Hi Betsey and welcome! I find my experience with exercise correlates with your own: If I take a 20-mile bike ride and go and lift weights afterwards, I'm almost completely pain-free for a long while - no lower lumbar tingles, no sciatica, no drop foot, no strange pains in my knee. However, if I spend the day in front of the PC stressing out about some problem on my mind, bango: My back hurts and my left leg is weak. This of course makes no sense if my problem was purely structural. Then, the longer I would ride, the more I would hurt, especially if there were bone spurs rubbing or a bulging disk bulging, whatever. However, because I hurt worse when I'm under self-imposed stress, it's very, very likely that my pain-syndrome is TMS induced. Since you can "walk through" your pain, it sounds like you'll benefit immensely from the TMS approach; that is, as long as you've been checked out by an MD to determine there aren't any underlying physical causes for your pain. With all the alternative strategies you've explored, it sounds as though you've done that already. If Dr. Sarno is correct about TMS pain being caused by the autonomic nervous system reducing the supply of oxygen to your extremities, it also makes sense that when you walk a longer distance and "warm up" that more oxygen is getting to the parts of your body that hurt. Such an exercise-based cure is temporary I would think because it does not address the underlying emotional reasons your brain is cutting off the oxygen to your nerves, muscles and tendons. However, pushing yourself physically does seem to help break down the conditioned pain pathways in your body that perpetuate the syndrome. There's probably also a psychological explanation too: When you push yourself, you feel better about the inner you and negate one of the main reasons behind the TMS charade, which can often be low self esteem.
