Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 52, November 2013 | Página 27

Body Science

Cramping your style
One second you’re running comfortably, the
next your calf seizes up and you’re instantly
reduced to a hobbling wreck. Amazingly, in
spite of modern science, we still don’t know
much about muscle cramping, although
several theories of yesteryear have now been
thrown out. – BY SEAN FALCONER

F

or many years, it was believed that cramping was caused
by heat, dehydration, or a lack of salt and minerals in the
body, but study after study has ruled out all of these factors.
“Although the idea that mineral deficiencies and dehydration
can cause cramps have been popular, we have done many,
many studies that do not prove these as causes for cramps
during exercise,” says Dr Martin Schwellnus of the Department
of Human Biology at the University of Cape Town, who is
considered one of the world’s leading researchers in this field.
Instead, the growing research on cramps points to muscle
fatigue a nd failure in the neural communication pathways of the
muscles as the cause of cramping.

As an athlete, you train a muscle to contract so that you can
run, but this fatigues the muscle. It then begins to ‘shortcircuit’ and stays contracted when it shouldn’t, causing a
cramp. “The mechanism for muscle fatigue and muscle
damage causing cramping is best explained through an
imbalance that develops in the nervous system control of
muscle. Muscles tend to become very twitchy when they
become fatigued or are injured,” says Dr Schwellnus.
So what this means is that to stop cramps, you just need
to get fitter before racing… but that’s not going to help you
much when a cramp stops you midway through a race. If
that happens, there is only one thing you can do: Stop and
stretch! Static stretching, in effect, breaks the cramp, and
once you achieve that, you must start slowly and gradually
build up your speed again. (And eating a banana to break a
cramp is just an urban legend!)
Then, after the race, adapt some of your training runs so that
they are done at the same pace you intend racing, including
accelerating in the second half of the run and throwing in
that fast finishing effort that many of us inevitably put in
at races. You may still get some cramps, but you’ll be fitter,
faster and better prepared to race – and besides, cramping in
training is much better than cramping in a race!

LET NOTHING STOP YOU...

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