Healthy Living: Why Do We Get Muscle Cramps?

WELCOME TO NERDTWIST

Cramps are essentially muscle contractions,
just like the contractions that make your
muscles move, but gone terribly, horribly,
painfully wrong.

When a muscle cramps, the contraction is
involuntary. “In order to have the
contraction, the nerve or a group of nerves
has to be activated,” says Allan Goldfarb,
Ph.D., an exercise physiologist and a
professor in the department of kinesiology at
the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
“Some irritation or activation of that nerve
[causes it to] fire when you’re not trying to
make the muscle contract.” Under normal
conditions, after the muscle contracts, the
brain would signal for it to relax. During a
cramp, that relaxation signal doesn’t come in
so loud and clear, says Goldfarb. Instead,
there’s an “imbalance between the activators
versus the inhibitors,” he says, and the
contractions continue until you’ve got yourself
a full-blown cramp.
But why that imbalance exists to begin with
is still a bit of a mystery. One common theory
is that the cramping muscle is simply over-
tired. Such exertion could be the result of
holding a particular yoga pose for a lengthy
period of time or pumping out a whole bunch
of calf raises.
Many an experienced crampee will tell you
dehydration is the culprit. But science isn’t so
sure. Dehydration does certainly cause
imbalances in the body, particularly of fluids
and salt, says Goldfarb, but dehydration
affects the whole body, not one localized
muscle. “If it’s a systemic problem like
dehydration, then why doesn’t the whole
body cramp?” University of Cape Town sports
physician Martin Schwellnus posed to the
Globe and Mail.
It may be that dehydration and related
depletion of minerals like potassium,
magnesium and calcium may simply increase
your risk of cramping in the right (er, wrong?)
scenario, says Goldfarb, rather than being
the distinct cause of the cramp.
A number of medications — and not just
those that cause you to lose fluids — list
muscle cramps as a side effect, WebMD
reported. And we can’t totally rule out a
simple (yet poorly understood as of yet)
genetic predisposition, either, says Goldfarb.
Sometimes a cramp is brought on by a simple
external trigger the body would usually
control for, like a cool breeze over an
exposed leg while you sleep after a hot and
sweaty day at the beach, he says. “You set
up your system to have an imbalance,” says
Goldfarb, and then that gentle breeze or a
jog on the sand or jumping rope becomes
more problematic.
The good news is that most muscle cramps
can be gently massaged or stretched away in
a matter of minutes. And more often than
not, a cramp isn’t much to worry about, says
Goldfarb. The worst cramps may leave you
with tiny tears in the muscle that could take
a couple of days to heal. In rare cases a
more serious health condition could be
behind the pangs, according to the National
Institutes of Health, including a spinal cord
injury or a pinched nerve. If you find yourself
cramping regularly, it’s time to see a
physician, says Goldfarb.
Until there’s more definitive research, it
certainly can’t hurt to stay hydrated and keep
electrolytes balanced during longer, more
tiring workouts.