Welcome back to Get Fit Guy.

Kevin Don here and this week I received an email from an avid listener asking me about how to stop muscle cramps.

As a curveball, she gets migraines so avoids sweeteners, fermented foods, bananas, and doesn't take sugar so she can't have

sports drinks. Did I have any advice about natural electrolytes?

We can't talk about how to stop muscle cramps unless we know what they are though.

So let's figure out what they are and what causes them.

So according to the

dictionary, a cramp is a sudden involuntary spasmodic contraction of a muscle or group of muscles.

And I don't think anyone who's ever had a cramp would argue with that definition.

So what causes them? Well, this is the interesting part because I think if we were to ask the general population, we'd hear about electrolytes.

No doubt because we've been exposed to a sports drink industry with lots of those advertising dollars to sponsor trending athletes and teams.

But actually, in spite of many studies being conducted on exercise-induced muscle cramps,

scientists still aren't sure exactly what causes them.

There are, however, two main theories.

The first is, indeed, the dehydration electrolyte theory.

This theory is probably the oldest and most well-established theory

and came about from a study in salt deprivation conducted in the 1930s by Robert McCannes, who was a British

physiologist. He was interested in what would happen if we depleted salt but not fluid

from study participants.

Aside from removing salts from the diets, they also drank a lot of water and took hot baths

to accelerate salt loss. What they found was that when salt depletion hit, participants

suffered from a loss of taste, massive fatigue, cardio-respiratory distress upon exertion and muscle cramps.

...