DR. ROBERTA ANDING: Cramping? Most competitive athletes have cramped at some point in time. What causes cramping? Well, it's three basic things that cause cramping that you're going to be able to prevent. One is dehydration. If you're dehydrated and your body is 70 percent water, you're not going to be able to perform to your best and the muscles respond by cramping. Two, it's sodium depletion. We think of salt as a four-letter word. Nobody wants to have salt in their diet. Where in essence, salt in your diet helps your muscles and nerves to talk to one another. So when you're out running, exercising, biking, any time you have excess sodium loss, you can cramp. How do you know if that's you? Well, if you train in a dry environment and you come back in from a training run, you can oftentimes find the salt on your face. You can wipe it off. If you live in a hot humid environment, the sweat never dries on your skin, and so sometimes you might feel that if you scrape yourself you really have a stinging sensation in your skin. Or if the sweat gets in your eyes, it stings more than you would anticipate. You may be losing salt. So one of the tips to prevent that sodium loss is before you go out and run, make sure the meal that you have before you go run has some salt in it. Well, what could that be? It could be pretzels; it could be something with visible salt; it could be a vegetable juice; it could be a sport drink; something that's going to have that salt that gets that muscles and nerves to talk to one another. The third thing that can cause cramping is the fact that you might not be conditioned to the volume of exercise that you're doing. It's called asynchronous firing. Those muscles are just not really happy with the training load and you might experience a cramping sensation. What I'm not going to recommend is that you go out and take any potassium supplements. Most people think if you cramp, you need to eat bananas and oranges. Those are really great water foods, great water foods, but the likelihood of a potassium or a magnesium deficiency causing cramping is less common. Do not take potassium and magnesium supplements without the guidance of your physician because too much of those two minerals can actually be bad for your health and not good. So prevent the cramping by being hydrated, by making sure that you've got some sodium in your diet and avoid taking any kind of supplement for cramping without talking to your health care provider.
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