It shouldn’t come as a surprise that muscle soreness is common after an intense workout.
You’ve put your muscles to work, and the microtears that develop from high-intensity activity can lead to soreness in the days after your workout. While it’s completely natural, extended or severe pain could be a sign that something is missing…If soreness becomes chronic, you could have a magnesium deficiency—a mineral that plays an important role in inflammation and muscle contraction/relaxation.So, we’re breaking down what you need to know about magnesium and muscle pain. We’ll cover the causes of muscle pain, how magnesium can help, and what to look for in a supplement.
What Causes Muscle Pain?
Many factors can cause muscle pain—intense exercise, traumatic injury, sleeping “wrong”, and more.
But typically, this pain subsides after a couple of days and you’re back to normal function. But if the pain doesn’t go away or subside, it could be because you’re missing nutrients needed to support proper muscle recovery.While we usually chalk up muscle pain to injury, there are several additional causes. Muscle strain during exercise is a biggie, as well as an insufficient warm-up or cool down, but there can also be medical causes that result in muscle pain:
- Fibromyalgia
- Infections (flu, polio, bacterial, etc.)
- Thyroid issues
- Potassium deficiency
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Myofascial pain syndrome
- Autoimmune conditions
- Medications (statins, ACE inhibitors, etc.)
Muscle pain can be both localized (one area) or affect a large chunk of the body.
Should you foam roll before or after your workout? Find out in our guide here!
Magnesium Deficiency
Although there are many food sources of magnesium, it remains one of the most common nutrient deficiencies—and usually goes undiagnosed.
It’s estimated that anywhere from 15% to 20% of the population is deficient in magnesium and that number increases to more than 80% in postmenopausal women 1.There are two types of deficiencies that can occur: frank deficiencies and subclinical deficiencies - clinical and subclinical.
The former is something like scurvy with obvious symptoms attached to low levels of a nutrient. A subclinical deficiency means a silent reduction in physiological, cellular, and/or biochemical function as a result of low nutrient status.
Subclinical deficiencies are more concerning, as they’re more difficult to diagnose and predispose individuals to several health problems and chronic diseases 1
Think you may be magnesium deficient? Watch for these symptoms:
- Muscle twitches, tremors, and cramps
- Mood changes
- Osteoporosis or weakened bones
- Fatigue
- Muscle weakness
- High blood pressure
- Arrhythmia
- Muscle tightness
If you’re checking yes to more than one of these symptoms, get your magnesium levels checked and keep reading for ways to boost your levels!
How Does Magnesium Help With Muscle Pain?
Boosts ATP production
The body relies on a consistent supply of energy to perform optimally, and that energy comes from a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short.
While ATP is used to power virtually every process in your body, one of those includes muscle contraction during your workout and relaxation after. It breaks the actin-myosin cross-bridge, thereby freeing the myosin for the next contraction.
Without sufficient ATP, this contraction can’t happen—and the synthesis of ATP is magnesium-dependent. For ATP to become biologically active, it must bind to magnesium to form an Mg-ATP complex 2.But ATP is also needed to produce the energy that allows you to get through your workout in the first place and recover properly.
Relaxes tense muscles
If you’ve ever finished a workout and felt super sore and achy, magnesium could be something to add to your post-workout supplement stack.
As it does in the heart, magnesium acts as a natural calcium block to induce muscle relaxation by binding to proteins like troponin C and myosin 3. When calcium binds to receptors in muscles, these proteins change shape to generate a muscle contraction.
However, because magnesium competes with calcium for binding, it can help to inhibit muscle contraction and promote relaxation, thereby preventing muscle cramps and spasms. That said, evidence on the benefit of magnesium for muscle cramps is largely mixed 4—but it certainly can’t hurt!
Supports sleep
Sure, your workout is what builds strength and mass, but the recovery period is important—if not more important than the training itself—to solidify those gains.
You can work as hard as you want in the gym, but if you're not sleeping enough to recover, those gains aren’t translating. Sleep is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to muscle recovery and mitigating delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and magnesium helps to facilitate a good night's sleep.
It’s suggested that sleep deprivation decreases protein synthesis and increases degradation pathways, thereby favoring loss of muscle mass and hindering muscle’s ability to recover after damage induced by exercise, injury, and certain conditions associated with muscle atrophy 5.But during sleep, testosterone and growth hormone (GH) is also secreted. If you’re not getting enough sleep, specifically slow-wave sleep, GH and testosterone secretion decrease, which means your muscles aren’t getting what they need to grow and repair.
A 2010 study looked at the effects of sleep deprivation and muscle growth 6. Participants were put on a strict sleep schedule for 14 whereby one group slept 5.5 hours per night—the average amount of sleep for most Americans—and the other group was allowed 8.5 hours.
Results showed that despite all external factors besides sleep being equal, those sleeping only 5.5 hours lost a whopping 55% less fat and 60% more muscle than those who slept 8.5 hours.The takeaway here is if you’re looking to maximize gains, you need to be sleeping enough. And while most of us have difficulty sleeping to some extent, you can say goodbye to the days of sleepless nights and hello to major gains.
If you’re ready for the best sleep of your life and ready to maximize your recovery (and minimize muscle soreness), check out Performance Lab Sleep.
Sleep is an innovative natural sleep formula designed to help awake feeling revitalized and refreshed without any nasty next-day grogginess that most conventional sleep aids leave you with.
It’s a powerful blend that supplies natural low-dose melatonin from CherryPURE® Montmorency Tart Cherry. And with additional joint- and muscle-soothing antioxidants, CherryPURE® promotes deep sleep better than any synthetic melatonin can.
It encourages natural melatonin and serotonin production for drowsiness, and the addition of three forms of magnesium promotes sleep-supportive muscle relaxation to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
Best Sources Of Magnesium
Diet is a great way to increase your magnesium intake and avoid muscle pain. Here’s what you should load up on:
- Spinach, boiled (and other dark leafy greens)
- Pumpkin seeds
- Lima beans
- Tuna
- Brown rice
- Almonds
- Dark chocolate (>85% cocoa)
- Avocados
- Bananas
- Black beans
- Cashews
Getting enough nutrients through diet can be challenging, but we have a super-stacked supplement combo that will take your recovery to the next level.
When you stack Performance Lab Recover with NutriGenesis Multi, you’re providing your body with everything it needs to perform and recover—and kick muscle soreness to the curb.
Recover is the world’s smartest ergogenic muscle fuel designed to replenish glycogen levels fast to accelerate your recovery. Featuring KarboLyn® carbohydrate, Oryzatein® organic brown rice protein, and NutriGenesis® vitamins and minerals, Recover unlocks peak muscle growth and repair. And Multi provides 17+ essential vitamins and minerals in gender-specific doses for optimal performance and hormonal balance. Each nutrient is complexed with cofactors to boost absorption and bioactivity, so you know that what you’re taking works. It’s the ultimate stack to kick recovery into high gear and fend up unnecessary muscle pain that keeps you from unlocking your potential.
References
- DiNicolantonio JJ, O'Keefe JH, Wilson W. Subclinical magnesium deficiency: a principal driver of cardiovascular disease and a public health crisis . Open Heart. 2018;5(1):e000668.
- Yamanaka R, Tabata S, Shindo Y, et al. Mitochondrial Mg(2+) homeostasis decides cellular energy metabolism and vulnerability to stress. Sci Rep. 2016;6:30027.
- Potter JD, Robertson SP, Johnson JD. Magnesium and the regulation of muscle contraction. Fed Proc. 1981;40(12):2653-2656.
- Garrison SR, Allan GM, Sekhon RK, Musini VM, Khan KM. Magnesium for skeletal muscle cramps. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2012;2012(9):CD009402.
- Dattilo M, Antunes HK, Medeiros A, et al. Sleep and muscle recovery: endocrinological and molecular basis for a new and promising hypothesis. Med Hypotheses. 2011;77(2):220-222.
- Nedeltcheva AV, Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Schoeller DA, Penev PD. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Ann Intern Med. 2010;153(7):435-441.
