What it is, and what actually helps
One guide per condition: what is going on, what the published clinical guidance recommends, with the sources linked, and a short session drawn from the clinically authored Vinys library.
Back, neck and nerve
Sciatica
Sciatica is a symptom, not a diagnosis: the sciatic nerve is being irritated somewhere along its path, and the leg is where you feel it.
Lower back pain
Most lower back pain is not a sign of damage, and the care that works best is movement that is graded rather than avoided.
Neck pain
Neck pain is rarely about the neck alone: the shoulder girdle and upper back set the position the neck has to hold all day.
Disc herniation
Disc bulges are found in large numbers of people with no pain at all, and the recommended care is graded movement rather than protection.
Desk tension
It is not that sitting is bad for you. It is that any position held for hours is, and the fix is breaking the dose rather than finding the perfect chair.
Upper back pain
The thoracic spine has no clinical guideline of its own. That is a fact about the research, not about whether the pain is real or treatable.
Core weakness
Deep core work helps, and it is not magic. The evidence says it beats doing nothing and does not beat other exercise, which is worth knowing before you buy a programme.
Piriformis syndrome
It looks like sciatica and it starts in the buttock, and the thing most people do about it is the thing least likely to help.
Joints and bones
Osteoarthritis
Every current guideline puts exercise first for osteoarthritis, and none of them recommends protecting the joint by using it less.
Osteoporosis
The guidance for osteoporosis is more specific than avoid bending: back strengthening and spinal extension are recommended, and it is loaded end-range flexion that is held back.
Scoliosis
Curve-specific exercise is prescribed by a trained therapist after a three-dimensional assessment. What a general practice can offer is different, and worth being clear about.
Shoulder pain
For the most common kind of shoulder pain, exercise is the recommended first-line treatment in every clinical practice guideline, and the dose matters more than the exercise.
Plantar fasciitis
First-line care for plantar fasciitis is unusually specific and well evidenced, and most of it is not about the heel itself.
Hypermobility
When joints move further than most, more stretching is rarely the answer. Control and strength through the range you already have is where the evidence points.
Knee pain
For the most common kind of knee pain, the guideline recommends training the hip as well as the knee, and prefers the combination to knee work alone.
Hip pain
For pain on the outside of the hip, a landmark trial found education plus exercise beat both a steroid injection and waiting it out.
Ankle pain
After a sprain, the thing that most often does not come back on its own is the sense of where the joint is, and that is trainable.
Frozen shoulder
This is the one shoulder problem where pushing into range is not brave, it is counterproductive, and the guideline says so explicitly.
Whole-body and energy
Fibromyalgia
EULAR's recommendations put exercise ahead of every drug for fibromyalgia, and it was the one recommendation the panel endorsed unanimously.
ME/CFS
NICE no longer recommends programmes of fixed incremental increases in activity. Energy management, led by the person, replaced them.
Long COVID
Where post-exertional symptoms are present, the same caution that reshaped ME/CFS guidance applies, and pacing comes before any progression.
POTS and dysautonomia
Exercise training is a recommended treatment for POTS, and the reason it usually fails is that people start upright.
Getting going after illness
There is one thing to establish before rebuilding activity after being unwell, and it is whether exertion is followed by a delayed crash.
Staying strong later on
The WHO recommends that older adults do multicomponent activity emphasising functional balance and strength on three or more days a week, specifically to prevent falls.
Stress, mood and sleep
Stress and anxiety
Anxiety is not only a thought problem, and slow movement with breath work has a real and measured place among the things that help.
Sleep problems
Yoga appears among the exercise approaches examined for insomnia, and the useful part is what it does to the state you arrive at the pillow in.
Burnout
The WHO defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and that distinction changes what actually helps.
Nervous system dysregulation
The term is not a clinical diagnosis, and it points at something measurable: how breathing changes autonomic balance.
Women's health
Postpartum recovery
Pelvic floor muscle training is the recommended starting point after birth, and the core work that follows is graded rather than rushed.
Menopause
The exercise priorities through menopause are specific: strength and loading for bone and muscle, and the regulation work that sleep and mood respond to.
Pregnancy
In the absence of complications, physical activity in pregnancy is described as safe and desirable, and the recommended amount is the same 150 minutes a week.
Perimenopause
The transition can run for years before periods stop, and it is the point at which strength and loading start to matter more, not less.
More than one of these at once is the normal case.
Most people do not arrive with exactly one condition. The assessment takes all of them together, plus how your body is on the day, and builds a session that accounts for the combination.