A painful side effect of pregnancy can be the nightly leg cramps. These painful cramps most often strike when you’re in a deep sleep and towards the end of the second trimester of pregnancy. They are excruciating but you can proactively prevent them. This article will give you tips for preventing them.
It can be very excruciating to experience leg cramps during pregnancy. Nevertheless, many pregnant women today experience these cramps more and more. They occur more frequently at night and during your third trimester.
But why do they occur in pregnancy? The baby growing in your uterus (womb), gains weight, along with the added mass of the uterus, the amniotic fluid (the fluid surrounding the baby or fetus), the placenta etc. You may also have noticed a few extra pounds as your body stocks up on fluids.
No one really knows why women have increased leg cramps during pregnancy. Speculation is that your leg muscles are tired and stressed from carrying extra weight. As you gain more weight, your leg cramps may increase.
It is reasonably common for many pregnant women to experience leg cramps. Pregnancy is a delicate situation and you’ll experience a lot of discomforts during its full course. But regardless of how uncomfortable your leg cramps, pregnancy pains, and other aches, being pregnant is still a particularly joyous occasion.
Many fear that use of essential oils during pregnancy will cause harm to the growing fetus but there is little or no evidence that this is true. Neither is there evidence that essential oils will terminate a pregnancy except from massive overdoses of only a few oils that are usually not even available in this country.
Some common conditions that pregnant women face are ankle swelling, wrist swelling, and leg cramps.
These can easily be remedied or prevented altogether by paying more attention to our pillars of support – the legs and feet! In pregnancy, swollen ankles and feet usually need three simple things: hydration, rotation and elevation of the legs.
Leg cramps are often painful and involuntary contractions of the muscles of the leg. Yes cramps occur in all muscles and the results range from annoying to excruiating but leg cramps, especially those at night, are in a class of their own. Leg cramps are also called “charley horse” in common parlance.
One night I was lying in bed. Suddenly, I felt the hamstring in my left leg start to tighten like you wouldn’t believe. At first it was a dull pain that turned into a sharp pain. It was so bad that when I got myself out of bed and headed for God knows where, I literally collapsed in the hallway and almost passed out from the pain.
We have all experienced leg cramps [the involuntary contraction of a single or a group of muscles] at some stage in our lives, while varying in duration and pain they can be quite incapacitating and tend to involve the calf muscle, hamstring or quadriceps.
There are many different reasons that you may start to experience leg cramps. While it has previously been thought that cramps occurred directly as a result of a deficiency in calcium, studies indicate that this is a long way from the whole story regarding cramping.
One such problem for women is during the period of pregnancy and this is said to be the most strenuous time for the particular gender. They suffer from various joint pains, uncomfortable feeling and many difficulties that extend the list a mile long. Though the effects of this time will wear off after the birth of the child, their general health condition deteriorates by a specific percentage.