What Is Sciatica Pain?

Hi Guys!

If you’re trying to know about what is sciatica pain, then congratulations, you’ve come to the right place.

In this post, I’m going to talk about what is sciatica pain, what might be the reason it’s happening (yep, there’s a root cause for it) and what can you do to stop it from happening.

So stick back, and read through!

So What Is Sciatica Pain Really About?

Sciatica pain is a term describing a set of pain that you can sense at the back of your legs all through your lower back.

The reason why it’s happening all have to do with the sciatic nerve (hence why the term “Sciatica pain”). This sciatic nerve is a very important nerve that connects our spine to the whole length of our leg. In short, it’s the only communication channel from our brain & spine to our legs.

It’s very long and is nestled adjacent to our lower back spines and leg muscles.

What happens during a sciatica pain attack then?

To put it simply, this sciatic nerve is getting irritated or compressed from either the spinal disc or the muscles next to it.

Compressing the nerve sends a pain signal all to the brain – it’s an automated system of our body so that you’ll know that something is not right and you should stop it from happening.

But the problem with sciatica pain is that it will come at the perfectly normal time of the day when we’re doing something that completely usual such as walking, lying down, sitting etc.

So what’s wrong then? Why did sciatica pain happened in the first place?

The answer to this question lies in the inside of our body, specifically our spine and muscles.

The Actual Root Cause Of Sciatica Pain

In the first place, we need to understand that sciatica pain is a symptom, which means it’s actually a byproduct of another medical condition.

So what are those medical conditions? Here are some of them:

Herniated/slipped disc: The term slipped disc is a misnomer; the disc is not actually slipped, but instead it’s herniated and bulging, leaving the inner gel inside it to go out from it. What happens then is this will place pressure on the nerve causing pain. There’s a lot of known causes for slipped disc such as wear & tear, injury, fall, etc. By far, this is the most common cause of sciatica pain and also lower back pain due to its commonality.
Spinal stenosis: This refers to the narrowing of the spaces around the spine due to wear & tear and aging.
Spondylolisthesis: If herniated disc is slipped disc, then I’m going to say that Spondylolisthesis is more like slipped spinal bone/vertebra in layman’s term. It could be caused by injury or even defect during child birth.
Piriformis syndrome: Sciatica pain can also be caused by piriformis syndrome, whereby the muscles behind the legs were tightened and compressed the sciatic nerve.

What Can You Do To Treat Sciatica Pain?

First and foremost, you’ll need to diagnose the root cause of the pain. If you suspect that a spine injury might be the root cause, go see a doctor, get an MRI or X-Ray done and determine exactly what is the root cause.

Then, work with your doctor to completely heal the spine injury.

With that out of the way, there’s still a chance that sciatica pain will still happens. From here, you can do work with your doctor or try to cure it own your own using a combination of physiotherapy using exercises and home treatments.

If the second option is your choice, then I highly recommend the Sciatica SOS ebook.

It’s an all-in-one ebook that has all the best and most effective treatments for sciatica that you could ever get.

I hope this article about what is sciatica pain is beneficial to you. Do let me know if there’s any questions or comments on this by commenting below. Ciao!

6 Tight Hip Flexors Symptoms

I’ve written about tight hip flexors symptoms before. Here, I just want to share a great infographic from healthandfitnessstartwithyou.com that is informational and can make you understand on 6 tight hip flexors symptoms that you should be wary about.

(Infographic above courtesy of healthandfitnessstartwithyou.com)

Did you notice that you have a few of these symptoms? If you did, then it means you have tight hip flexors and it’s very important to correct it before it’s too late.

Tight hip flexors usually originated from excessive sitting. But in this modern age, most people will spend the major bulk of their daily time to sit, be it working, dining, watching movie/tv, driving, etc.

But the main issue is you just can’t stop sitting!

That’s why frequent exercise is very important to help unlock and looses these tight hip flexors. I’ve written a post about 2 of my favorite exercise (see link here) that helped me tremendously to loosen my tight hips.

If you want a more structured program to help fix your tight hips, then I fully recommend the Unlock Your Hip Flexors. It’s a good ebook contains 10 great exercises with clear instructions on how to do it. These exercises really worked for me and I believe it will do the same thing to you. Check out my review of the Unlock Your Hip Flexors for more info.

Sciatica SOS Review – Treat Your Sciatica With This!

Hi Guys!

Today I want to share about Sciatica SOS, an information product that I’ve used in the past to help with my sciatica pain. If you have sciatica pain, then you’ll be very well to read this review through as Sciatica SOS is something that I highly recommend to my friends and family to treat their sciatica. Read on!

But First, What Is Sciatica?

Sciatica pain is not a disease in itself. It’s actually a symptom, but a very painful and nuisance one at that. Just like tight hip flexors, sciatica happens due to a current injury or physical issue within our body.

When you feel the sciatica pain, what’s actually happening is the sciatica nerve (running from our lower back through the legs) is pinched by either the muscles around it or the bulged spinal disc.

Sciatica Pain And Lower Back Injury Goes Hand In Hand

In my case, I started to get sciatica pain after I’ve injured my lower back from sports a few years back. My lower back spine disc was bulging, and it impinged upon my nerve causing sciatica pain.

Not only that, the back injury also causes a sort of chain reaction where my back, butt and hamstring muscles easily developed spasms which can also cause sciatica pain.

If you’re also experiencing sciatica or had it before, I’m sure you’ll understand how painful it is. I can still remember suddenly developed sciatica pain in one morning when I was just walking to my office.

I had to suddenly stop and find a place to sit next to a busy street path as the pain was too unbearable for me to walk. It was then when I made my decision to cure my sciatica once and for all.

Sciatica SOS To The Rescue!

Like everyone, I used google to search for the solution to my problem. While there’s a lot of information laying around, I was first introduced to Sciatica SOS from my friend who sent the link to the website to me and said that it helped him with his sciatica before. I quickly glanced through the website and really like what I saw.

Again, while there’s a lot of free information out there from google, I just like the idea of paying for a book as it has everything that I need. There’s also a money back guarantee up to 60 days which further helped me with my decision to buy that ebook.

It’s not a very thick book but the content is everything that I’ve hoped for, even exceeded my expectations. It’s well written with a clear flow on why sciatica pain happens, to what we can do to treat it ourselves. In terms of the treatment, I can segregate it into two categories: exercise and non-exercise.

I really like the non-exercise treatments as it’s very easy to do and provide instant relief (such as the heat pack and carrot juices). Certain treatments such as sleep therapy was also very beneficial and helped a lot to reduce muscle spasms around my lower back.

But the exercise treatments are also important as it helps to reduce muscle spasms by unlocking the muscular tightness. The Sciatica SOS lists a number of very effective exercises that really made a whole lot of difference to my life.

Suffice to say that I never get any sciatica pain after I’ve completed the whole course of treatment in the ebook! So if you’re having sciatica pain, get this ebook and you can thank me later!

I hope my short review of the Sciatica SOS will help you with your pain. I also found other more thorough reviews (https://healthandfitnessstartwithyou.com/my-sciatica-sos-review and https://kylefitnessbros.weebly.com/blog/sciatica-sos-review ) that you can check out too if you like. Till next time!

The 2 Week Diet Review

Hi Guys!

In this post, I would like to share with you a revolutionary diet plan that I’ve been using for a few months now to great success. It’s called the 2 Week Diet and is one of the diet plans that I’m very satisfied with.

To give a perspective, the diet plan claims it can help to reduce at least 6 pounds over 2 weeks. When I used it, I managed to lose 9 pounds in the first 2 weeks of using it! I really like when a product underestimate their claims as it gives lots of room for improvement in the user’s side.

I also would like to note that I’m doing everything that the diet plan asks me to do. It’s a very hard diet program to be honest as it combines various dieting methods and encourages for exercises to be done. So if you’re not following the program exactly, do understand that your weight loss might be lesser than mine.

With that out of the way, let’s start with my review of the 2 week diet.

Calorie Intake Lesser Than Calorie Expenditure

This is the backbone of the diet plan – calorie intake must be lower than calorie expenditure. This little concept governs everything about our weight gain or weight loss.

If you’re eating more than your body needs, the excess calorie will be turned into fat and you will gain weight. If you’re eating lesser food that the amount your body needs, your body will then have to burn off the fats from your body to fuel it, resulting in weight loss.

Throughout the full 2 weeks, you will be eating lesser calorie than what your body needs (designated by the Basal Metabolic Rate, BMR. Check out this website for an easy to use calculator for your own BMR).

But just reducing calorie intake is not enough as our body can adapt to it and hence reduced the calorie needed daily. Which was why the diet plan includes 4 different weight loss methods that needs to be done successively.

The 4 dieting methods are detox, intermittent fasting, fat fast and lowered calorie techniques. While all of these gives a lower nett calorie intake, it use different approaches to trick the body for faster weight loss.

In my experience, this has made my body sort of guessing what is actually going on and prevented it from reducing its BMR. This works wonders as my BMR is still the same over the course of 2 weeks but with a lesser calorie intake I managed to lose a lot of weight at the same time.

Exercise As The Secret Key To Fast Weight Loss

In addition to dieting, the exercises recommended by the diet plan works effectively to increase my metabolism.

If you’re thinking it’s just a run on the treadmill then you’re wrong as the exercise is a full body workout designed to build muscles all around the body. It’s also need to be done in just 20 minutes to give a sort of High Intensity Training (HIT) effect.

Instead of running around, the full body workout is more enjoyable and it also build up my muscles – which gives me a nice increase in upper body mass.

And did I mentioned that exercises will increase metabolism and use more energy? Well, I kind of overdid the exercise (6 days per week) which might explain my great result =)

You Will Need Great Motivation And Support

To be honest, the 2 week diet plan is a tough one and the only reason why I managed to do it is from the supports of my family and friends – it’s kind of hard to diet when your friends/family invites for a big feast over the weekend right?

I’ve read many dieters failed as their friends and family didn’t give the right moral support to them which is kind of sad in my opinion. If you have the same awesome friends and family as I am, then good for you but if you didn’t, then the 2 week diet plan has a specific chapter dedicated to motivate dieters.

I hope my short review is useful to you. Check out these other reviews (here and here) for more detail reviews on the 2 Week Diet. Till next time then!

Fix Your Anterior Pelvic Tilt With These 2 Easy Steps

Hi Guys!

Anterior Pelvic Tilt (or APT) is something that most adult have but not many are aware of. It’s a bad posture condition that your body defaulted to unconsciously due to t the imbalance in your hip muscles. What happens is those with APT have a belly that seems to push forward, even though he/she is not fat at all.

This condition starts from the having tight hip flexors as the tight psoas major muscles pushes the organ in front of it (especially the tummy) forward creating the bulging belly. In fact, APT is one of the symptoms of tight hip flexors.

The root cause of tight hip flexors and APT is from excessive sitting. As modern people sit a lot (either for work or leisure), our hip muscles are severely imbalance with the psoas major muscles tightened/shortened and the glute/butt muscles lengthened/weaken. This strength imbalance makes the body tend to cause APT instead of the natural straight body posture when you’re standing.

Fortunately, there are some easy ways to fix APT. I’ve actually learned these 2 tips from Unlock Your Hip Flexors ebook which gives details step-by-step method on how to fix tight hip flexors and APT (you can read my review of the ebook here).

The 2 easy steps to fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt are:

1-Maintain An Upright Posture

First of all, you need to consciously mind your posture and try to maintain an upright posture whenever you’re standing or sitting. The first thing that you have to do is to look at yourselves in a mirror.

You will notice that your body is not in a straight line. Most often, your shoulders will be rotated forward – while this is not due to tight hips or APT, it’s still not a good posture.

So what you can do is to consciously make your body upright. The key to do this is by sucking in your tummy to create a tight core/abs and pulling your shoulder blades together and simultaneously puffing out your chest.

If you’re also suffering from low back pain, you will immediately feel a relieve when you’re correcting your standing posture like this as the stress on your lower back is reduced with a correct posture. This can also be done when you’re sitting with the same way.

2-Treating Your Tight Hip Flexors

The second step is to treat your tight hip flexors. While maintaining an upright pose will do the trick to stop your APT, it’s a conscious effort. By treating your tight hip flexors, your body will not tend to fall back into its APT form even when you’re tired from keeping that upright pose.

So how to treat your tight hip flexors?

Exercise.

Exercise is the only known way to treat tight hip flexors. I’ve actually written a post dedicated to this (which you can check out here). It involves various stretches to lengthen again the tight psoas major muscles. You will also need to activate and strengthen the weaken glutes so that it can support your body and reduce the muscular imbalance.

I hope that this post has helped you to understand about anterior pelvic tilt and ways to overcome it. You can also refer to this excellent post on other ways on to fix anterior pelvic tilt.

Till next time!

Loosen Tight Hip Flexors With These 2 Great Stretches

Hi Guys!

Continuing from my previous post on tight hip flexors causes, in this post I’m going to share with you my top 2 exercises that have really helped me to loosen my tight hips in the past. In fact, I still continuously do these 2 exercises frequently as it has such a great effect on your hips and general movement.

As someone with a normal desk job, it’s correct to say that I sit a whole lot of my waking hours. Unfortunately, it’s not something that I can control as my company don’t give any flexibility in which my desk is stationary like any normal desk.

This is something that have contributed to my tight hip flexors which I’ve managed to reverse through the use of the Unlock Your Hip Flexors ebook (read this post where I’ve reviewed this great ebook).

If you’re sitting a lot daily, suffers from sluggish movements and frequently feel strain pain around your hips, these are the symptoms that you might have tight hip flexors. But worry not, these 2 exercises will help to loosen that tight hip. Let’s start!

1-Quadriceps Stretch

The first stretch that you should do to loosen tight hip flexors is the quadriceps stretch. Simply stand straight and fold one of your legs backwards by bringing the feet to your back.

Use one hand to hold the feet in place while pulling it further back. Hold this position for 10 seconds and then change leg. You can do this stretch for 3 sets (each sets constitutes 2 legs) or more if you feel need to.

You should feel a nice stretch on your front leg muscles (or quadriceps) when doing this. Done right, you can also feel a light stretch on the connection between the leg and the hip.

It’s also important to stabilize you body when doing this as you will be standing on one leg the whole stretch. What I do is to do this stretch near a wall where I can use my other hand to lightly support my body from falling by touching the wall. Always try to keep your body in a straight line and not flex it too much.

2-Kneeling Hip Flexor Stretch

By far, the best stretch I’ve ever had on my hip flexors is the kneeling hip flexor stretch. It involves kneeling on the floor while making a 90 degrees angle on your front and back legs’ knees.

After in position, place your hands next to your hips and push your hips to the front slightly. You will feel a very great stretch on your deep hip flexors muscles (the psoas major muscles) when doing this. Hold this for 10 seconds and then change the legs. 3 sets are enough though you can do more sets if you feel the need to.

The way these exercises work to loosen you tight hip flexors is by reversing the position your hips are in while we’re sitting. When we sit, our legs will be folded upwards, shortening the psoas major muscles length.

The 2 exercises above seek to lengthen the muscles, thus reversing the effects of sitting. While it might not be enough (since we’re sitting for hours in a day), doing these exercises at least once daily (my favorite time is during lunch or after wok) will give a significant improvement on your hip condition.

I hope that this post has helped you to implement some easy exercises to loosen your tight hip flexors. For more exercises, you can refer to this article here or this great video below.

Till next time!

Excessive Sitting – The Primary Tight Hip Flexors Cause You Need To Be Aware Of

Hi Guys!

Most of those with tight hip flexors don’t know what actually causes their tight hips. As a continuation of my previous post, I’m going to share about the main cause of tight hip (which is excessive sitting by the way) and how something so harmless and done by almost everyone is actually detrimental to our body.

One thing that we need to understand is our body is made to move around. From ancient times to the pre-modern age, human was always moving around for most of the day either to gather food, hunt, and other important stuffs. They are only sitting when resting or eating for a couple of hours daily.

But modern human is different. The way our economy and technology works now means most of the jobs are done at a desk whereby the workers will be sitting for no less than 8 hours a day.

Not to mention our favorite pastime – watching TV or Netflix – also involves sitting on the couch. Sure, you’ll stand up and move around but it pales in comparison to the amount of time we’re sitting. In fact, it can be estimated that most adults sit for more than 50% of their daily 24-hours life. This figure can be greater if you have a really sedentary lifestyle (no outdoor activities etc.).

What happens then is your hip flexors muscles will be imbalance due to lots of sitting. There’s a lot of muscles around the hips with the psoas major and glute/butt muscles the 2 big major groups.

Psoas major muscles connects our lower back spine to the front of our legs while the glute muscles connect our upper body to lower body from the back. These 2 muscles will work in tandem for our body’s movement – one will contract while the other will elongate – for all movements to happen.

Sitting disrupts this natural balance by forcing the psoas major to be shorten and the glute to be elongate for hours. Muscles are elastic (means it can return back to its original form afterwards) but being forced in this position for hours will cause the muscles to stick to its sitting form even after you stand up.

This is what causes tight hip flexors.

Your psoas major muscles are shortened and too tight that it will want to restrict your body from being straight. Your glutes muscles, on the other hand, are weaken and not strong enough to pull back your body to the natural standing posture. It’s easy to see how this could wreck your body form, posture and general movement.

There are two ways to correct tight hip flexors:

1-Stop Sitting A Lot

This is naturally the first thing that most people should do. Instead of watching TV on a couch, you can go out of your house and do other activities.

Instead of working a desk job, you can quit and work in construction site. Okay, that last one might be a bit too extreme but you can always try to reduce the amount of time that you sit at work and try to move around.

2-Do Exercises That Will Help With Tight Hip Flexors

Fortunately, there’s a way to reverse the effects of excessive sitting by exercising. This will involve some stretching to elongate the psoas major back and strengthen the weak glutes.

While such exercises are available on the internet, I personally recommend the Unlock Your Hip Flexors ebook as it’s a very comprehensive with easy to do 10-exercises regime. Not only that, it works! You can read my review here to read about the ebook.

I hope that this post has helped you to understand about tight hip flexors main cause. For more information about tight hip flexors causes, you can refer to this article here.

Till next time!

What Are Tight Hip Flexors Symptoms?

Hi Guys!

Hope you are doing okay. In this post, I’m going to share about tight hip flexors symptoms that you need to know. Previously I’ve written about the Unlock Your Hip Flexors review, an ebook that really helped me with my tight hips in the past. A few of you guys asked me how to know whether you have tight hips or not. In this post, I’ll let you guys know about the 4 major giveaways that you should look out for.

1-You Just Don’t Move Like You Used To

This is the first and foremost symptoms, you’re just not moving as you used to be like in your past self. Anyone with a tight hip flexors will feel like there’s a chain holding their movement down. You just don’t walk like you used to, jogging or running feels a bit constricted, and not to mention the increasing difficulty in getting out of bed. If you’re always holding your hips whenever you walk to support yourselves, then that’s a major giveaway there.

2-Strain On Hip Muscles

The second symptom is you can easily get strain pain around your hips whenever you’re moving a little bit excessively than you normally would. What happens here is that your hip flexors are too tight so much so any movement that’s outside your usual range or motion (or done instantaneously) will cause it to sprain.

3-Anterior Pelvic Tilt

The next symptom is anterior pelvic tilt. This is something that most adult have but not many are aware of. If you ever seen a thin guy but he has a big belly that protrudes outward, then most likely than not he has anterior pelvic tilt or APT. APT happens when the hip flexor muscles (the psoas major) are too tight it becomes shortened.

Psoas major are the muscles that connects the lower back spine to our front leg so when it becomes shortened, it will push out every organ on its way forward, hence the bulging belly. While APT don’t really have any medical concern outright, it will make your posture looks weird and will aggravate any lower back pain you already have.

4-You Sit A Lot

The last and final symptom is you’re sitting a lot. It’s not exactly a symptom of tight hip flexors but I’m including it here as it’s the number one cause of tight hips. If you have the 3 symptoms above AND also sit a lot, there’s a high possibility that you’re actually suffering from tight hip flexors.

So how can sitting a lot cause tight hips? What most people don’t understand is our body was designed to move around a lot. But the modern adult are mostly sitting throughout their lives, be it working, watching TVs or any other activities.

We’re sitting for a lot of hours daily (some estimates to be about 13 hours daily) . What happens is the hip flexors muscles are grossly imbalanced due to this. The psoas major will be shortened while the glute (or butt) muscles will be lengthen and weaken. This muscular imbalance is the root of the tight hip flexors.

I hope that this post have helped you to understand if you have tight hip flexors or not. You can also refer to this article (https://healthandfitnessstartwithyou.com/tight-hip-flexors-symptoms) if you would like to know more tight hip flexors symptoms.

Till next time!

Unlock Your Hip Flexors Review – Does This Work?

Hi Guys!

In this blog post I’m going to write about unlock your hip flexors review, an ebook that I’ve been using for the past 3 weeks to improve my tight hip flexors condition.

I was actually having doubts about it but after visiting its website, I was convinced that this ebook was what I needed and boy, how right I was.

It’s definitely something those that are struggling with tight hip flexors need to get! In this post, I’m going to share the details of this ebook so that you will have a better understanding of what it is from a consumer point of view. Let’s start!

The Unlock Your Hip Flexors ebook was a work by Rick Kaselj and Mike Westerdal, both an injury specialist and strength coach that had trained hundreds of people out of their injury.

It’s a program that’s designed to help those with tight hip flexors by unlocking and re-balancing the muscular imbalance in the hip region. It’s this muscular imbalance where some muscles are tight/strong and others are weak that caused tight hip flexors.

Inside the ebook, Rick and Mike delved deep into how tight hip flexors happened, what are its effects on our body and life and how we can unwind this process.

The main ingredient of the book is a 10 exercises course program that they called as sequential flow method. They claimed that most other people out there were doing exercises to unlock hip flexors wrongly (you know those numerous articles and youtube videos). As the hip flexors are located very deep inside our pelvis, we will need to unlock it in a sequence.

In addition, their exercises combine multiple types of exercises which are static & dynamic stretching, mobility exercise, PNF stretching, 3-D core stability, fascia strengthening and muscle activation movements.

As you can guess, the exercise does not only try to unlock the tightness, but it’s also designed to give its users a well-rounded core exercise so that you won’t be getting that tight hip flexors back anytime soon.

I can say this is one of the strength of this program as other people will only focus on unlocking the tightness without addressing the core stability and strength which are very important for adults.

Another thing that I like about the ebook is there’s an associated video links given specially for its users. There are two videos that we can use:

Coaching Video: In this video, Rick went step-by-step on how to do the 10 exercises correctly. What I love about this video is how detail he went into explaining what each exercise will do and how to get the most benefit from it. I also love the tips and what-not-to-do which are very important.
Follow Along Video: in this video, a female model is doing the unlock your hip flexors exercises in the correct order and we can then just follow her movement. I don’t actually use this video but I can see that it can be used if you want to hold a small class with your friends and family this video will be useful.

All in all, the unlock your hip flexors ebook is a good program for those that want an effective and long lasting solution to their tight hip flexors problem.

I tried to keep my review of the ebook sweet and short but if you want more information, I found an excellent review here that gives a more detail breakdown of what the ebook is.

Till the next time!