In a pickle
Cramp is kryptonite to a cyclist, but there might be a weird but wonderful fix
In cycling there are more tales spun about ‘solving’ cramp than at the bar of an old wives convention. In the days before stick-on race numbers, pros would pull out safety pins from jerseys and thrust them into the offending muscles; latterly we were all told to hydrate, and more recent advice is to eat a banana. Quite apart from diluting our salts, what the cramping body needs is a mass injection of potassium. Or so we used to think, because one study suggests the most useful ally in the fight against cramp might in fact be pickle juice.
Researchers used electronic impulses to stimulate cramp in a subject’s flexor hallucis brevis – that muscle in the foot you might feel cramping in running or swimming. They then measured the intensity and duration of the cramp. Next round each subject was given either deionised water or pickle juice to drink – 1ml per kilo bodyweight – immediately after the cramp was triggered. Cramp intensity hardly varied between the groups, but cramp duration dropped significantly when pickle juice was ingested – a staggering 45% or 49 seconds.
Of course one might point to the vinegar or salt in the juice as the reason for the difference, but further research posits that cramp is actually down to an overstimulation of the motor neurons in the nervous system that control muscle behaviour, and what the pickle juice does is trigger a response in the body
‘to inhibit the firing of alpha motor neurons of the cramping muscle’. In other words, that vinegary taste tells your brain to tell your muscles to just relax.