Why do you get "cramp"?

St0rmer66

St0rmer66

St0rmer66

Soldato
Joined
31 Oct 2004
Posts
4,550
Location
Harrogate, North Yorks
The kind of cramp where your muscle tenses up and hurts a lot! I got one earlier in my leg for no apparent reason (I very rarely get cramp) and it just got me wondering what actually causes it to happen? They just seem to come without warning, although it's usually when stretching.
 
i get it in the morning, when i am half awake, and yawn......stretches out my leg and BAM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!Screams !!!

Then kinda limp to uni coz it still hurt for hours afterwards.
 
I get it a lot. Mostly during the night. If find it one of the most painful things I've felt, its really sore and not very nice to wake up in the middle of the night with this kind of pain.

I'm not sure what causes it though.
 
Lol, beaten to it aye it's lactic acid build up.

Sometimes cramp can be caused without exercising and while there are lots of theories there isn't a concrete one. The wiki link isn't that good which is very surprising tbh. I'll hunt out my old physiology notes.
 
I have heard it's due to a lack of salt. Your nerves require the sodium and the chloride to send and receive messages from your brain, and if your nerves don't get enough salt, your brain gets confused and carries on sending the same message (to tense up a muscle).
 
That wiki explains it pretty well (edit: or not, apparently), not really sure why I got one earlier though. I was just sat watching a DVD and stretched my leg then it hit me, I hadn't been sat still for a particularly long time (10mins at most probably) though I am feeling quite tired so it could be a lack of oxygen as my breathing slows down I suppose..

On the rare occasions I do get a cramp I find that it doesn't hurt afterward like some people get, which is good.

On that note I shall go to sleep, before I fall asleep at my keyboard :o .
 
I used to get it in my feet (usually one foot or the other, not both) although I haven't in a long while. It was excrutiating and felt like my toes had come out of their sockets, and also felt like someone was pushing something blunt into the bridge of the foot!
 
MiGSY said:
Simply pull the muscle in the opposite direction and the cramp will go away almost instantly.
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Yeah I used to have to pull the wrong way hard as I could on my toes, which helped after a few minutes, although the pain in the bridge of my foot took a little longer.
 
Lactic acid is made when we anaerobically respire- in simpler terms, we anaerobicaly respire when there is not enough oxygen present for aerobic respiration to occur. A common example of this is when we are running and our bodies cannot take in enough oxygen to respire aerobically, so we use just glucose which produces mostly lactic acid and some energy. It is this build up of lactic acid which causes cramps and more often than not, oxygen debt. Lactic acid does contain some energy but it is not usable by the body.

The cause was probably you not getting enough oxygen so your cells started to respire anaerobically to produce energy but also created a store of lactic acid. This lactic acid would not be removed until the cells began to respire aerobically again. Just had a test on this in Biology :o
 
I get terrible leg cramps after particularly heavy nights out whilst lying in bed the morning after. Dunno why it is exacerbated by booze :p
 
Raikiri said:
I get it in my calf muscles, hard to pull them in any direction :p
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Grab your toes and pull, seriously. I get cramp in my calfs when I swim and that makes it go away. Leg out straight, grab them and try to point at your face with your toes, it stretches the muscle out and makes it stop. :)
 
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