Muscle cramps are temporary contractions of the muscles and they usually appear during physical effort. The sensation is similar to the one you have when you feel a strong, involuntary tightening of the muscle group that you can’t control any more. There are many causes which bring about cramps, but they happen most often because of insufficient warming up before training.
Good and correct warming up has two stages: the general one (cardio), for increasing the body temperature (running, cycling, etc.) and the specific one, during which the main joints and groups of muscles which will be involved in training are warmed up. It is enough not to give, from different reasons (rush, superficiality, ignorance), the necessary time or importance to one of these stages, and cramps can become a current phenomenon.
As important as warming up is the relaxation stage after the training. This has, like warming up, two stages: a dynamic one (aerobic) and a static one (stretching). It is meant to ‘calm down’ the body and to eliminate the muscular tension and the catabolic products resulted from the training. Lack of relaxation can slow down the process of...