How might yoga be more harmful than helpful? When it comes to sciatica pain,
there's certain yoga stretches that can directly cause more irritation to the sciatic nerve.
And let me explain how this is the sciatic nerve pathway runs this way, it starts up at the skull,
as you can see that green strap that's there, runs down through the spine,
goes on the inside of the pelvis here and then pops out on the outside right here in this bone,
and it runs down on the back of the thigh, and all the way down the back of the knee
to the foot all the way to the toes. So because the sciatic nerve is relatively
on the back of the body, it's going to be stressed if you do any sort of motion that brings your foot
towards your head. Now what you need to know is nerves have a certain flexibility built into them.
I mean, think about it, every time you move your arm or your leg or your foot,
there's nerves inside that arm, that leg that are stretched, they move with the arm with the
legs. So if you reach out this way, nerves have to have a certain amount of flexibility to allow you
to get there without causing any problems. Same thing with your legs all the way down your feet.
But when nerves are irritated when they're injured, they do shorten a bit. We've seen
in more recent medical research that nerves have the ability to shorten and lengthen
slight amounts. And when they're irritated, they tend to shorten just a bit. So doing any
sort of motion that stretches in already short nerve is going to add more irritation to it.
So this is why poses the bring your feet towards your head are particularly not helpful. I'm
talking about the Downward Facing Dog Pose, the standing of folding pose this any seated
folding pose anything where you bring your head towards your feet or your feet towards your head,
whichever way you want to call it. But your knee is straight. Because as
soon as you bend your knee, you add some slack to the nerve. And that might be beneficial. But even
for a very irritated sciatic nerve, even bringing your leg this way could be harmful. Another one
that's kind of sneaky that does bring your feet towards your head is a triangle pose as well.
Now, what I'm not saying is that yoga is terrible, always, there's definitely a good time in place
to do yoga. And I encourage patients to do it. But ideally, when they're healthy, it has great
ability to increase your flexibility, improve your balance, and to a degree, increase your strength.
I mean, weightlifting is going to increase your strength even more than Yoga. But if
you're already pretty weak and you start doing yoga, you're going to get a little bit stronger.
But if you're looking to do yoga for the first time, and you've never done it before, and you're
trying to treat your sciatica problem with it, it's probably not the best idea to begin doing
yoga for the first time for a sciatica issue. But what will for sure help a sciatica problem.
In order to fix sciatica for the long term, you've got to treat the underlying root
muscle imbalances that are adding tension and compression to the sciatic nerve,
it usually comes back to strengthening abdominal muscles, especially the lower abdominals and
the glute muscles on the back of the hips. There's typically a weakness or a relative
weakness in these two muscle groups that's causing some sort of bad tension or bad
compression into the sciatic nerve. And that's what's causing the irritation that's going
down the leg possibly all the way into the foot. Usually, there's cramps involved with this too.
Check out the video I linked in the description below called sciatica doesn't get better unless
you fix these two problems. And also, there's a link for our whole playlist of videos that
we've done over the years for sciatica, you'll find all kinds of proper exercises,
advice and what to do and what not to do to heal the sciatica problem for the long term.
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