. Turned out to be a herniated disk in the lumbar spine compressing the sciatica as it leaves the spine. I had to go through four doctors before they thought to check for a herniated disc. Lying down on stomach and then pushing oneself up with one’s arms, bending at the waist, so that the hips stay in contact with the surface one is lying on should help this condition. When I do this ten or twenty times every two hours, the pain goes away.
I believe I have both conditions. I reached a point where I could not get out of bed without excruciating pain and I called 911. The pain in the back of my leg was so bad that it did not respond to morphine and the drug that is even stronger than morphine. They transported me to an MRI center and the MRI came back with a herniated disc. They did not take an MRI of the hamstring area. Since they could see the pinched nerve, there was no need to look elsewhere. Everyone is now talking back surgery. I am currently bedridden since walking 10 steps gives me extreme pain and I want a fix. But I would hate to go through back surgery and have it not fix the problem since the pain caused by the herniated disc was secondary pain. I believe I have a hamstring pull that caused swelling that then caused the sciatica. Stretching my thigh kills.
Hi, I noticed you posted this a while back, how did you get on in the end?
I had a similar problem with my sciatic nerve and recently once my physio sorted it out giving me specific leg movements to perform every day(where you perform 20-30 repetitions and feel a pull in your hamstring), I started running again. Only recently I decided to progress to sprinting (which was probably too early just yet as I had previously got onto 20 minute running)where the nerve became irritated and now it has been a few weeks even though I am still performing the leg movements effectively and my nerves are fully functional i.e. I can touch my toes with the palms of my hand and can straighten my leg and bend the foot without feeling pain. Resting, Ice, Heat, Massage, Nerve exercises and stretching have all failed.
My physio couldn’t solve the problem, do you have any advice?
Cheers in advance.
The tough part with this problem is proper diagnosis. I’m still not positive what my problem was, and I don’t know what fixed it. I stayed away from what seemed to have done the most damage initially (quick movements that jerked my hamstrings, long distances of fast walking, trampolines), and running seemed to make it feel better. I got back into the gym, which also seemed to help as I did more core exercises and strengthened my abdominal muscles. But maybe it was just a fluke and it would have gotten better anyway. I just don’t know.
I have been having a similar experience since June and finally went to a Sports Medicine doc yesterday. My pain was first noticed when running. It was under the left buttock and somewhat down the underside of my thigh. Hurt every time I lifted the left leg while running. Sometimes it bothered me when just walking. Along with it came a general feeling of weakness in that leg.
Mild stretching seemed to help it, but one night I decided to add a piriformis stretch to my regimen and, oh boy, I saw the stars for several days.
I thought this was a disc problem in my back. But the doc says I have strained my hamstring at its insertion point and the swelling is putting pressure on the sciatic nerve. He recommends rest, physical therapy and gentle and progressive stretching. He feels like this will get me back in the game in a matter of a month or so.
Believe it or not, just knowing that has made it hurt less! I guess the doc visit relieved some anxiety which was probably contributing to the problem. My advice to you: go see a competent Sports Medicine Orthopedic. Don’t waste any more time trying to diagnose it yourself.