The nerve damage isn't productive of muscle weakness/paralysis, its not like wrist/foot drop, but constant contraction without the corresponding ability to counterbalance it by relaxing the muscle. The reason I've sometimes had to 'brace' my foot, I meant, sandwiching it between flat surfaces so that the muscle contraction when it affects my toes and foot can't go past a point where I'm unable to unbend it, and have it strain anything. To restrict the range of movement and force it to stay flattened out like feet are meant to be, so it physically cannot bend, despite its trying to forcibly contract, by giving it nowhere to go, if that makes sense.
Its done it so forcefully before in the past when I've been walking, that I was leaving a shop and it dropped me to the floor, had to take my boot off and use my hands to wrench my foot in the opposite direction and then stand with all my weight on the damn thing, dragging my foot along the street when put back in the shoe, with my holding onto my toes, kinda wrenching them upwards in both hands until I could slide my toes part-way back in my shoe.
Hurts like a fucking absolute cunting sack of bastards, caught me completely by surprise when I was leaving the shop and I almost screamed out loud. Just hit me like a bolt out of the blue suddenly, with no warning, feeling like my tendons/ligaments over the top of my foot were trying to snap in two.
The zanaflex works though, have tried a whole bunch of other meds, baclofen (I seem to be one of those who at least by mouth am a complete non-responder to any dose, even up to hundreds of mg starting dose, without tolerance, so I abandoned that pretty quickly), tried pregabalin, gabapentin and methocarbamol, as well as diazepam. and had no luck with any of them, nor with temazepam. Nitrazepam does work better though, so I use it occasionally for that if it happens without warning, but usually my solution is plugging tizanidine.
It'll knock you senseless doing that though, and needs some xylometazoline drops up the nose as theres otherwise nasal congestion with high doses. At first, plugging or insufflating half a 2mg tab would knock me out cold, almost like nodding on opiates, without the euphoria. Eventually got on just about enough to keep it at bay, now I'm taking 5x4mg tabs a day. Works well for opiate WD, since it works like clonidine does, but its a lot stronger of a muscle relaxer and seems less hypotensive.
Although I take clonidine as well, but thats for a completely different reason, to help stop me overloading, thanks to the whole lack of sensory filters, less extraneous sensory shite comes in thanks to taking it, although the tizanidine helps in that respect also.
