What Causes Muscle Spasms?

What Causes Muscle Spasms?

What causes muscle cramps?  What causes long term spasm and muscle twitch, as opposed to occasional, momentary twitch and spasm?

Ultimately, muscle spasm and muscle cramp and muscle twitch causes are due to nutrient deficiency.

Whether you cramp up while running a marathon, or you're laying in bed and get hit with a sudden cramping spasm of a muscle, the cause is essentially the same.

If your body doesn't have the little building blocks that it needs to operate optimally, then it can't and won't operate optimally.

Specifically, if you don't have enough of the right nutritional components available to the physical structures that require them, then you will experience muscle twitch, spasm, and cramp.






Updated Program Is In The Works!
Feb 1st or sooner!


What Causes Muscle Spasms?
What Is A Muscle Spasm?

What is a muscle spasm?

A muscle spasm is the involuntary and unwanted contraction of muscle fiber.

Depending on how many muscle fibers in a muscle are firing, this spasm can be unnoticable, it can be mildly or very annoying, or it can be painful, even disabling.

Fibromyalgia, for instance, consists of many (only a few of which are noticeable to the touch) 'trigger points', which are small sections of muscle STUCK in spasm.

Muscle spasm can last just a moment or days or weeks or longer.

The spasm is called a twitch when it is momentary in duration.  It's called 'spasm' when it's a bigger section of muscle twitching and contracting.  It's called cramp when it's PAINFUL.

Leg muscle spasms are the most common, but muscle spasm can happen and cause problems all over the body.

Tiny, Small, Big, Bigger, Biggest

There are spasms you feel, and spasms you don't feel.  It's entirely common to have tiny, non-noticeable twitches happening constantly.  You don't feel those.

And the worse things are, the bigger those twitches get, bigger and bigger, until they appear as a muscle cramp.

Usually, we think we're fine until all of a sudden we start feeling muscle spasm.   At that time, it would be wise to do something smart to return the body to a more healthy state.

What causes muscle spasms?  Primarily, it's imbalance of nutritional components in the body.


What Causes Muscle Spasms?
Blame Nutritional Deficiency

The human body can get muscle spasm and muscle twitch from a variety of directions.

From having a stroke, neurological disease, ripping and tearing a ligament, tendon, joint capsule, etc.

There's not much to do about stroke damage. Connective tissue damage can be dealt with.

Muscle Spasm related to Tendonitis is due partly to nutritional deficiency, and partly due to the Process of Inflammation that is part of the Tendonitis dynamic.


But it starts with nutritional insufficiency.

Muscles operating short of optimum due to not enough nutrition causes irritation.  Irritation causes inflammation.  Inflammation eats up extra nutrition, which causes muscles to operate less optimally...repeat repeat repeat.

Marathon runners burn through nutrition as they run.  When they use up too much of their stores, they get cramps (which are bad muscle spasms).

Non-athletes, who get cramps while sitting around, get those muscle spasms because they are chronically short of the right nutritionn, and then they get spasms and cramps.


Dehydration plays a role as well, but that is still a cause of nutritional insufficiency.


The nutrtional quality of the Standard American Diet is pretty poor.  Even the organic produce doesn't have as much nutrition in it as it did 100 years ago because of depleted soil and poor farming practices.

And the government's RDA standards are criminally low....


I could go on an on about poor nutrition in the US.  Point being, as a nation we THINK we're full of nutrition, but unfortunately, we just aren't.


What Causes Muscle Spasms?
How To Get Rid Of Muscle Spasm

To gret rid of muscle spasms one must replete the body of missing nutrition.

Something like 70 of the population is chronically mildly (or more) dehydrated.  We drink coffee and soda and milk but not enough water.

So drink more water.

You've probably hear of electrolytes.  Those are minerals the body requires for muscle function.   Potassium, calcium, magnesium.


Calcium is required for a muscle fiber to fire.  Magnesium is required for that muscle fiber to STOP firing.

Potassium plays a role as well.  But the first line method of getting rid of muscle spasms is to drink more water, and get enough magnesium in you.


Calcium requires Magnesium and Vitamin D

We get enough Calcium from our diets, but we need Vitamin D and Magnesium to utilized that calcium.  And as a nation we're short on Vitamin D and magnesium, thus we're functionally short on Calcium.


How To Get Rid Of Muscle Spasms

It's pretty simple, actually.


1.  Drink more water.  Do not drink distilled water, as it's missing the micronutrients that SHOULD be in water.

2.  Supplement with Magnesium.  See:  Magnesium For Tendonitis


And it can't hurt to eat some banannas or other foods rich in potassium.  Admittedly, I'm a fan of therapeutic supplementation.






Return to the top of this What Causes Muscle Spasms page. 

Go to the main Tendonitis page. 

Go to the TendonitisExpert.com homepage.









Enjoy this page? Please pay it forward. Here's how...

Would you prefer to share this page with others by linking to it?

  1. Click on the HTML link code below.
  2. Copy and paste it, adding a note of your own, into your blog, a Web page, forums, a blog comment, your Facebook account, or anywhere that someone would find this page valuable.

Updated Program Is In The Works!
Feb 1st or sooner!