Sciatica describes weakness, numbness, or leg pain that begins at the low back and goes down the sciatic nerve in the leg and causes sciatica pain. The largest nerve in the human body is the sciatic nerve which starts in the lower back and travels down the buttock and the lower limb.
The Journal of Neurosurgery, in the year of 2005, showed that 5 percent and more of adults in the US have sciatica and a person has a 40 percent possibility to get it, but fortunately, yoga practice can help you to reduce sciatic nerve pain.
What causes sciatica is irritation or compression of the sciatic nerve.
Other causes of sciatic nerve pain are:
- Degenerative disc disease.
- Spinal disc herniation.
- Narrowing of the spinal column.
- Nerve entrapment (a muscle in the buttock presses the sciatic nerve).
How to Find Out If You Have Sciatica
To find out if you have sciatica look through the following:
- Discomfort and pain along the pathway of the sciatic nerve: in the buttock, lower back, back of the calf, and thigh.
- Weakness: lack of strength that causes your knees to warp while standing up or can make it difficult to rise from a position of sitting.
- Numbness: Feeling loss. You can test yourself for this with a tooth stick or the edge of a matchbook. Compare the skin areas on one leg with the same on the other leg.
- Reduced reflexes in the Achilles knee and tendon.
- Paresthesia: unusual feeling, such as tingling, needles, pins pinching, and burning.
- Foot drop is a condition in which you cannot flex your ankles enough to walk on heels.
The strange places to feel sciatica pain are in the heel, down the back of the leg, in the back of the thigh, on the side of the foot, and outside of the calf.
So, sciatica is not the cause but the symptom of the discomfort and pain, and most of the time you need to visit a medical professional.
Yoga and Sciatica
There are other articles about sciatica nerve pain as 1 Minute VIDEO Exercises To Ease the Sciatic Nerve Pain and Top 10 Sciatic Pain Natural Treatments, but in this article, we will introduce you the yoga exercises for stretching your sciatic nerve.
You can do these exercises at your home. If you are a novice, follow the video in this article – Yoga for complete beginners.
Even if yoga can help you with sciatica and pain in the lower back, it can also cause pain in your back, so be careful.
If a medical professional says that the cause of your pain is muscle tightness or spasms, then these exercises can help you.
When stretching, be sure you do stretches on both sides.
Nowadays, yoga is performed by 20,000,000 people in America and it is used to stretch, strengthen and improve the overall balance of muscles.
And the good thing is that yoga can be done at your own home.
Attention: If you suffer from severe sciatica, consult your doctor before starting yoga.
Follow this video of yoga against sciatica: