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Originally Posted by Elfay
I get them bad, I will wake up from a deep sleep with my legs feeling like they are on fire !!! It. Doesn't matter how much I warmup before I still cramp terribly. I had terrible leg cramps when I was pregnant and I took an extra calcium and it worked, extra calcium doesn't do anything now ... I developed RLS after my son as born but it goes away in a month or 2 but will come back every 5 years since 1999.
I walked harder and longer today and my legs have been hurting all day and they are starting to cramp up since I've been relaxing. I worry its going to be a painful sleepless night. Not going to quit walking or exercising but it sure is VERY painful !!!!
The only thing that works is walking around the room sometimes 15-30 mins and I can go back to bed but there are times the cramping returns multiple times in a night.
Anyone else experience similar leg cramps or shin splints ? Anything work for you?
Thank you !!!
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Everyone gets 'irritable leg syndrome' sometimes, but if it is very painful, then you really must tell a doctor and get examined properly. There can be any number of causes, some trivial, some very serious, and everything in between. It is probably nothing to worry about and will ease over time, but if you have a blockage in an artery resulting in insufficient oxygen reaching the muscles, then you'll want to get that identified and fixed.
Most likely though, if you've been exercising hard, most likely it is nothing more than lactic acid accumulating in your muscles (a byproduct of glycogen, ie muscle fuel, having been burned). That will go away as your fitness improves, and as your arteries, having got used to the idea that they need to carry more blood for the greater demand, widen to allow muscles to fuel quicker and lactic acid to be carried away quicker. Massage can help if that's what it is, and a COLD bath (the instinct is to run a hot bath for muscle pain, but much of that pain is inflammation, and inflammation is made worse by heat).
Incidentally, kind of an aside, but related seeing as we're talking about muscle pain and exercise and acid build up etc. There is nothing in the human body that can detect oxygen levels in our blood. Yet obviously our brain knows when we're in oxygen debt because our respiratory system is sped up to compensate. So how does it know? Well, when we exercise, CO2 is released into the blood, and this turns the blood slightly acidic. When the CO2 is removed, the blood pH heads back towards normal. The more CO2 is in our blood, the more acidic it gets. The body can detect acidity, and it deduces the oxygen level based on the fact that if its acidic, it is high in CO2, if it is high in CO2 then cells are burning fuel faster than the CO2 can be removed, if the cells are burning fuel faster than the CO2 can be removed, then they must be burning fuel faster than oxygen can be supplied, so we get out of breath. So why am I relaying this seemingly pointless technical detail? Because knowing this enables us to trick our natural responses. If we get out of breath, we're already well and truly in oxygen debt and on the road to pain from acid accumulation in the muscles. If we make a conscious effort to breath deeper and a bit faster BEFORE we need to, then we can do more, and suffer less afterwards.