How do you relieve or avoid leg cramps and/or Restless Leg Syndrome?
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at
4:27 am
I get very painful thigh cramps and my legs twitch when I sleep. It is causing my wife to wake up. I sleep through it. What can I do or take to relieve the leg cramps and/or the RLS?
Tagged with: Leg Cramps • Legs • Rls • Sleep
Filed under: Restless Leg Syndrome
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My doc prescribed drugs, but when I read the side effects I didn’t touch them. The things that help me best are:
HOT bath before bedtime OR minutes of stretching before bedtime – I mean really stretching OR riding my stationary bike before bed, but the downside is that this can sometimes rev me up so I can’t go to sleep for a while.
Good luck – I feel for you
focus on B vitamins & iron,the cause could be a deficiency of folate.Eat plenty of legumes,oranges,brussels sprouts, spinach, asparagus & strawberries are a good source of folate. Steamed clams,lean beef,turkey,chicken,whole grain bread & legumes provide a hefty serve of iron.If it strikes when you have gone to bed get up & walk around or if you have stairs do a few laps up & down the stairs.Try sitting point your toes & stretch both legs from foot to hip. A warm bath may also help but I have heard where a cold compress helps.
What I have found to really help is to eat lots of bananas. They are high in potassium which helps reduce cramps. I too have RLS and its the only thing that I have found to help.
Whenever I get a bad leg cramp – I usually have to do some streching of the muscle (yes this does hurt) and i place a heating pad on it fo awhile
Take an over the counter pain reliever like Ibuprofen before you go to bed to help the cramps. For the twitching massage the muscle and use a hot/cold pack. Other than that just exercise and avoid caffeine, alcohol and tobacco.
The same thing was bothering me and i found that if i ran in the evening, usually just a mile or two, i slept great!
Hope this helps!