What is sciatica?
Sciatica is caused when there is pressure on, or irritation of the sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve is one of the major nerves that runs through the lower back, buttocks and down the leg, and when irritated, symptoms may include pain, numbness, tingling and weakness in the legs. Symptoms are often felt in the hamstring muscles, often leading to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment.
Why it develops
Usually sciatica will be due either to compression of the nerve at the spinal level, like when a bulging disk is pressing on it, or when the nerve is trapped by the soft tissue somewhere along its path. Much sciatica occurs as a result of compensation to movement and stability.
Treatment
The main factor which needs to be established is why the nerve is being irritated. Once you’ve figured this out, you can treat it accordingly. The goal is simple, to relieve pressure on the nerve, and ensure it can ‘glide’ through the necessary soft tissue structures along its path.
Often there can be a very simple reason for sciatica developing, but often this gets overlooked and a more complex diagnosis is assumed. Understanding how you manage your centre of mass and good fundamental movement is essential in getting long term relief from sciatica.
Do you have the necessary CORE stability to support your back and neck?
Get assessed, we can help you develop it
How we can help
What we can do
The first step is to identify the type of sciatic pain you’re experiencing, and then to identify and correct any weak links in your kinetic chain (movement chain), which might be contributing to the pain. Sciatica can be a debilitating condition, we want to help you first manage it, then beat it for good!
Change your habits
If your lifestyle habits are contributing to the sciatic pain you’re experiencing, these must be addressed. We see lots of cases where the sciatic pain is simply due to the person compressing one side of their body through placing more weight through it. If your sciatic nerve is being compressed by how you’re sitting, standing or moving, then we need to change you!
What your investment represents
We believe treatment with us is not only about getting you out of pain or rehabilitating an injury. We feel you should get so much more, including:
- Pain free lifestyle
- Understand your weak links, and how to fix them
- Better CORE stability
- Move and feel beter
- Improved walking gait (transfers nicely to running gait)
- Improved posture / look better
- Lean how to manage your lifestyle