Have you ever experienced sciatica pain? It usually crops up when you irritate your sciatic nerve. The pain can typically radiate from your lower back, down the back of your thigh. Sometimes the shooting pain can even reach as far as your knees. Prescribed treatments run the gamut from painkillers to surgery.

Here’s an alternative remedy for those of you who want to avoid prescription side effects and resorting to something as invasive as surgery: swimming. Researchers in Brazil have conducted a clinical trial to assess the effect of swimming on nerve injury to the sciatica.

For their animal study, the researchers wanted to find out not only if swimming could help heal a sciatic nerve injury, but also how soon exercise should be started again after an injury. They divided rats who had suffered a crushed nerve injury into four groups: those that began to swim immediately after the nerve injury; those that began to swim 14 days after injury; injured rats that didn’t do any swimming; and uninjured rats who participated in swimming.

After 30 days, the research team found that the diameter of axons and nerve fibers in the injured group that began swimming immediately and the group that began swimming 14 days after injury was larger than in the rats that didn’t do any swimming. An axon is a long fiber of a nerve cell that carries outgoing messages — in other words, it acts somewhat like a fiber-optic cable. Electrical messages, or impulses, are sent from a cell through an axon to their intended destination outside the cell. A larger axon could mean better transmission of impulses.

The researchers concluded that swimming exercise applied during the acute or late phase of nerve injury accelerated nerve regeneration. They also had this health advice: swimming exercise may be initiated immediately after sciatic injury.

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