Abstract
Muscle cramps are involuntary, often painful, skeletal muscle contractions that can occur for multiple reasons including physical exertion, injury, dehydration, nutritional deficiencies, or other neuromuscular conditions. Understanding muscle cramping etiology and treatments is difficult due to their often unpredictable timing and conditions that need to be met for many individuals to experience them. Previous studies have induced muscle cramping through electrical stimulation, long duration exercise, dehydration, and other methods, but these techniques are either non-physiological or complex and time attentive. PURPOSE: Therefore, we aimed to develop a new method to produce a muscle cramp in the biceps brachii in a laboratory setting without requiring participants to be electrically stimulated, exercised to fatigue, nor dehydrated METHODS: 24 healthy participants (17 males, 7 females) with no history of severe arm injury and a mean(SD) age, height, and weight of 21.5(5.14)yrs, 1.80(0.12)m, and 78.79(14.41)kg respectively reported to the laboratory. Each participant attempted to produce a cramp by performing a unilateral maximal volitional isometric contraction (MVIC) of the biceps brachii at ~30-45° elbow flexion while performing a wrist supination. If no cramp occurred, the procedure was repeated two more times. This was repeated on the contralateral arm. Participants reported the onset of a cramp and involuntary muscle activity was confirmed via electromyograph (EMG). RESULTS: 58.82% of male participants were able to produce a muscle cramp in their biceps brachii with 60% of them cramping bilaterally. Only 14.60% of female participants were able to produce a cramp. In total, only 45.83% of participants were able to produce a cramp. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that this method might be a promising technique to induce skeletal muscle cramps of the biceps brachii. Modification of body positioning and understanding demographic factors that influence cramp development might increase the proportion of individuals who can induce the cramp. Since the biceps brachii is an easily accessible superficial muscle for EMG and functional analysis, this could be a strong method to study factors affecting muscle cramping
Recommended Citation
Krajca, Elizabeth C.; Greengold, Benjamin; and Merritt, Edward
(2026)
"A Novel Method for Producing Muscle Cramps Without Electrical Stimulation,"
International Journal of Exercise Science: Conference Proceedings: Vol. 2:
Iss.
18, Article 254.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/ijesab/vol2/iss18/254