You reach for an item onto the top shelf of the cabinet and your back wrenches in pain for a muscle goes into spasm. How can something as easy as reaching for a towel produce such pain?
The answer is — it did not. Reaching to your towel overextended a muscle which was already strained. This made the muscle stiffen and go into spasm to protect it from any additional harm. Muscles can become strained due to repetitive movements or habits, such as bad posture, heavy lifting, swinging a racquet or sitting before a computer.
Often, when muscles have been strained for some time, all it requires is one sudden movement (i.e., one stretch to get a towel) to get an already strained muscle to move into spasm.
While this occurs, all of the muscle fibers contract at exactly the exact same time. Muscle contraction cuts off blood supply, which generates even more muscle pain, causing the muscle to contract even further. This can be an all too common occurrence for some people who lie around the ground in pain for hours because the muscle doesn’t relax with motion.
Help to Your Muscle Spasms
It can take several weeks to get a muscle spasm to deteriorate, so try another to help the recovery process.
- Rest.
- Apply ice/heat and try massage therapy to assist in pain relief.
- Considering that a lack of calcium, water and calcium are thought to provoke muscle spasms, increasing your intake of all three might help as well.
- Seek chiropractic care.
Chiropractic care helps to alleviate the cause of muscle spasm once it’s present as well as helping to stop it from occurring in the first location! Proper nerve function is essential to proper muscle function, and chiropractic adjustments locate and appropriate regions of the spine where there’s nerve dysfunction.
