Do you get cramp during sports due to magnesium diviency?
Maintaining a good magnesium supply is important for sportsmen and women. That’s because we lose valuable minerals when we sweat, including magnesium. But as the mineral is essential for your energy metabolism (to keep your power up), you should always keep an eye on your magnesium levels when practising sports.
Magnesium and sports: key facts at a glance
- Magnesium is crucial for the body's energy metabolism and sports performance.
- Sweating tends to increase magnesium loss.
So, sportsmen and women may have a higher daily magnesium requirement. They need to take particular care to ensure their magnesium intake is adequate.
Full power with magnesium: fuel for your muscles.
Whether we’re jogging, swimming, playing football or hiking – to move our bodies, our muscles need energy. The source of their energy is ATP (adenosine triphosphate), without which muscles would simply be unable to function. It is stored in the muscle cells. But reserves are used up in just a few seconds during strenuous physical exercise. Enzymes split the molecule into adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and phosphate, releasing energy which the muscles need to contract. But this ultra-high-energy compound can only be fully used by the muscle system if sufficient levels of magnesium are present. And the converse also applies: if magnesium levels are low, the muscle cells can’t get all the energy they require.
Why an adequate supply of magnesium is important for people practising sports
If you train a lot, you’ll also sweat a lot. The problem is that intensive and extensive bouts of sport increase the amount of magnesium mobilised from the body’s internal reserves. Eventually magnesium starts escaping from the pores along with sweat. So endurance athletes and people involved in performance sports, who sweat a great deal, often do not have an adequate supply of magnesium.
But people involved in sports such as weight lifting and other high-resistance activities can also sometimes neglect their magnesium intake, for example if they are on a high-protein diet. Switching to these sorts of diets risks missing out on important micro-nutrients.1
Typical signs of magnesium deficiency in sportsmen and women include, for example, muscle and leg cramp. It will also often lead to a drop in performance for sportsmen and women.
Controlling your magnesium intake: tips for sportsmen and women
Sportsmen and women need to keep their magnesium levels topped up if they want to achieve full performance levels with all of their muscle cells fully supplied with the mineral. That’s because magnesium is important for energy and protein metabolism and maintaining vital muscle function.
The problem is that you can’t always ensure your higher magnesium requirement is met by a diet that is rich in magnesium alone. As well as adjusting your dietary habits to optimise magnesium intake, it can sometimes be helpful to supplement your diet with suitable magnesium products from the pharmacy. The Biolectra® magnesium range, for example, has various dosage forms and strengths to suit every individual magnesium requirement.
Maintaining an adequate supply of magnesium is a good way of avoiding deficiency for sportsmen and women. At the same time, taking the mineral has not been shown to be performance-enhancing in athletes, and so it does not count as “doping”.1
1 Predel H.G.et al. Magnesium im ambitionierten Breitensport. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Sportmedizin. Jg. 69. Nr. 1 2017, S.1-9.
