As a teenager, I babysat for a little girl who regularly snuck into the kitchen, used all of her might to pry open the refrigerator door, and took a few big chugs of juice from the pickle jar before scampering back to the playroom to get back to her Barbies or Etch-a-Sketch or whatever pre-Zhu Zhu Pet toy was popular in the mid-90s.
I caught her doing it a few times and asked her mother if it was OK for the 3-year old to casting aside a sippy cup of whole milk for pickle juice. She said it explained why the pickle jar lid always seemed to be loose and her little girl had funky breath.
Back then, I thought it was a funny quirk of a preschooler. But if that little girl happened to grow up to be an athlete of any kind and happened to keep on taking swigs of pickle juice, it turns out that she could actually be doing something good for her body.
That's right. Oddly, ingesting pickle juice might just be the key to curing muscle cramps, and now there's science behind it.
A new study out of Brigham Young University examined how pickle juice impacts exercise-induced muscle cramps. The fascinating thing is that this research was based an unverified theory that some element of pickle juice might combat cramps better than water, bananas, or electrolyte-replacement drinks. According to the New York Times, t's also part of a bigger, elusive question for scientists about what causes cramps in active people and why the problem is so pervasive.
"Exercise-induced muscle cramps are one of the continuing mysteries of physiology," Gretchen Reynolds of the NYT's Well Blog writes.
Although scientists apparently disagree on why exercisers experience cramps and how to counteract them, athletic trainers began to buzz about the success they were seeing with a pickle juice remedy. This led to surveys of trainers about how regularly they are giving it to cramped-up clients and what results they've noted, but the Brigham Young study is said to be the first lab investigation into it.
Their study is small and narrow. Only ten healthy male college students participated. However, the findings are pretty interesting. After exercising to the point that is considered to be mild dehydration, the toes of each participant were electrically stimulated. This induced a cramp that the researchers measured while participants were told to relax and ride out the mild discomfort it brought on.
After some rest, a second cramp was induced. In this round, participants immediately drank a few ounces of deionized water or pickle juice (I just love that it is noted that the pickle juice was strained directly from a Vlasic jar).
Here's what they found: The unattended cramps lasted 2-1/2 minutes on average. Cramps treated by drinking water went on for nearly as long. But pickle juice cramps were blocked 45% faster.
The researchers admit that it's highly challenging to recreate a full exercise-induced cramp in a lab and that their results are "speculative" considering they were not dealing with more painful large-muscle groups in this study. However, they do recommend that people who are active try to avoid cramps by training properly and slowly so muscles are less likely to get so fatigued. They also say that, when a cramp does strike, stretching the muscles seems to make a difference.
They also say their pickle juice findings may be applicable to more than their small group of participants.
Would you try a swig of the briny green water to ease the pain and get you back to your workout quicker? Or will you wait for more research to back up pickle juice's benefits before you put aside your bananas and water bottle?
[photo credit: Getty Images]
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Why pickle juice might be the key to a less painful workout
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