What really causes muscle cramps?
Stop getting muscle cramps by reducing your baseline level of muscle tension
Whether you’re an athlete or not, if you experience muscle cramps on a regular basis you can reduce and even eliminate them by reducing your resting level of muscle tension.
When we repeat a movement over and over, our nervous system gradually makes it automatic so that we don’t have to consciously think about it anymore. This innate process of developing muscle memory is a survival mechanism: It helps us act quickly in dangerous situations.
Muscle memory is a wonderful thing, because it helps us move through our daily lives efficiently. The downside is that we tend to build up elevated levels of tension in the muscles that we use most often. This results both from messages being sent by our brain to contract the muscles, and from a feedback loop called the gamma loop. The gamma loop operates between the spinal cord and the muscles, quickly and automatically regulating the level of tension in our muscles.
When we repeatedly choose to contract certain muscles, the gamma loop adjusts, gradually increasing the baseline level of tension in these muscles. Muscles with elevated levels of tension are in the “cramp prone state;” it takes fewer muscular contractions and less fatigue to push them over the edge into a cramping state.
The most effective way to reduce the baseline level of muscle tension is with pandiculation. Pandiculation is our nervous system’s instinctive reaction to excess muscle tension. If you’ve ever seen a cat or dog arch their back when they get up from a nap, you’ve witnessed the pandicular response.
Thomas Hanna developed exercises that use the pandicular response to reduce muscle tension (I sometimes refer to his technique as “voluntary pandiculation”). Voluntary pandiculation is a specific way of contracting and very slowly releasing muscles that sends accurate biofeedback to the nervous system about the level of tension in the muscles. The technique of pandiculation allows you to retrain your own nervous system, reducing baseline muscle tension and changing habitual posture and movement patterns.
