Applied together with the Braggard manoeuvre it has been the gold standard for more than a century. The standard sciatic nerve stretch test for lower back and leg pain was originally credited to Charles Lasègue more than 150 years ago. They will help you get started on the path to improving your sciatica pain.Maitland's lumbar examination aims to place increasing dural tension on the sciatic nerve to measure possible entrapment in or around the intervertebral foramen. If your test is positive, take a look at some of the articles with videos for sciatica we’ve linked below. If you don’t feel Pain travelling down your leg/foot, and you just get low back pain, that can mean you don’t have Sciatica, but may have a different low back issue. If you do feel your pain symptoms, it’s because you’re causing nerve impingement in some way, and you likely have sciatica. Straighten out the opposite (bad) leg and bring your head down towards your knee again. Does it reproduce any symptoms? You probably won’t because this is the good leg, but you may get some back tension or some other symptoms. And then again, round out your back and bring your head a little bit closer to your knee. Next, start with your good leg, that you aren’t experiencing pain in. If this alone reproduces your pain symptoms, you’re done with the slump test. Slightly round out your lower back and tilt your pelvis in (posterior), which may right away cause some discomfort. So, we’re going to tension that nerve and see if there’s any entrapment or impingement along the way that’s causing these nerve type symptoms that you’re getting in your leg.

The nerve exits your lower back, goes down your leg, and innervates your lower leg. We’re just trying to see if it reproduces your symptoms. Never power through a test like this or force anything.

Go into them very slowly and back out of them slowly as well. You want to be careful with these types of tests. In order to determine if your pain is true Sciatica or some other low back issue, we need to stress the nerve a bit to see if it reproduces your symptoms.

Most times sciatica affects only one leg (unilaterally), but it can affect both legs, depending on the cause. Sciatica is nerve pain that that normally radiates into the butt, back of the hip, and down the back of the leg to the foot.

Slump test for sciatica