What causes muscle cramps? Well, there are a wide variety of factors responsible for these painful contractions, one of the most common being mineral deficiency.

What we want to explore is what is causing the mineral depletion.

Sure, supplementing with sea salt, mineral broths, bananas, coconut water and other electrolyte/mineral sources can help relieve muscle cramping but if we keep ignoring the bigger issue we will never rectify the true underlying issue.

Low energy metabolism, hypometabolism, hypothyroidism (whatever you wish to call it) can all be considered the underlying cause of nagging and debilitating muscle cramps. When the body does not have the adequate resources for efficient energy production it has not option but to compensate and it does this by way of adrenaline and cortisol.

In addition to helping you handle stress, these two primary adrenal hormones help control body fluid balance, blood pressure, blood sugar and other central metabolic functions.

In chronic circumstances, where stressors are present yet the body is unable to adapt and/or the stressors are too excessive, the body can become depleted of essential mineral sources. This is a hallmark symptom of hypothyroidism, rapid sodium and mineral depletion. One way the body compensates is through increasing aldosterone, which regulates water and sodium throughout the body. Unfortunately, any alteration in balance typically results in additional compensations. Case in point, as aldosterone is increased under stress as the body’s means of maintaining optimal water and sodium balance, it is at the expense of losing potassium and magnesium.

All the above circumstances affect energy (ATP) production leading to hypoglycemic responses in the body. Hypoglycemia increases capillary stiffness and depletes glucose as it passes through the blood vessel. Red blood cells, the body’s main vehicle for oxygen delivery to tissues, require more glucose for maintaining ATP production, which is depleted by passing through the narrow capillaries leading to muscle cramps.

More….

Cramps Are A Failure of Neuromuscular Performance

When the neuromuscular system (your nerves plus muscles) works in sync, your exercise routine can continue for hours. You feel unstoppable. But when the system is perturbed by low blood glucose, muscle glycogen depletion, dehydration, accumulated muscle damage, high body temperature, severe salt loss, accumulation of metabolites, or reduced muscle blood flow, fatigue will gradually or suddenly sets in. The neuromuscular system becomes unstable. Muscle cramps are often associated with fatigue, a painful example of a failure in neuromuscular performance.

As a fuller picture of the etiology (cause) of muscle cramps is emerging through studies by researchers such as Dr. Rod MacKinnon, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, there are new insights that will help prevent or minimize cramps. First, the cramp is not your fault. Most likely, your cramp had nothing to do with preparation or fitness. As we’re learning, the breakthrough in solving the cramp mystery is in understanding the root of the problem. It’s not the muscle; it’s the nerve.

It’s Not The Muscle; It’s The Nerve

Skeletal muscle cells, as opposed to cardiac muscle cells in the heart and smooth muscle cells in the lining of blood vessels and the intestine, are under voluntary control. You will a muscle to contract and it obeys.

But all those hours you spent training can be for naught with just one ill-timed muscle cramp. You can’t finish a race or complete a training session. Regardless of the conditions that provoke it, muscles cramp because of hyper-excited nerves, alpha motoneurons to be more precise, the nerve cells that project from the spinal cord directly to many skeletal muscle fibers. The motoneuron and the connected muscle cells go haywire, the motor unit malfunctions. In the laboratory, muscles can be made to cramp by electrically stimulating motoneurons, a simple way to illustrate the point that your muscles are slaves to your nervous system.


I am a part time Proctologist and full time Gynecologist What causes muscle cramps?