Tennis sciatica is a symptomatic expression which affects serious athletes and amateurs alike. Tennis is a grueling sport, but is not inherently bad for you or damaging to the spine. Tennis is also a sport which attracts people who are driven, success-oriented and perfectionistic, increasing the odds that these victims of sciatica may be experiencing personality-based mindbody symptoms.
In order to get back to enjoying the game you love, you must learn why you have pain and what can be done to end it for good. While this seems easy to novice sciatica sufferers, most soon discover that the diagnostic and treatment processes can be incredibly complicated and frustrating. Hopefully, this tennis sciatica article will help to put you back on the path to good health.
Causes of Tennis Sciatica
There is really no particular reason why tennis should cause sciatica, unless a structural or emotional issue is enacting the symptoms. The most common anatomical conditions blamed for causing sciatic nerve pain are herniated discs and spinal osteoarthritis. These conditions are often innocent, and often act as scapegoats to explain why a person has pain.
This has been established by medical research and validated in recent changes to diagnostic procedure in which doctors have been warned not to blame structural abnormalities in the spine for causing pain without definitive evidence. However, in some instances, the pain may indeed be purely physically sourced and any vigorous activity, such as tennis, may escalate symptoms. For these types of pain scenarios, resolving the causative condition is logical and sensible. Hopefully, this can be achieved using conservative sciatica treatment methods. If not, then the patient may have to consider undergoing some form of sciatica surgery directed at resolving the source of the pain.
Psychoemotional reasons for chronic sciatica are just as common, although they are rarely correctly diagnosed. Athletes who suffer pain due to performance anxiety or repressed emotional sensitivities are rarely intuitive as to the real reasons for their suffering. This causes them to seek medical help, when all along the answer may lie in psychoemotional treatment, such as that offered by knowledge therapy. This is also why these same patients seldom achieve lasting relief from their sciatica symptoms and sometimes are forced to quit playing their game altogether. This is a real shame, particularly when there is nothing at all wrong with them.
Personal coaches and sports psychologists both cite a hugely disproportionate number of mindbody pain syndromes in tennis players, compared to the general population.
Therapy for Sciatica Pain
Most tennis players who experience pain during or after play, deal with the symptoms through activity avoidance. For structural concerns, this may be wise, but is not a good long-term solution, since conditioning will create a very limited lifestyle quickly in people who avoid activities which cause discomfort.
For patients with emotional causations, it is often crucial to return to a normal and active lifestyle ASAP in order to put things in perspective and eliminate the control exercised by the psychosomatic sciatica syndrome.
Regardless of the source of pain, an accurate diagnosis is the single most crucial factor to achieve if a patient is to have any hope for a complete recovery. Without this in place, patients are literally wandering in the dark when it comes to the best way to treat their suffering, explaining why so many treatments fail time and time again.
Tennis Sciatica Considerations
I can’t tell you how many people write to me with questions relating to tennis sciatica and back pain. Their letters often have various symptomatic profiles and the circumstances of their pain differ patient to patient. However, the personality of most of these people is strikingly similar. Most are obviously pushing themselves far too hard, although it is not their fault. It is simply the way they developed as people and they are just not aware of how this perfectionistic personality can cause physical pain.
Compound this personality type with the multitude of life issues, emotional worries, anxieties and painful memories, as well as the possibility of real structural problems in the spine, and you have a logical explanation for most cases of activity-related sciatica pain. I have become quite in tune to recognizing these factors, since I am a person who endured decades of torment due to my own personality issues and physical injuries.
In order to best recover from any pain syndrome associated with tennis, you must consider all physical and psychological conditions which may be causative or contributory. You may require a combination of tools in order to achieve this, including medical evaluation and a basic understanding of knowledge therapy practices.
Be active in your own healthcare and get involved in researching all the reasons why pain may be present. Sometimes, hiring a sports therapist is crucial to overcoming specific anatomical or mental problems which may result in tennis sciatica.
For purely anatomical symptoms due to injury or degeneration, be sure to involve your spinal neurologist in the diagnostic process, as well as your physical therapist or sports medicine doctor. Just be aware that some non-neurologist physicians still blame circumstantial spinal abnormalities for causing pain, without any definitive proof of a pathological process.
I am a firm believer that with effort, comes results, so I wish you the best in finding relief soon.
