Love Your Lower Back - Yoga TLC for Sciatica and Herniated Discs

Ever struggled with back pain? If so, you know just how debilitating it can be when even the slightest wrong movement sends you into a spasm of crippling pain, making it near impossible to move.

Back pain will affect four out of five people at one point in our lives. When back pain becomes chronic, it often leads to disability - and it is on the rise. People struggling with back pain have few medical options beyond pain killers and, ultimately, surgery, which has a limited success rate, depending on the condition.

The good news is that for many types of back pain, self care practices like yoga and exercise can make a big difference, both in terms of prevention and relief.

In this online course, author and yoga therapist Laura Staton will show how you can create a personalized, therapeutic, yoga-based plan to help heal or decrease pain and prevent recurrences of back pain.

The course focuses specifically on back pain issues linked to herniated discs and sciatica.

Disc herniations can appear anywhere in the spine, but they are most common in the lumbar spine. They can be extremely painful, because when herniated, disc material contacts nerve roots which cause pain and/or muscle weakness.

Disc herniations are often the cause of sciatica as well, because the large sciatic nerve is actually a combination of five lumbar nerves!

In this course, you will learn how common yoga-based back care practices can help you restore function and life balance. Laura offers strategies to help you explore the mind-body connection to manage discomfort and find long-term healing, increase strength, and decrease pain.

If the pain is relatively mild, simple movement practices can often help relieve discomfort. However, if a newly diagnosed or old herniation is the culprit, then it becomes important to understand how you help your students manage this condition. By clearly understanding how to work with herniations and sciatica, asana practice can often resolve pain flare-ups and manage the herniation without more consequential interventions.

What You Will Learn:

• Why lumbar herniations are so common and which factors will tend to predispose you towards disc herniations
• The link between lumbar herniations and sciatic nerve pain 
• How movements of the spine affect the nerves
• How to differentiate nerve pain from other types of pain
• Which movements/asanas to avoid when struggling with disc herniations and sciatic and why
• Yoga-based movement practices to help reduce or heal pain linked to disc herniations and sciatica
• Body mechanics that will help you prevent disc herniations or facilitate healing when it has already occurred
• How to use the antigravity postural muscles to keep the trunk strong and flexible to reduce loading in the lumbar spine.