Piriformis Syndrome - IMMOO in 17 days - help please?

Triathlon Forum
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Anyone have any help/thoughts re. a very bad case of Piriformis Syndrome in my left buttock and left leg - really need to recover asap - IMMOO in immediate future - anyone had this? How long to recover? WHat did you do to fix it? ANyone got any helpful hints?

Many thanks,

Neil.

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3 words. TP Massage Ball. Get one and sit/roll on it.

3

also get a frozen water bottle and roll on it, at least it helped me :slight_smile:
.

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Second the ball. In the meantime, get a tennis ball and use that. The TP ball is better, but at least you’ll be doing something.

Also - lots of stretching - especially Pigeon pose. It’ll stretch both the piriformus & psoas. Good luck. I keep a tennis ball in my desk drawer - just in case :wink:

Thirdly - find an ART therapist & see if you can get some work done on it. It’ll really help to loosen everything up in there.

5

I’m a chiro and deal with these all the time, usually with a very high success rate. In fact, my next two patients coming in this morning have this problem. Usually there is also a sacro-iliac joint involved as well as the piriformis muscle. The pain in the leg is probably the piriformis muscle irritating the sciatic nerve as it travels in the hip area. My suggestion is find a chiro in your area that deals with sports injuries.

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Now that I have your attention: Gonna go against the grain here:

I was having big piriformis problems. Went to my PT and the first thing he asked me was if I was using the roller on it. Yes, I say. He said STOP!.. NO ROLLING AND NO MASSAGING unless it was along with my PT. Why?

He explained that, where the piriformis is, is kinda sandwiched in there with other muscles and nerves and when you mash on it it gets inflamed a bit because you’ve put pressure on it. He said it will feel good for a while, but 10 minutes later or an hour later or whatever, you’re back needing to massage it.

So I stopped using the roller, the ball, and the stick, and other than normal tightness after a long hard run, I’m good to go. Said normal stretching is fine, but don’t go overboard.

SOOOOO… If you have been rolling the snot out of it and using massage and such on it, and it STILL hurts, give this a shot for a week (keep stretching) and see what happens.

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Thanks everyone for the replies so far - man this site is awesome - by the time the last poster threw in his 2 cents I was sat on a tennis ball, with a bottle of water in the freezer having ordered a TPball!!! Guess we’ll see - but right now the tennis ball feels sensational!!!

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Glad to report that I suffered from the same problem a few weeks ago and was worried that my Timberman race would be a DNF, but was able to get the problem resolved by race day.

What worked for me was a combination of:

  • Massage therapy (by a triathlete RMT)
  • Specific stretching exercises (as directed by RMT)
  • Specific strengthening exercises (as directed by RMT)
  • cut back on running (running seemed to aggravate it)
  • corresponding increase in biking and swimming (which didn’t seem to aggravate it)

I also tried the tennis ball, but like the previous poster found that it would tend to cause an increase in pain later so I stopped that.

Good luck!

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I’ve had these piri/itb issues off and on. In addition to the advice already given, I’d suggest ice baths and Advil/nsaid. I take 1 or 2 Advil to deal with symptoms and then regularly take ice bath after any run/ride longer than 45 minutes or so.

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I rode the course on Sunday and strained my butt check. I think I’ve got something similiar. I just got a massage and when she hit the pififormis area I shot through the roof. I’m on rest right now. Good thing its taper time. I can ride okay - just cant push like crazy.

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Neil, I second the massage ball recs and maybe even a visit to a chiropractor. I know controversy surrounds chiropractic and you either are or aren’t a believer but I’ve had success with them.

I had a similar set of symptoms a number of years ago and called a P.T. friend who invited me to her clinic and did the standard therapies and showed me some unusual stretches that I do to this day. They helped a great deal. No problems since.

The potentially fortunate thing about this is that, although the timing may seem awful, it may be perfect. The symptoms can be treated and likely be r3solved prior to race day and this ia an appropriate time to be backing off. Remember, Joan Benoit-Samualsen won the first ever women’s Olympic marathon only 6 weeks after arthroscopic (sp?) knee surgery.

Remember the Ironman motto: “Anything is Possible”.

Best of luck. I’ll see you there.