Don't worry. After a few short years of constant swim training, the calf cramps and toe cramps might almost go away. That is, until you start doing flip turns. Then you will be pushing off the wall harder, and the cramps may come back. Isn't swimming great?

I only get it when I push off the wall hard in cooler water. The worst I've had recently was after a long workout I jumped hard out of the water onto the edge, both calves locked up and I had to hobble to the far end of the pool to put the pull buoy back and back again to get in the hot tub. Every time I'd even think of standing up they'd both lock up. Good times, makes me really excited to jump in a cold pull in the middle of the winter.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

I always got them if I ride before I swim.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Bozo - as the other posters alude, lots of us get these including me. While there's no easy solution, salt pills, hydration between laps, stretching, caffeine, etc. they do seem to be more of an early season/early training phenomenon. All I can say is to keep on training and in the experience of many, they will improve significantly but, sadly, they may not go away. Be comforted by the fact that you have lots of company.

John

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John H. Post, III, MD
Orthopedic Surgeon
Charlottesville, VA

I've been getting them lately. Never used to happen before. Went to the chiropractor today. Said my hips were off and my right leg was 3/4" shorter than the left which was most likely causing the problem. A couple of cracks and twists and I was straightened out. I'll see how it works next week at the pool.

 
Well, thank you, I guess, for the answers so far :-).
I am not sure whether I should be happy(/ier) now after hearing this.

I guess I was hoping for more soothing responses like "20 more swims and all will be good".

So my takeaway is: It will get better, over time, with patience, but will probably never go away.

Let's see what happens.

No joke, this used to happen to me all of the time until I started drinking more water during the day. That and increased ankle flexibility as I worked on form and I have avoided calf cramps since. So quick answer is maybe try keeping hydrated and see where that gets you while you add miles and technique. Best of luck.

This has happened to me after almost every swim workout over the last 2 yrs, but it's usually just one calf or the other as i tend to push off the bottom to jump out of the pool with just one leg. Sometimes i have lie down on the pool deck and relax the calf and then it goes away very quickly. My sense of this is that it happens mainly after longer/harder workouts. In 2013 and '14, I did the U.S. Masters Swimming "Go The Distance" challenge where the goal is to swim 1500 miles (2,640,000 yd) in one calendar year. It was the relentless week after week of 50-60,000 yd/wk that caused me to have the cramps after almost every swim. This year i've sworn off the bottle and am taking a 4-month break from the swim. In sum, i think it is swim fatigue that causes the cramps:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

In my experience they are worse if I run before I swim. I've had some luck working on ankle flexibility and stretching my calves.
Recently I've had some luck doing kicking drills with the biggest fins I can find and kicking on my back - both dolphin and flutter. This allows my ankle to flex more slowly in both directions. When I kick on my stomach my toes are pointed and don't flex as much. Since instituting this practice I can now kick without fins on my stomach without as many cramps.

3/4" ? Wow! Do you walk with a hitch? (pink)

There's one more thing. It works for me but it's a little witchcraft. Quinine is recommended in neurologic disease and it helps here in some athletes. Get tonic water from the supermarket, make sure it has quinine in it. Drink some the night before your a.m. swim work out and again in the morning after you brush your teeth. See if it doesn't help out. Let us know.

John

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John H. Post, III, MD
Orthopedic Surgeon
Charlottesville, VA

I can tell you, they are manageable with some effort.

I cramped in two Olympic tris, a HIM (forced a DNF), an IM, and just about any time I swam longer than 1500 yards.

To overcome, I did lots of focus on keeping my legs relaxed and was sure to flutter every so often to keep the blood moving. I also did kick sets with fins in training and upped my overall swim volume. During OWS, I would occasionally pull each knee toward my chest, again, just to keep things from locking up. Did lots of OWS and ultimately finished the IM cramp-free.

I knew my nutrition and hydration were good so, for me, it was just learning to keep my legs out of the death grip. If you flex any muscle for an hour, it's going to revolt.

Good luck. It'll resolve itself with the effort.

P.S. - While I write this as if I figured it all out, my coach was instrumental in getting the training right and working me through this.

Pickles!
I was having the same issues. I was hydrating, eating bananas, added magnesium and still would cramp hard at the end of my sets. Read and heard about pickle juice so I tried a eating a couple pickles with lunch on swim days. Knock on wood ... I haven't cramped since and I'm swimming harder and longer every week.

Muscles generally cramp when they are used too much and/or held under unnecessary tension for too long without adequate training. Cramps can be exacerbated or improved with hydration, electrolytes and maybe even chiros and quinnine.

Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the 2nd sentence and ignore the 1st. For swimming calf cramps especially, many, many adult onset swimmers simply can't relax enough in the water. The lower legs are a very common area to hold under tension, as most of us simply have a terrible kick and bad ankle flexibilty. We try so hard to do the right things down there that we don't realize how much tension we are holding in our calves. Trying to point the feet is a big cause of this. Fins can helpwithout by straightening the ankle without the need to muscle it straight. They can also make them worse by simply requiring more muscles to kick with fins.

Keep swimming and try to relax. Your awareness in general and especially in the pool is like a bubble. You can mentally place it where you want and it gets bigger and clearer very quickly when you start to use it. The more you try to be aware of things in the pool, the better you get at being more aware of more things all the time. Awareness of what you are doing with your calves is the key to your problem. Probably not salt tabs.

My Dad's response to me when I had this issue was to drink pickle juice. He actually carries a vial of the stuff with him in marathons. To each his own. My first run-ins with cramping were in large volume (for me) stuff building for my first IM. One of the probably useful things I did was swim through the cramping and it subsided. I figured learning to not freak out could be handy if it should happen in a race.

Recently I've had a hard Wed night run, Thur morning cycle with transition run, Thur eve swim with severe cramping in the swims. I left one practice, headed straight to McDonalds, and inhaled an order of fries like some kind of salt addict. I'm sure I'm not getting enough fluids in me. My salt tabs helped when I remembered to take them ahead of time. Good luck getting through it.

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To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive.

Drink till you pee clear, eat a banana before you swim and get used to the pain until they go away. You'll eventually stop cramping.

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'The best pace is suicide pace and today is a good day to die.'

For me, an adult-onset slow swimmer (by ST standards) - the more kick drills I do the fewer calf cramps I get during "normal" swimming. I still try to get in 400Y or so of kicking in per swim workout. The benefit of additional ankle flexibility seems to help with swim speed too.

This is the worst advice ever.

Many runners-turned-swimmers cramp for reasons that have nothing to do with nutrition/hydration. That's a fact. In addition, these calf cramps can be so intense, there is no way to "get used" to the pain. The cramp locks your ankle, your legs sink, and now you are in open water, in extreme pain, with zero ability to swim. This is not speculation. This is experience.

Yes, pay attention to your hydration, but also learn to swim relaxed. Also, up your kick set volume and overall swim volume.

You just started increasing your distance and/or time spent in the pool, right?

You can:
Take lava salts and push off a little softer and in 2 or 3 weeks the cramps will cease as you get used to pointing your toes more
Eat bananas until you pee yellow and push off softer and in 2 or 3 weeks the cramps will cease as you get used to pointing your toes more
Do Buddhist fertility dances prior to swimming and push off softer and in 2 or 3 weeks the cramps will cease as you get used to pointing your toes more
Take a sip of HEED every lap and push off softer and in 2 or 3 weeks the cramps will cease as you get used to pointing your toes more.

Are you sensing a common theme here?

The theme is you have no real experience dealing with cramping from swimming. The cramp as you push off the wall is the outcome of poor ankle postion. The push-off triggers the cramp, but it's going to happen anyway.

This type of cramp has nothing to do with pointing toes. It's actually quite the opposite. Many runners who switch to swimming actually point their toes downward, not toward the trailing wall. Try this. Stand with your feet shoulder-length wide. Now keep your heel on the groung but pull your toes upward to the sky, hold it, and every so often flex your calf. Hold that postion for 90 minutes. That is the tension newby swimmers-from-running are putting on their calf and shin.

It's not until you learn to relax the ankle and let it flop that you will overcome the cramps. If you haven't followed this thread, I DNF'd a HIM because of cramping, struggled through an IM and missed the cut at 2:22 because of cramping, cramped in many OWS practice swims, and frequently cramped in the pool.

While I was struggling through this everyone and their brother told me about pickle juice, and bananas, and magnesium, and...

I tried not pushing off the wall. I tried wearing compression sleeves to keep the muscle warm. I tried not kicking at all. I tried kicking like a mental patient.

It wasn't until I learned to keep the tension off my calf (by not letting it lock in the downward position) that I was able to finish the IM.

It's pretty much a runners problem.

When you're running you stretch the calf but swimming shortens it.
We have a track session then an hour later a 90min swim set with some drills (with fins) it's cramp city.

I cramped so hard my calf ached for days :/

pickle juice is meant to help, but like everyone else says - just deal with it; it may go...it may stay

As a lifetime swimmer I was amazed when I had a severe cramp in my first IM distance race. Stopped dead in the water, my wetsuit had calf zippers, (long time ago) so I unzipped those, flapped and waggled everything, fortunately you can't drown in a wetsuit, so eventually the cramp went and I finished.

Cramps in practice, usually you can walk off or switch strokes (breaststroke helps me). Nearly always comes when you start using a muscle that has not been used too much that way before.

You are new to distance swimming, but I would also guess you were never a club swimmer, where you would have learned to deal with cramping or developed your swimming so that you did not cramp.

There are anecdotal remedies, Calcium, Zinc, Magnesium, bananas, pickle juice.
There are a few physical remedies, lots of kick sets which condition the muscle and maybe give a little better blood flow.
You could also do the flexibility exercises (like sitting on your heels).

There is also a chance that after a few weeks they will go away, once your body is conditioned and you get better blood flow all around for the swim muscles. Cramps that come from the push on a turn are also from conditioning and you can try pushing harder with one leg on alternate turns and kicking a little more as you swim a length. There are no turns in OWS, but a little bit of a kick every so often can save you from cramping. Even an avowed non kicker like me, still kicks.

I have also found that what you do before your swim can have an affect. Running or riding before a swimset can be hard on the calves. I used to get terrible cramps if I ran after a swim (took a few before it dawned on me), but not on the bike. Apart from warming up, I never do one of the other two (run bike) before swimming.

Have a great race, welcome to the sport.

I had the same issue until I started to make 20% of my swim workouts kicking. It was and still is hard, but the cramps have gone away and I am swimming faster than I ever have. I think it took roughly 1 month before the cramping stopped.