Muscle Cramps

At some point, most exercisers experience cramps in strenuous workouts. Runners experience these usually in the feet or the calf muscles, and cyclists in the quadraceps muscle group. Cramps may come during exercise, afterward, or they may hit at random. Most commonly, they will occur at night, or when you are sitting around at your desk or watching TV in the afternoon or evening.

Cramps vary in severity. Most are mild but some can grab so hard that they shut down the muscles and hurt when they seize up. Massage, and a short and gentle movement of the muscle can you keep going as you work out the muscle knots. Odds are that stretching will make the cramp worse, or tear the muscle fibers.

Most cramps are due to overuse--exercising farther or faster than in the recent past, or continuing to put yourself at your limit, especially in warm weather. Slow down the exertion level from the beginning of the workout, insert more walk breaks if you are a runner, and avoid huffing and puffing.

You may have had too many workouts in a row, increased the workload of the workouts too quickly, or have been working too hard every day.

Continuous hard exercise increases cramping. Runners tend to avoid cramps by taking walk breaks every minute during the first 10 minutes of a run (run a minute/walk a minute) Many runners who used to cramp when they ran a minute and walked a minute, stopped cramping with a ratio of run 30 seconds and walk 30-60 seconds.

To read the complete article visit 8 Ways to Keep Muscle Cramps Away