Summer is always nice. Holidays at the seaside are even more splendid, but summer vacation can often be spoiled by an unpleasant thing – foot cramps.
What Causes Foot Cramp?
Another typical problem of the summer time is cramps in calf muscles, which often occur while swimming. The two main reasons are the sharp contrast of temperatures and untrained muscle fatigue when, after the year of office seating, we try to swim for a long distance.
Deficiency in potassium, calcium and other trace elements as well as flat feet can also cause cramps.
The reason for cramps may also be a variety of diseases such as epilepsy, spasmophilia, eclampsia, brain tumors, latent injury, various inflammatory processes, and infections. These causes can be detected only by specialists, such as endocrinologists, phlebologists, and neurologists. Cramps disappear as soon as the main disease is cured.
How to Prevent Foot Cramps?
Warm up before bathing, run around, do some squats. Heated muscles have a better blood supply, they become more resistant to stress. You can make a gentle massage of the calf muscles and go into the water slowly.
Anti-Cramp Diet
To prevent cramps and avoid lack of vitamins, the diet must contain cottage cheese, legumes, hard cheeses, fruits such as apples, bananas, dried apricots, which are rich in potassium. Eat these products regularly. Apart from that, if ordinary food does not help and the lack of trace elements is too evident, it is necessary to take vitamins twice a year.
If you have foot cramps very often, it is necessary to reduce the consumption of sugar and coffee and smoke less because excessive amount of nicotine and caffeine in the body can cause frequent cramps.
Foot Cramps Treatment
The main thing is not to panic. Practice shows that most cramps can only reduce swimming speed. All accidents are due to the panic and the related loss of motor coordination. Having overcome fear, find the most hardened place in the spastic muscle and pinch it strongly. The unexpected stimulus will relieve the muscle of the cramp, and it will relax. Then, you can have a massage, and finally spread some warming ointment over the sore spot. One can prevent cramps by constantly doing massage.
The old advice of pricking the muscle with a pin is better to be forgotten: the muscle may possibly relax, but you can get some infection and additional problems.
