Advice from an expert: How to tell if your leg pain is actually coming from your back
By:
Anna Staehli Wiser, DPT, FAAOMPT
Do you have persisting pain in your hamstring, calf, or shin that won’t go away no matter how much you stretch? Sometimes persisting leg pain can actually be coming from your back - even when your back doesn’t hurt! The hallmark symptoms of classic sciatica include pain in the lower back that radiates into the posterior hip and down the leg, often times accompanied by numbness and tingling1. Even if those hallmark symptoms are not there, this does not mean your lower back is not causing your leg pain. Here are 3 expert tips to help you determine the source of your pain:
1. Pay attention to how your leg pain behaves. Pain from a muscle is fairly specific and you should be able to pinpoint the source with your finger tip. Pain from the lumbar nerves tends to be diffuse, difficult to localize with your finger, and may even move around from day to day (nociceptive versus neuropathic pain 2).
2. What activities make the pain worse? An injury to a muscle usually feels worse with activity. The injured muscle would hurt worse the more you use it, such as with running, hiking, or playing sports. If the pain is coming from your back, the pain would often-times be noticed more at rest, like after periods of prolonged sitting at your desk or in your car.
3. A muscle injury should respond readily to treatment such as massage or stretching. If pain is coming from your spine, then no matter how much you massage or stretch the muscle, the injury would not get better, which means you need to go looking elsewhere for the source of the injury!