Nocturnal Leg Cramps Causes

Nocturnal Leg Cramps – Things You Need to Know :: Newbie Answer

When Agnes awoke from his childhood dream, she felt pain in the back of his leg was a muscle cramp at night. A cramp is just a painful and prolonged contraction of the muscle side.

Leg cramps at night is one of the most common causes of sleep disorders, especially among the elderly. In a study of fifty years of age, over 70 percent of leg cramps experienced at least once a week. This is not a disease, but recurrent leg cramps cause much unnecessary suffering, both pain and sleep disturbance.

Most muscle tightenings don’t hurt; the pain in a cramp is caused by several factors. First, the muscle shortens so violently that waste products are generated within the muscle and produce pain. Second, the muscle is working so hard that the body is unable to provide it with an adequate blood supply; the muscle being relatively starved of blood is another source of pain. Finally, in severe cramp, the muscle itself may be damaged, with partial tearing of microscopic parts of the individual muscle fibres.

A muscle lives a fairly simple life. It can do only two things: shorten (that is, contract) or lengthen (that is, relax). Shortening is an active process, usually occurring when the muscle gets the appropriate signal from a nerve. Lengthening is passive and, normally, muscles function in opposing pairs – for the muscles of one side of a joint to contract, the muscles on the other side of the joint must relax.

Do-it-yourself cramp When we apply this idea of muscles working in opposing pairs to the ankle, we can see that the muscles at the back of the calf (the large amount of muscle tissue behind and below your knee), when shortened, cause the ankle to bend and the sole of the foot to move down, towards the floor. It’s the action of going from standing flat on your feet to standing on your toes, and is the ankle motion necessary for walking. For this shortening to occur, the opposing muscles, those at either side and in front of the shin bone, must relax. These muscles are not as large as those at the back of your calf, because lifting the toes and the foot to take another step does not require as strong a muscle as pushing down against the ground and lifting the entire weight of the body while walking, which is what the large muscles of the calf do. Nevertheless, the muscles that cause your toes to lift up are opposing muscles to those that cause your toes to bend away from you.

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