How to End Impingement Syndrome & Sciatica

Chances are, you know this person. I’m not going to say who it is, but you may know them personally…

With muscle testing, we usually start at the root cause and work out. First of all, that’s a better way to find the root cause, but second, and more importantly, it allows us to remain objective and not get caught up in the assumption that goes along with any condition which has been named: eg. that the condition is an end in itself and has no solution… which is bunk.

But in this case, I’m working backwards, literally. Its 7:00 a.m. and I’m about to go to sleep for the night. The thing that kept me up was putting the finished touches on the manual for my muscle testing and biomechanics course VTS Level 1.

A lot of people ask me about impingement syndrome and sciatica, and how I am able to use muscle testing to eliminate them, and since its a big part of the course content, I’d share a tidbit. Here it is: enjoy.

Impingement Syndrome:

This is what happens when a nerve gets pinched and the CNS goes berserk. A “syndrome” is different from a “one-time” impingement in that the word syndrome denotes that the problem is ongoing. Imagine a crab scuttling up to you and grabbing your ankle in its pincers, and then you just walk around like that for the rest of your life, and that’s impingement syndrome, except the “crab” is a bone inside your body and the “ankle” is a raw nerve, firing pain signals up to the brain like a squad of NRA activists at a shooting gallery.

If you’ve ever had it, its horrible. “Sciatic pain” is an example of impingement syndrome but the syndrome is also quite common in the neck and back.

We’re not so much interested in the “syndrome” part, as that just means the initial cause never went away, so let’s look at the “impingement” part:

Causes of Impingement

When there is a breakdown of elasticity somewhere along the kinetic chain, the joints are allowed to move outside of their proper positions. The original breakdown in elasticity, with its minor joint movement, may fall below the pain threshold, but it often creates a chain reaction where other joints move to compensate. At some point in this process, one of the compensatory movements will result in a bone or joint moving in such a way as to come near to a nerve.

Because the CNS is paranoid of anyone coming near its nerves, it goes berserk. The degree to which it goes berserk will be a reflection of the degree that the nerve is being impinged.

Let’s use the example of “sciatica”. A very common chain reaction I’ve noticed is this: (numerical order may be easier to follow, and you can see each of these steps in the attached diagram of what may very well be you on some level):

Causes of Sciatica – Impingement Syndrome

1. For one of a dozen reasons, the tibialis posterior muscle shuts off (bottom right on the above picture)
2. The arch caves in from lack of muscular support (also bottom right)
3. The tibia and fibula splay apart (still bottom right)
4. The femur rotates internally (look, its all bottom right okay?)
5. The pelvis gets pushed up on one side
6. The sacrum is also shifted to one side
7. The sciatic nerve, which runs through the pelvis and next to the sacrum, is impinged
8. The subject walks around on a collapsed arch for years and never makes the connection that their “sciatica” is stemming from the collapsed arch.
9. The result: they get years of therapy on the region in and around their sciatic nerve, but nothing helps. They assume it is a life-long condition and talk about it at dinner parties.

Refer to the  attached picture of a pelvis with the sciatic nerve running through it. Look at how easy it is for something like that to get impinged from just a little lateral shifting…

Amusingly enough, this image is thanks to a “medical astrology” blog.

The long-term damage control measures that characterize the treatment programs for impingement syndrome are common with practitioners who specialize in soft tissue therapy but lack an adequate understanding of biomechanics. This can be addressed by reviewing the following steps:

Whether you’re a therapist, trainer or simply someone who is tired of experiencing impingement syndrome, the solution is the same:

• Learn how to perform Muscle Testing on your subject or get it done on you if you’re the subject
• Use Muscle Testing to figure out what’s not working
• Figure out how to get it working (if you’re not sure how, or where to start, that is the focus of this entire Blog
• Once everything is working, see if the impingement syndrome has gone away on its own. 9x out of 10 it will have, and the 10th time you didn’t reactive something, and there’s still a compensation pattern going on.

Moral of the story:

We need to start seeing impingement syndrome/sciatica not as an inescapable condition but simply as a function of a joint pinching a nerve. Whatever destabilized that joint in the first place probably originated somewhere else, and you may not even be feeling pain in the original area so it can feel a bit counter-intuitive at first. The solution is simple: remove the cause, eliminate the effect, and you’ll have a new name for the condition – you can call it:

That condition I got rid of…

Where to go from here?

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