Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Heat, Hard Work & Muscle Cramps?

Im not prescribing a diet, ,,double the daily intake,, yikes, I hope the cops dont get wind of it, lol...

One other piece of advise: your Gatorade intake the night before is going to effect what happens the next day. My son learned this the hard way when he was in bagpipe competitions. You can't load up during the day or even that morning and expect success. Gatorade is good stuff, but you have to drink it the afternoon or evening before exercise in order for the minerals to absorb. Angus was young and inexperienced and had two trips to the EMT wagon before he figured out what was what.

Bagpipes? Yep. Think of wearing all that dark wool along with a wool hat in the hot sun, marching around, blowing into a bag.

Pickle juice has been mentioned several times. Why not go to the source as I discovered. Raw and unfiltered apple cider vinegar!

I began to get severe leg cramps when I was 64 after 3 1/2 -5 hr hikes hunting mearns quail. I hydrated before and during the hunts with water and gator aide but it wasn't enough. A friend told me of apple cider vinegar helping his foot cramps while long distance swimming. He would take it BEFORE his workout and again later. It helped him and helped me.

Dosage? An ounce or two mixed with water, a table spoon of sugar and slammed down quickly is easiest for me. I suppose you could put it in any number of drinks in small doses.

I use Bragg's raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar with the "mother".

https://www.swansonvitamins.com/bra...055&gclid=CPqugJ373dQCFdKEfgodjVgAQQ

I'm not a cold water or ice water fan, certainly not while still working or working out. I prefer cool water, but no ice.

Also, a bunch of us who run and bike in the desert carry the little packets of yellow mustard with us.

When cramps start, zip the packet into your mouth and wash it down with water and the cramps will disappear in under 10 minutes.

these are for leg and abdominal cramps, but I can't see why they would not work for other cramps.

It's not the vinegar in the pickle but the salt that does the trick. Vinegar is acetic acid. Nothing special in the way of electrolytes there. ACV may have some potassium from the original apple source, but I have not verified that. 1 Gatorade to 1 water if its hot and humid. Football teams know about hydration these days. The Gatorade/ Powerade stuff they mix from powder in buckets has less concentration that bottles.

You also need to under the biochemistry of absorption in the lumen of the gut. The glucose os added to provide active transport of the electrolytes into the bloodstream. Also, there is the mechanism of how the body stores water and energy. The body stores your carb reserves in the form of glycogen in the liver and skeletal muscles. Each once of glycogen holds 2 ounces of water. Purpose of that is as you do strenuous work, your body releases water stores as you burn energy.

This^^^ get and stay hydrated prior to as well during exertion.

i have a friend in sun city arizona, in his 80's. He by hand has mixed and poured about 300bags of concrete, constantly working around
the house.
he swears by a tall glass of water with a teaspoon of salt added.
A quart of water in my area, phx, wouldn't do squat.
i am around 70 and am on medication, and i watch it a lot closer than i use to.
this last week i was working on a project in the back yard, heat into the tripple digits, my clothing was sopping wet. I kept drinking the
whole time. But you can definitely drink too much water and leach out other stuff.
years ago when i worked heavy construction, we took salt pills. I remember at the end of the day my levi's were white from the salt.
Last week i was drinking liquid all day long, but didn't pee hardly at all, leaking the liquid out.
I was always told if you are not peeing, you ain't drinking enough.

This is what you want, I use them on a regular basis.

For electrolyte replacement before, during and after http://www.hammernutrition.com/endurolytes-extreme/

For energy and hydration while working http://www.hammernutrition.com/heed-sports-drink/

Not cheap but works, regardless of age or activity.

Oh.. and Gatorade sucks the big one. Few things worse for your body, except for maybe diet coke.

"Not a problem in the larger muscle groups, just the hands and forearms, and cramps can persist even into the next day."

Do you have any health problems or take any drugs? If you take drugs look at the potential side effects of each drug. My best friend has diabetes and he has problems with cramps in his hands and forearms. Do you keep in shape so you'll be able to do hard work? When you are working in hot weather you should be drinking enough water so that you still have to urinate occasionally just like you do when you're not working. If your urine is yellow you're not drinking enough water. You also pace yourself and take frequent breaks at your age. It takes me an hour to mow my yard and another hour to weed eat. I take drink water while I'm mowing/weed eating and take a 5 minute sit down break every 30 minutes. If your mouth gets dry you're not drinking enough water. When I get through you could wring sweat out of my socks and underwear. I'll be 75 this January and never get cramps. I've lived in Texas all my life so I had to learn to handle the heat. I hope you figure out the cause of your cramps.

Obviously you haven't had any graduate level biochemistry. That's ok, I have enough for both of us.

Zing!

Yeah, ya got me. I need a chemistry degree to understand the artificial coloring and the high fructose corn suryp and the artificial flavoring and the artificial sweeteners and the soy based veg.oil and the etc etc........that's listed on the label.

Sure Dude, Pure health in all its florescent glory!

I prefer to put the good stuff in my body without the sheit... but then I don't have graduate level cheeemooostry in my edjamacation so WTF do I know?

What does gatorade offer, specifically?

I can tell you that low sodium tomato juice has about the same sodium as Gatorade, but the tomato juice also has about 19-20 times the potassium. And we all use about 5000 mg of potassium in an ordinary day.

My leg cramps were a nightly affair. Tried just about everything mentioned in this thread. Cleveland Clinic found the problem-statins (Lipitor) I tried Crestor with the same results. I replaced beef and pork in my diet with bison and venison. I no longer have cramps and my LDL is 90.

I think you're mistaking Gatorade for that drink they developed over at Florida State. It was called Seminole Fluid and nobody but the guys in the Music Theatre Department would drink it.

Specifically, it replaces lost water volume, sodium, and potassium along with providing a source of carbohydrates to replenish lost glycogen reserves in the body. If you examine the composition of it and other sports drinks, you will find them similar to products used for oral rehydration in medicine.

Without going too deep into the biochemistry, when you get dehydrated, your system is depleted not only of water, but sodium and potassium that are essential to proper nerve conduction. It is called the Action Potential. Nerves fire by sending a wave of Na into the never fiber from the outer sheath through the Ion Channel while K (potassium) goes from the opposite direction creating a wave of conduction that is the nerve impulse. When you get low on either or both, the conduction waves are interrupted and the muscle cramping occurs.

Next thing to understand, as I briefly pointed out about, we store water along with our carb reserves int he form of glycogen in the skeletal muscles and liver. Each oz. of glycogen burned releases 2 oz of water. We have 1-2 kilos of glycogen to be used in anaerobic activity. Sprinting, chopping wood, weight lifting, or any significant manual labor that might make you winded while you partake demands glucose from some source (there are a few exceptions, so don't get all Google FU). You will find it interesting that a distance runner require very few carbs to produce ATP for the cells because in their activity the energy chain runs on free fatty acids - but that is another discussion.

Let's take football players. Tremendous amounts of anaerobic sprinting, sweating, and energy demands. On hot, muggy days a 250 lb player can drop 8 -10 pounds of weight in 4-5 hours. That will be 3 pounds of glycogen and 6 pounds of water in most cases. You lose the electrolytes along with that and they cramp. Rehydrate and the cramps stop.

Fastest way to rehydrate is IV fluids. D5W (Dextrose 5% in saline water) is most common and provides relief in minutes. Ringer's Lactate is another essential IV rehydration vehicle.

Oral rehydration is another story. The water and electrolytes must be absorbed through the lumen of the intestine and that absorption rate is increased with the presence of glucose to act as active transport to get the stuff into your bloodstream. Let me re-emphasize that one thing glucose does is get the stuff into you faster! It also gives your body needed glucose when your glycogen reserves are low or spent.

So why does Gatorade or other Sports drinks get a bad rap? They are not intended to be a beverage of habit or pleasure. They are a useful nutrient. People don't have a biologic need to sip on 64 oz of the stuff all day if they are sitting around. No, a sedentary person has little need for the extra electrolytes and sugar. Certainly, sipping of the citrus favors with the citric acid and sugar sure isn't good for anyones teeth.


Look, this is hardly meant to be a comprehensive explanation on the subject, but I hope it helps you understand the process a bit better.

Look, I'm not here to bust on you, but you don't know what you don't know. That's the "edjamacation" you reference. Let me help you out. I had a year of P-Chem, 3 years of Organic and Polymer Chemistry as an undergraduate. That taught me very little about how the body works at the cellular level. That is what Biochemistry was all about once I was at the Medical College of Georgia. Just because someone can pick up a copy of Runner's World and read a paragraph that says Sports drinks suck doesn't tell the whole story. Stuff then gets accepted as dogma just as much as "Bush lied" and "Trump Colluded". True or false doesn't matter anymore. There is also the overwehming advertising blitz for this stuff.

You want to bust on the Diet Coke? Easier to make a case. I still haven't found convincing evidence from sources I consider reliable that aspartame is a killer. The phosphoric acid in cola products destroys enamel on teeth, and may leach calcium from skeletal bones. I do think aspartame products do not satiate thirst and cause people to want more. See, I can analyze these things and we can find common ground.