Sciatica can be a pain in the butt—literally. This common condition causes pain in the back and butt that may even radiate down the leg to the foot.
Acute and chronic sciatica pain can have a significant adverse effect on your quality of life and can make exercise and activities of daily living uncomfortable, if not downright impossible.
Although even the notion of exercise can be extremely unappealing if you have back pain, studies show that exercises for sciatica can actually help relieve sciatica pain and get your body on the road to recovery. Additionally, regularly performing back and core strengthening exercises and stretches may help prevent sciatica in the first place.
Sciatica is a painful condition of the lower back, buttocks, and legs caused by compression on the sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in the body. It originates from the spinal cord in the back and travels down the back of the butt and down each leg all the way to the foot.
Sciatica pain may occur anywhere along this path of the nerve or it may radiate throughout the entire course. In addition to pain, there may be numbness and tingling, and because the sciatic nerve contains motor information (information that controls movement), sciatica is also associated with difficulty moving the affected leg, or weakness in the leg.
Sciatica can be acute or chronic. In acute conditions, someone may injure the nerve by bending over to pick something up using improper movement mechanics and twisting their spine, whereas chronic sciatica can be caused by sitting for long periods of time with poor posture, among other faulty ergonomics.
Read more at: https://www.themanual.com/fitness/sciatica-stretches-and-exercises/