Let’s pause for an anatomy lesson!
The piriformis muscle goes across the buttocks and moves as your leg swings during walking and other activities. When your leg swings back and forth your glute muscles OR your hip flexor is at work; one shuts off, well, relaxes, while the other does its job. Not so with the piriformis. If this muscle gets really tight then it can put pressure on the nerve that runs down the back of the leg. This is not a great thing.
Ok, back to me and my issues (not that this post could even begin to cover those… haha). There is a certain spot on my piriformis on the right side that hurts a lot when the physical therapists do their thing. (Real quick: The intern who started with me was Becky. She went back to school last week and now a new intern, Kate, works with me.) Tony (the main physical therapist), told Kate my trouble spots and she has been working with the piriformis the most. It’s amazing how much this little spot hurts. It doesn’t hurt as much as the pubis spot, but it’s a sharper pain. Sometimes it feels like she’s sticking me with pins. I have a really tight spot that she works with. She can feel the muscle desponding to her pressure, which is good because all I feel pain for the most part. While the right side has pain, the left side is doing pretty well.
Usually Becky, and now Kate, does the myofascial release. Tony did it once last week, and holy cow was it intense. He said, “Good myofascial release should leave bruises.” Well, I didn’t get bruises, but I was sore afterwards, but in a good way.
Very randomly this past Sunday I awoke with hip pain. I thought that I had just slept on it wrong, so I moved my hips around, trying to fix it. Bad idea. It felt like I had slipped it out of place or something else painful, so I lay down for an hour. That fixed it, and I forgot about it. Monday morning I awoke again with the same pain, but this time I didn’t try to fix it. I’m not stupid. It felt painful if I tried to fully extend my legs in either direction, as if my hip was out of place. Luckily I was able to walk it out.
I’ve started to add 20-30 minutes worth of jogging/walking to my routine. So far it is going well. Once I pushed myself a few times and ran for a few minutes, which was a horrible idea. I was wicked sore later. Although I cannot yet do full squats and lunges (and by that I mean I’ve been told not to), I can now add half-squats and half-lunges to my work outs.
My pain is migrating between the butt area and my thigh. Tony says that the pain moving upward from thigh to butt is good. The other day the physical therapist found a huge knot in my thigh and worked on it. It was not comfortable.
Now that my month is up I am done with working with the physical therapist. For the next week or so I will work out and stretch by myself. I will also go to the physical therapist to work out there where they can monitor me and answer questions. If I don’t continue to heal then I will get manual therapy again.
I’ll admit to being a little hesitant. Although I am better I am not healed. I’m glad that I’ll be under their supervision still.
