This may come as news to even veteran runners, but nerves need to move! And tight nerves can have substantial consequences. Not only can nerves cause pain, but they can also create chronic muscle, joint, and connective tissue stiffness, soreness, and tension — and nerve tension can make us feel incredibly stiff.
Optimal nerve mobility goes far beyond decreasing nerve pain. It may also be the key to peak performance. This article serves as a primer on nerve tension and offers runners two new, on-the-go nerve stretches to optimize their running mobility.
Nerve Tension Defined
Nerve tension is a deficit of nervous system mobility in the body. The peripheral nerves are a series of interconnected “electrical cables” — covered in thin fascia — that interweave within, along, and between every layer of tissue in our body: skin, muscles, bones, and organs. Yet those nerves need to slide and glide amidst all that other tissue.
Why Nerves Get Tight
Nerve tension is common for everyone. Various life factors — including impaired posture, trauma (falls and accidents), and even deficient hydration — can make a nerve sticky.
Amongst runners, it is almost unavoidable. The impact load of running can compress and stiffen the spine, through which — and out of — the peripheral nerves flow to our arms and legs. Then, the innumerate muscle contractions, particularly in our legs over many miles and minutes, can cause myofascial tension that compresses the nerves within and around them.
Lastly, prolonged dehydration from endurance exercise can cause neuron-fascial tissues to get sticky and lose their natural glide.
The sciatic nerve is a common source of pain in runners. Photo: Shutterstock
Nerve Tension Can Make You Hurt
The consequences of nerve tension are multiple. Tight nerves can cause pain: symptoms can be a dull, or sharp-shooting pain, or both. They cause other symptoms, including burning and tingling. Though more rare, severe nerve tension can cause numbness and even muscle weakness. A hallmark of neurogenic pain is pain at rest.
But more troublesome, is how nerve tension can masquerade as orthopedic pain in two ways. Firstly, nerve tension can amplify a myofascial pain. For example, a tight, irritable medial plantar nerve can make a mild, 3-out-of-10 plantar fascial strain into 7-out-of-10 pain.
Secondly, even trickier, nerve tension can create and perpetuate myofascial pain. A tight nerve in the lower leg can create and sustain stiffness, tension, and even trigger points in a calf — an issue that no amount of generalized calf massage, stretching, and strengthening will sustainably alleviate.
Moreover, a tight, irritable nerve can create swelling in nearby tissues. For example, that same tight lower leg nerve can dump swelling into the heel and ankle, making it appear that you have seriously strained the ankle or Achilles. The joint or tendon will swell, get tight, and sore. But attempts to treat the immediate area will result in short-term improvements.
The take-home: in such cases, only by improving nerve mobility will the local tissues move and function efficiently.
For more on the multi-dimensional effects on nerve tension, see our previous article, “Three Types of Nerve Pain.”
Nerve Tension Can Make You Slow: The Wet Jeans Effect
Lastly, mild nerve tension can make you slow. Nerves are highly sensitive structures. When the nervous system perceives excess tension, it will increase tissue tone — global tightness in the area — to protect the nerve, and prevent you from moving that limb too fast or far.
Indeed, legs with nerve tension feel objectively heavier and take more effort to move.
I liken functioning with nerve tension to running in wet jeans. If running with a mobile, efficient, and relaxed nervous system feels like running in light split shorts, then running with moderate to severe nerve tension can feel like running in a pair of denim pants, soaking wet. You can move, but full range is limited, and it takes much more energy to flex and extend the legs.
Yet again, specific myofascial mobility strategies often fail to improve this pervasive and often severe stiffness.
If running with a mobile, efficient, and relaxed nervous system feels like running in light split shorts, then running with moderate to severe nerve tension can feel like running in wet jeans. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Nerve Tension Self-Check
Determining nerve tension can be tricky. Some runners can be very stiff, yet have relatively mobile nerves. While others can be very bendy — with naturally flexible joints and soft tissues, yet still have tight, irritable nerves. Think you might have nerve tension? Try the following two stretches. If, at the end of the mobility sequences you feel a strong tension sensation, you:
- may have significant nerve tension
- may benefit from adding regular nerve stretching to a performance mobility routine.
In the remainder of this article, we’ll refer to testing and mobilizing the sciatic nerve, which is the largest nerve in the leg that originates from the lower spine and sacrum, runs through the pelvis, and along the back of the leg. The sciatic is a large nerve that tends to get tight and irritable in many runners. It innervates all the muscle and skin on the posterior upper thigh and the majority of the lower leg and foot. When tight, it can cause pain and stiffness in the hip, hamstring, calf, ankle, and foot.
Joe’s On-The-Go Sciatic Nerve Stretches: Step-by-Step
Sciatic nerve tension testing and pre-activity mobilization is easy. All it takes is your leg, and a foot rest of some kind. Follow the steps below:
Step 1: Place a foot on an object in front of you. Find a stable object upon which to rest your foot — a chair, staircase, bench, rock, or even a vehicle bumper. The optimal height depends on your overall flexibility: If stiff, the object can be low: a couple of stairs, or a low stool. If you’re particularly bendy, you may need a high surface like a table or countertop.
Place your foot on the object, with a straight knee and the foot flexed upward. An optimal object height will result in a light stretch sensation in the back of the leg.
Step 1, Sciatic nerve testing and stretching set-up. Photo: Joe Uhan
Step 2: Point the pelvis toward the foot. Turn your hips so that they face your foot. This often will increase the stretch, at least slightly.
Step 3: Perform these two moves.
- Side Bend Away from the Stretched Side – Keeping the pelvis level, side bend your spine away from the stretch leg. It may help to slide your hand along the opposite leg, reaching toward your stance foot. For example, if stretching the right leg, the left hand will slide down, along the left leg, reaching toward the left foot.
Side bending away from the stretched side. Photo: Joe Uhan
- Rotate Toward the Stretched Side – Keeping the pelvis level, rotate the trunk toward the stretch leg. The outer (stance leg) shoulder should twist toward the stretch foot. For example, if stretching the right leg, twist the left shoulder toward the right foot.
Rotating toward the stretched side. Photo: Joe Uhan
Step 4: Oscillate the Motions – Optimal nerve mobilization involves small and slow on-and-off movement. This can be in the form of tensioning — applying stretch pressure — or through flossing (learn more about flossing below in this article).
Signs of Sciatic Nerve Tension
Once in this position, a normal sensation is just a mild increase in leg tension when the spinal side bend, or rotation, is applied. Signs of positive and relevant sciatic nerve tension include:
- a strong to severe stretch sensation
- a stretch sensation that replicates pain, other symptoms, or chronic tension.
If performing the stretch results in severe tension, or the replication of pain, aching, shooting pain, tingling — located anywhere in the leg or spine, including the foot, lower leg, hamstring, anterior thigh, pelvis, or low back — then you have significant nerve tension, and it’s time to get it moving!
Don’t Yank, Wiggle: Benefits of Three-Dimensional Nerve Mobilization
[Author’s Note: These two stretches are adaptations of the pioneering work of physiotherapist Bob Elvey and protege, Jack Stagge.]
A cursory internet search of nerve mobilization will result in two main types of stretches:
1. Flexion-Based Tensioners
These are strategies where the nerve is tensioned — lengthened between the spine and limb — and involving flexion — the forward-bending of the body or individual joints. For example, a sciatic nerve flexion tensioner stretch involves a foot on an object, followed by a simple spinal flexion.
2. Flossing
This is a more nuanced strategy where the nerve is tensioned on one end of its length, while slackened on the other. This creates a flossing effect, where the nerve is pulled slightly, either more proximally (toward the spine), or distally (away). With sciatic nerve flossing, a foot may be on an object, but when the spine flexes forward (tensioning the proximal nerve), the foot plantarflexes (slackening the distal nerve) at the same time. Oscillating this movement creates a flossing-like effect.
But sticky nerves can be stubborn, often requiring more than one or two strategies to get free. Joints have several different types of movement: flexion, but also extension, side bending, and rotating in multiple directions. Why not involve them all?
These two strategies employ both side bending and rotation, and they afford the opportunity to add the other motions — particularly flexion and extension — as well as flossing. The more novel movements, the more likely it is to sustainably free the nerve and restore efficient nerve mobility.
Mobilizing nerves will lead to more comfortable and faster running. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Advanced Sciatic Nerve Mobility Strategies
Once you have found nerve tension and established the foot-on-object position, experiment with various movements to accentuate the stretch. Options include:
1. Lower Body Tension Strategies
Movement strategies for the leg include:
- ankle dorsiflexion and plantar flexion
- knee flexion and extension
- hip hinging
2. Upper Body Tension Strategies
Movement strategies above the leg include:
- neck flexion, extension, side bending, or rotation
- arm movements such as straight overhead or lateral raises
3. Flossing Strategies
Wanna’ test your coordination? Turn any tensioner strategy into a flossing strategy by combining a tensioning and slackening. An example includes, chin-to-chest (neck flexion) with ankle plantarflexion. Any upper body movement paired with a lower body movement can be used as a flossing strategy.
Nerve Stretching: When and How Much
While they need motion to be healthy and function properly, nerves are highly sensitive structures. They hate stretching! Prolonged, aggressive stretching of these electrical cables often results in worsening symptoms.
Optimal nerve mobilization should include:
- High Frequency: Stretch nerves as often as four or five times a day.
- Low Duration: Prolonged tension can be highly irritable to nerves. Hold tension for only a few seconds. Better yet, oscillate with slow on and off tension or flossing motion.
- Moderate Repetition: As few as 8 to 10, to as many as 20 to 30, oscillating repetitions is plenty, and they should not last more than 30 to 60 seconds in total duration.
- Timing: The best times to mobilize nerves includes the morning, pre-physical activity, after prolonged inactivity such as sitting, and in the evening, or before sleeping.
Conclusion
Nerve mobility is vitally important, not just for pain relief but for full and unrestricted motion. Tense nerves are responsible for not only nerve pain, but a lot of chronic myofascial aches and pains, and may stubbornly restrict any motion in the body.
Even if you do not have nerve pain, or don’t feel particularly stiff, check in with your nerve mobility. Enhancing it may make running feel lighter, easier, and faster!
Call for Comments
Do you suffer from sciatic nerve pain? Did you find the above helpful?
