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Dear All,

Do you know any tip to decrease leg stiffness?
I mean, except taking Magnesium and doing exercise.

Thks

interesting (if annoying), you have high serum mag and leg stiffness??

Hi,

I presume you have seen other posts about what I have said about eccentric muscle movement and obviously magnesium is covered in many posts.

When you say leg stiffness, I presume you mainly mean in the hamstrings. You can also get it through the hips and the quads can feel very tight which will shorten the length of your stride.

Although your leg is where you notice it, you need to look at how well your psoas muscle is functioning. That's the muscle the controls how easily you can pull your leg up to walk. It is not in the leg, it's in your torso. You also need to ensure that your hip flexors which run across from your torso to the front of your legs are activated. Similarly you need normal flexion in your foot and that needs integrated movement involving the calf muscles.

If you can find a spasticity clinic they may give you a few shots of botox into the tight leg. That temporarily kills the dendrites on the neuron and releases the muscle but you need to stretch and exercise throughout that six month period or it just reconnects exactly where it was and you haven't changed anything.
The other alternative is dry needling. (not acupuncture - that's different but uses the same needles) That aims to break the fascia by making a micro tear.

Don't exercise by tightening the muscles. That will not help. You need to strengthen the muscles whilst they are in an elongated position. Pilates and some yoga will do that.

Regards,

reviewing your earlier notes, i see no serum mag testing has been done. (never saw any follow up info on dietary intake either!)

also re your regimen notes:

Magnesium:100mg (30.6% carbonate, 69.4% oxide)
• D3 4000UI (drops) from French Lab
• Magnesium 300mg (oxide) +B6 2mg -prolonged release cap from French Lab

possible issues:

1. lower quality forms of mag such as mag oxide; good for laxative purposes, not so much for absorption into tissue. ideally, find some magnesium glycinate or similar

2. timing of high dose d3 in relation to mag intake. if it all goes in at once, not good.
half of daily intake of high quality mag should be taken with d3, half at another time so will not be tied up with d3 interactions.

3. timing of mag supplementation in relation to food. if mag is taken with food, it can get bound up in complexes. mag should be taken 15 mins before a meal. first so your body has time to deal with it without competition. second the food pushes it out of the stomach and on down in to the intestine where it is optimally absorbed. plus you don't want it hanging around in your stomach anyway.

back in the day, i took low quality daily mag at the same time as my daily 4000 IU of d drops and it just about killed me.
a pharmacist told me about the mag timing and it helped a LOT. i think he basically saved my life.
it took me years of trial and error after that to figure out the quality side of things.

Dear both,

thks very much for your feedbacks.

I feel stiffness in the quads and psoas muscles.
I do some exercises 3-4 times per week, but it's mainly about tightening the muscles, not stretching.
Seems I was wrong here.
I will change that right away. I will keep tightening stuff but I will perform stretching 6 times per week

Regarding Mg, I ll meet my neurologist in a couple of weeks, I will ask for a blood analysis (Mg, D3 vit and B12).
Also, I will switch to Glycinate (Are 200mg ok?) 15 min before dinner to see if any change (I take D3 in the morning, so no interaction issue).

thks to let me know if anything looks incorrect to you.

Cheers

Heya,

Regarding Mg, my understanding was that B6 was necessary for good absorbtion.

I did a bit of research on glycinate, and I found "Bisglycinate tabs" from Solgar (I love this brand)
->It seems there is no need for B6

Do you know about this "bisglycinate" Mg?
Does it look like ok for you?

thks

Hi

If you have noticeable tightness in the psoas you will need very specific exercises to both stretch and strengthen the muscle.
When we start life as a bunch of dividing cells the first thing that develops is the stuff we later call connective tissue. Our bones, tendons, nerves and organs all grow inside that stuff so we are literally coated in sheets of connective tissue. The sheets run in different directions and look like slings that dive and weave their way over every part of you. Because they are connected sheets you can even get moments where tightness in your left should can feel like pulling near your right hip. If we could somehow remove the connective tissue we would just look like a puddle of muscles, organs and bones on the floor. It is that critical to how we move and the shape of us. Fascia forms the tensional network of the human body. A lot of pain we feel comes from tight fascia rather than the muscle.

If the tightness you feel is , in part, due to rigor bonds locking the fascia then you will need a lot of work. You just can't focus on the specific muscle alone. You will need to mobilise whole groups of muscles. If your psoas and quads are tight them your pelvis is probably tilted out of neutral. That means some of the muscles in your back and front are switched off and some others are working too hard. You need an integrated method of mobilising all of them or you won't get where you want to go. I definitely favor pilates for this . I spoke about it for about an hour in some live Q and A stuff here - http://www.mstranslate.com.au/facebook- ... sclerosis/ (sorry about the production quality)

The other things I would do is 1) get a good massage on a regular basis. That would include the use of either hot rocks or gel packs wrapped in towels to heat the tissue before massage. A good massuer would know what PNF stretches are and would incorporate them into the massage. 2) get some dry needling done. That requires someone who identifies what is tightest and uses fine needles to break the fascia at that point of tightness. Don't think you can do it by yourself.

Magnesium does help loosen muscles by blocking the ability of calcium to signal muscles to tighten. What makes muscles release is ATP so its availability is also critical to both muscle behaviour and fatigue.

That's too much information so I'll stop there for a while.

Regards,

zen2010 wrote:Heya,

Regarding Mg, my understanding was that B6 was necessary for good absorbtion.

I did a bit of research on glycinate, and I found "Bisglycinate tabs" from Solgar (I love this brand)
->It seems there is no need for B6

Do you know about this "bisglycinate" Mg?

Magnesium bisglycinate essentially has two glycine molecules (an amino acid) chelated to each Mg²⁺ ion.

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compou ... inoacetate

hi 200 mg mag glycinate (or close to it) should be okay given the issues you're experiencing at the moment. caveat to follow.

recall, half of daily mag goes in *with* d3, ie morning in your case (still before food ideally), half the mag goes in on its own, eg as you suggest 15 mins before dinner.

when my mag status is good, and dietary intake high, 200 mg of mag glycinate 2x per day can be too much. i noticed that climbing the stairs was a bit more challenging. quads were a bit too relaxed.

normally i like solgar brand too, but magnesium BISglycinate has been trouble for me. too strong, and i was in the habit at the time of taking it before bed on an empty stomach.

glycine is recommended for pwms in other contexts, so i liked the idea of mag glycinate but i had a TERRIBLE year with mag BISglycinate. ended up in the hospital *again*. for whatever reason, it gave me terrible acid reflux, a really obnoxious cough, dry heaves, loss of sleep, weight loss. all because it sat in my stomach relaxing my LES. and it took me a year, towards the end spending the night sleeping upright in a chair, to finally figure it out. good times :S

it is that experience which informs the 15 mins before eating part of my suggestions. (the pharmacist was the one who said take half of daily mag *with* d3, half *on its own*).

i think others may be ok with mag BISglycinate, timed right, but i'm paranoid about it personally!

i am not sure anyone just coming off a long term high d3 bad mag regimem would have the same problem with mag BISglycinate in the short term, especially it it's not allowed to hang out in the stomach.

in my case, mag status had gotten so bad that it took months if not years before i wouldn't feel magnesium actually 'kick in' strongly after any pill, with something i ended up calling 'the magnesium knock'. a pronounced fluttering feeling in the muscles of my throat.

then it took more years before i could go a day without taking a mag supplement and not instantly feel spasticity return to my muscles. esp noticeable in forearms in my case.

i think worst case scenario with mag bisglycinate, would be as mentioned above that you can't manage two of them per day, and muscles get sluggish. safe enough to test out for a week. if taken before food sitting upright, GERD related issues should be preventable.

if 400 mag bisglycinate per day is indeed too much, you can switch half to a different form. in my case, after a decade of working on mag via diet and supplements, when i know i need to take two in a single day, i find using 200 mg per day of mag glycinate and 200 of mag citrate is a good combo.

if you find yourself exploring with a similar approach, you can mix things up a bit maybe. eg take your d3 with the mag glycinate or similar one day, and with the multi's mag combo the next.

i suspect 200 mg of mag BISglycinate plus 300 mg of mag oxide might be a bit much in a single day. possible laxative side effect issue? not sure. you could test it out for a week, see how you do. you could take the 300 mg one only on alternate days or something like that.

hope that helps!!

Hi Everyone,

Here is my experience with stiffness.

I was given Baclofen back in the late 90's and had an extreme side effect so tried vitamin d with good results. Have been on magnesium bisglycinate for 2 or 3 years with no problems at all.....200 mg 2x per day.....before breakfast and 1 1/2 hours after supper. Have tried taking it at different times of the day and never had a problem. The magnesium has helped with a couple of things.

Our bodies are all different. Bananas constipate some people but they have the reverse effect on me. My doctor is like "Really??".

Trial and error as with most things.

Take care!

"Bananas constipate some people but they have the reverse effect on me. My doctor is like "Really??"."

Although a well kept 'secret' and not a popular topic, bananas (and many other 'commonly consumed and thought to be healthy plant based foods) have a lot of lectins in them which can cause digestive issues for some.

"Bananas constipate some people but they have the reverse effect on me. My doctor is like "Really??"."

I seem to recall reading that bananas can either constipate or promote bowel movements. It depends on how ripe the bananas are. Supposedly non-ripe bananas can be constipating, but ripe bananas do the opposite.

bananas are gross. when i could stomach them, they would've been making me constipated i guess

jimmylegs wrote: lower quality forms of mag such as mag oxide; good for laxative purposes, not so much for absorption into tissue. ideally, find some magnesium glycinate or similar

Hi,

It's incredible

Right after this message, I went to my pharmacy.
Funny story, the pharmacist told me exactly the same thing: "Mag Oxide is good for laxative purposes. If you aim for good absorbtion, you'd better switch to Mg Glycinate".

So I bought bisglycinate from Solgar, and only after 2 days: results are great.

Not only stiffness vanished, but globally, I feel much better.
I hope these results will last more than 2 days.

Jimmylegs, I owe you one...

awesome news!
ya it was a two day fix for things to start working for me originally too. amazing, right!?!

then i stopped to test things out, and all symptoms resurfaced. so, back on mag for good. now can coast thru on diet most days. i am feeling a bit of cramp atm which lets me know i need another one