Have you ever been haunted by a knife-like pain down your leg? Not just down your leg but in every aspect of your life. Making the simplest of tasks, like putting your socks on, impossible.
Imagine a pain that shadows you from the moment you get up and even haunts you at night, stopping you from sleeping.
You are not alone. Nearly half of us have suffered this at some time in our lives.
To learn more about sciatica and how to treat it, read on
It’s called sciatica and its root cause is a modern lifestyle of poor posture and weak muscles.
The videos explain what sciatic is and how the structure of the spine is vulnerable.
The sciatic nerve is a big nerve running from the back to the feet. Nerves, any nerves in your body in fact, don’t like to be squeezed and tell you quickly about this by causing pain. Typical causes of nerve compression are:
• Spinal discs act as cushions between the bony vertebrae, allowing movement and keeping the discs nicely spaced apart, allowing nerves to move freely and without pain. If those discs get compressed sufficiently, nerve compression and pain can result.
• Powerful back muscles can react to this nerve compression and go into spasm, increasing nerve compression and pain.
• Each pair of spinal vertebrae have joints between them to help control movement, called facet joints. These joints get worn with age and trauma and can eventually cause further nerve irritation.
• Our bodies are covered in a layer of connective tissue below the skin (imagine bubble wrap) and this tissue can become less flexible as we age, also leading to possible nerve irritation.
These underlying causes are nearly always quickly reversible with the correct lifestyle adjustments, adherence to exercise prescriptions and hands on physiotherapy. In more severe chronic cases, especially with locked in muscle spasm, specific dry needling may be required. There’s no one size fits all solution. A thorough assessment and treatment plan will be the most effective and fastest solution.
If your physiotherapist has any concerns, she or he can touch base with your doctor for bloods, x-rays or a scan.
Off the shelf pain meds, like anti-inflammatory with paracetamol can help. Your pharmacist can advise if its safe for you to take them with preexisting conditions or other meds.
or call 01889 881488
Jean, Erica & Charlotte will be happy to help
First, decide what your fitness goals are!
Patients often ask me, once their general fitness is much better, “How do I take the next step to train towards a specific sport?” Firstly, any current injuries should be assessed by an experienced physiotherapist or sports therapist. Then you need to decide on your goals. What are your goals? Stronger heart and lungs? A fit-looking body? To win at sport? To live longer?
Furthermore, you need to decide:
- which sports you want to concentrate on
- how vigorously you want to compete
- how long you want to be able to compete.
Everyone should exercise, but you need to set your personal goals of fitness and your own unique set of aims, as this will determine the most appropriate exercise and productive time you can spare for training. A fitness assessment with a personal trainer can establish your personal fitness goals and an injury prevention program can be formulated to attain your goals:
• Enhanced cardiovascular ability.
• Improved stamina and endurance.
• Better agility, flexibility, and balance.
• Stronger muscles and core strength.
• Slimmer body.
• Stronger bones.
• Clearer thinking and happier moods.
Ten Tips to Achieve Your Fitness Goals
1) Measure your heart rate just after vigorous exercise for 5 seconds, then after another minute for another 5 seconds. Multiply both by 12, then subtract one from the other. This gives you your speed of recovery, which is an indicator of your cardio fitness. As you get fitter, both your oxygen capacity and the ability of your enzymes to remove lactic acid will increase.
2) Mix up slow and fast pace in all activities. Athletes carry out long slow and short fast interval training for a good reason; the slow pace builds stamina and teaches the body how to cope with and eliminate lactic acid, as well as enabling muscles to store more glycogen for prolonged exercise.
3) Fast pace, on the other hand, comprises of short bursts of intense activity which boosts sugar metabolism and teaches the brain to co-ordinate the muscles at a faster pace, helping agility.
4) To avoid muscle injury due to tiredness, rest adequately as muscles need
48 hours to recover, plus good hydration and nutrition.
5) To achieve stronger muscles, lift a weight you can just manage between
8 and 12 lifts in about 50 seconds. Then, rest briefly between sets, as
lactic acid build-up will cause injury. Repeat. Rest a day in between. Add
2.5 kg to 5 kg maximum at each increase.
6) Exercised bones get stronger, so use resistance or weight-bearing exercises.
7) For a thinner body, sustained exertion will burn up calories and speed up the metabolic rate.
8) For a flexible body, complete slow, sustained stretches of 30 seconds when you are warm and pain-free. Stretch before your workout to reduce the chances of injury. Stretching after exercise reduces muscle soreness and promotes relaxation.
9) Clearer thinking is essential. Work out your pattern of mental alertness, the daily peaks and troughs. Plan a regular exercise program and see how it eliminates the ‘valleys’. Exercise-induced endorphins plus serotonin will reduce depression and pain.
10) For running, cycling and walking, get checked out biomechanically.
This means the alignment of foot joints to avoid knee pain, hip pain, and back pain.
A correct alignment will reduce wear and tear.
Do you need help in setting realistic goals, creating a plan and
ongoing help to get you there?
We Can Help
Call 01889 881488 Now.
Jean, Erica & Charlotte will be happy to help
Great event management can help your health and here's how
At Nicky Snazell Clinic Stafford, we find ourselves treating events staff, exhibitors and conference managers for stress-related issues such as back pain, neck pain, and general niggles, most of which are the result of stress caused by their jobs.
If you are involved with running an event or exhibition, it can be a high-stress situation, one which despite your best efforts is controlled by others. - That is where well-executed event management can help.
So, what should you do?
Firstly, you should carefully select your exhibition partner, someone like Exhibition Designer, custom exhibitions & live events specialists. They take your brief and run it, taking the hassle out of your event management. Event companies like this look after the managed delivery, reducing the stress involved with stand creation. This type of company also understands the best ways to provide breakout areas where event staff and visitors can sit and discuss business in comfortable surroundings.
Secondly, follow Nicky's advice allow yourself to relax emotionally, draw on your spiritual self through the mind and body meditation- It will relieve your anxiousness and negative energy. This kind of self-awareness will make a difference to your output at the event and your health and wellbeing.
Stress and negative energy are dangerous because they affect our bodies physically, upset digestion, which restricts nutrient absorption making us tired, and lethargic and can cause mood swings - all this volatility is not good for our performance.
Headaches, neck stiffness, backache, lots of common issues can be stopped sooner with knowledge and advice. We try to provide this at Nicky Snazell's Pain Relief Clinic because it modifies the causal behaviours that keep a niggle from going away. The mindset of event staff is paramount to stopping this impending stress developing into ongoing issues.
Summary
Think about what you are doing, give yourself time, work with a right exhibition company, remember your mental wellbeing and make time to relax. Stay well hydrated and smile.
We hope that you enjoyed this article and we look forward to hearing how it helped you. Thank you and bye for now.