Top 3 exercises that will make your sciatica worse:
1. Nerve flossing
2. Pigeon stretches
3. Lumbar extensions
Typically sciatica sufferers resort to doing some sort of stretching or mobility exercises, or nerve flossing exercises to alleviate their pain. While they might provide short term relief they’re not strategies that will fundamentally solve the problem in the long run. The way your body is positioned has a lot to do with whether or not you’ll feel pain. You can do all the flossing, mobility and stretching exercises under the sun, but if you don’t reprogram your muscles to correct the way your body is positioned, you’ll be stuck dealing with short sided solutions and spinning your wheels in the sand.
- Nerve flossing - If you’re not addressing the underlying reason your nerves are compressed and entrapped, pulling nerves back and forth to mobilize and stretch them will only take you so far.
- Pigeon stretches - Passive stretching feeds your muscles misinformation. Instead of programming your muscles to decompress and support the body, stretching programs your muscles to switch off during movement, making you move worse.
- Lumbar extensions - To address sciatica your need to take pressure off the nerves causing it. Lumbar extensions might do this temporarily but doing this passively isn’t what’s going to reconfigure your body to keep that pressure off long term.
If you want to find the root cause and fix your sciatica pain, it comes down to correcting your body positioning and decompressing your spine. Reconfiguring your body and removing pressure from what’s compressing the sciatica nerve, is going to be key to solving this problem for good.
This is why we take a systems approach when it comes to addressing pain. Instead of working with short sided solutions where you eventually end up with a problem again, we identify what’s triggering the pain to happen in the first place, and fix exactly that.
Great work here by @chris.yu._ for helping his client address their sciatica pains.
