 As often happens, I did not notice the trend until it affected me, personally. A few nights ago, in a game against the Cincinnati Reds, Albert Pujols had to be carried off the field due to a strained calf muscle. He pulled up lame in the seventh inning. This affects me personally because I am an Albert Pujols fan. I should also point out that, while I was a St. Louis Cardinals fan for many years, and I hope to be a Cardinals fan again in the future, I will not be a Cardinals fan as long as they have as their manager Tony LaRussa, the guy who personally ushered in the steroids era by turning a blind eye to what was demonstrably happening with the players that he managed. But we will devote another article to an invective against Tony LaRussa. For now, I will just say that I wish Albert Pujols all of the success in the world, but I root for the failure of the Cardinals, because one more year of failure might cause the permanent exit from baseball of the vegan lawyer who fancies himself a manager, but who is truly a blight upon Major League Baseball. Referring back to the first paragraph, the injury to Pujols caused me to think of all the similar injuries that have recently occurred. Here are just a few, with links to the web articles on each of them: Alfonso Soriano of Chicago Cubs Injures Calf Sean Casey of Detroit Tigers Injures Calf Thomas Jones of New York Jets Injures Calf Ronnie Belliard of Washington Nationals Injures Calf Moises Alou of New York Mets Injures Calf Jack Wilson of Pittsburgh Pirates Injures Calf Maria Sharapova Injures Calf Felix Hernandez of Boston Red Sox has Tightness in Calf Anthony Thomas of Buffalo Bills Injures Calf Brent Barry of San Antonio Spurs Injures Calf The potential list of all of the calf injuries in professional sports could fill several pages. Indeed, my Google search, which I limited to just professional baseball, basketball, and football, returned over three thousand results. We all know that some of those returned results are duplicates, but the search does demonstrate that there is something of a trend, if not an epidemic, in calf muscle injuries. Why are the calves of athletes attracting so much attention?
To be sure, there is much to be said about proper stretching to prevent muscle injuries. And professional athletes have access to an amazing calf-stretching device called the ProStretch, which was invented by a friend of mine, C.J. Smith. But the calf injuries seem to continue to occur in spite of proper stretching. There appears to be some other problem and I suggest that the problem is a lack of magnesium in the diets of these athletes. If you have ever been awakened in the middle of the night by severe pain in one of your calves, you can be certain that your diet is deficient in magnesium. This pain, commonly known as a charlie-horse, has often been incorrectly associated with a diet deficient in calcium, but Dr. Carolyn Dean in her book, The Magnesium Miracle, explains the confusion. She explains that calcium appears to help leg cramps, or charlie-horses, because excess calcium forces magnesium to be released from storage sites, and so there is commonly relief from leg cramps through calcium supplementation, but the real problem, magnesium deficiency, will eventually cause more problems. Calcium and magnesium work together in our body's muscles, with calcium causing contraction in muscle fibers while magnesium causes relaxation. When the cells in a muscle are found to contain too much calcium and insufficient magnesium, the result is the twitches, spasms, and convulsions that indicate sustained muscle contraction. All of the muscles in the human body contain more magnesium than calcium, and without proper amounts of magnesium, the calcium will not work properly. But both the current American diet, which contains large amounts of calcium-rich dairy products, and the tendency to oversupplement calcium makes getting enough magnesium almost impossible. The ratio of calcium to magnesium in our diet should be 2:1, but the U.S. diet is 3.5:1. By the way, your doctor is probably doing a disservice to your health if he has you on a calcium supplement regimen without a corresponding magnesium supplement. If sufficient magnesium intake is important to the health of muscles in the body of the average Joe, how much more critical is that magnesium intake to the muscles of a top athlete? The balance between magnesium and calcium in an athlete's body is a balance that is critical to top performance and for avoiding muscle injuries. When muscles are contracting and relaxing repeatedly during physical exercise, if there is too much calcium and too little magnesium muscle cramping will result. But most coaches and athletes are ignorant of the fact that magnesium is one of the most important nutrients for an athlete's body. Dr. Mildred Seelig is an internationally recognized magnesium specialist and she recommends that athletes in training obtain at least 6-10 mg/kg/day (or 2.7-4.5 mg/lb/day) of magnesium to help replace the losses from exertion, sweating, and stress. In other words, a 220-lb man should be taking 600-1000 mg of magnesium per day, and a 150-lb woman should be taking 400-680 mg of magnesium per day. While magnesium deficiency can show up in little twitches of facial muscles, or in somewhat irritating involuntary muscle contractions in arm muscles, for some reason magnesium deficiency in muscles is at it's most painful when it makes itself know in the calves. I would suggest that the current trend in calf injuries among professional athletes may have more to do with nutrition than with conditioning. Even though it is highly unlikely that the reader of this article is a professional athlete, magnesium in the diet of the average Joe is important. Even if you are not waking in the middle of the night with excruciating pain in your calves, magnesium is important to your ability to relax. As Dr. Carolyn Dean says, “Magnesium's interactions with calcium help keep calcium from causing excessive muscle contraction. Excess calcium causes tension and tightness in all of the muscles of the body, but when you take a balancing amount of magnesium, this tension releases within weeks, days, or even hours, depending on the underlying level of magnesium deficiency in your body.” As we mentioned before, getting enough magnesium solely from our diet is nearly impossible. Find a good magnesium supplement and begin taking it today.
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