[Vickie]

I hate to be the bearer or good news but I see sciatic pain aleviated on a regular basis by methodically and consistently attending to your exercise. There are certain cases of sciatic discomfort that are dire. If you have fusion around the vertebrae so that you can't decompress the irritant to the nerve or if you have scar tissue or free floating bone fragments: eeech! But typically, honestly more than 90% of the time in my practice the pain is minimized and often completely eliminated. Now the secret is the consistency, which showed up in another thread on this forum today. I do have a number of fused vertebrae due to accidents and some childhood illness. The only time I do have discomfort is when I 'get lazy' or distracted from my routine. Since I understand this it hasn't happened in many years.

The exercises I shared are a basic place to begin and as you can I recommend you create a more comprehensive program. I do a variation of the floor exercises to this day and as you can imagine there are many more and more advanced versions you would need to consider to continue to improve and heal. If you'd like to share more details of the disc problem and it's location and the amount of time you have been aware of it I can offer some more suggestions; off the top of my head I would like to give you a periformis exercise.)
Often people don't want to get into this on an open forum so you could send me a pm and I would answer you personally and also offer the solutions in more general terms on the forum site. It's up to you.


Sounds like you are doing your squats exactly right as long as you are not allowing your shoulders to round at the lowest point on your squat and when you lift that you are keeping your weight in your heel and squeezing your glutes which just bring your knees back. Try to be sure you are not creating the lift from the balls of your feet and your knees feel neutral throughout. 20 is a good number as long as you do two or three sets of them. Let the muscle rest for 30-60 seconds, either just resting or doing another exercise and then repeat. If you wanted to go up in weight in your sets but feel like the dumbbells pull you forward, take a heavier single dumbbell and hold it with both hands at chest level. This also encourages you to hold your torso straighter (not vertical, mind you, just more aligned from hip to shoulder)