Hey all,
I’m building my training back up and have had a couple of nights really poor sleep. I’m waking up at 3am and my legs are, for want of a better phrase, really ‘twitchy’, particularly in the quads. Done a couple of hard (for me anyway) rides and a 10k race this week.
I don’t usually get this, and i’m just wondering if anyone else ever gets it, or what you think might be causing it.
Cheers,
J.
Twitchy as in muscle spasms? Or as in restless, feeling the need to move the legs a lot? Might want to google “restless legs syndrome”. I have a very mild form of it, can be a little annoying sometimes.
Caffeine can be the culprit - at least it has produced similar symptoms for me if I have overdone it, esp. right before bedtime.
brother bonk
probably due to Ca++ ions being released causing depolarization of the sarcomere which can cause your leg muscles to twitch.
I might have missed a step, it’s been 10yrs since I have thought about depolarization of muscle fibers.
I don’t think it’s RLS. I very occasionally get it when I’m really tired and nodding off to sleep while trying to stay awake. This is just a twitchy restlessness in the quads.
Will read a bit more on RLS though. Thanks for the reference.
Nope, not caffeine, I hardly ever drink anything with caffeine in it.
Thanks Brian, that really helps 
What would cause the calcium ions to be released?
It’s not like this is a massively heavy week, I’ve certainly done more than this regularly in the past without this problem, but my quads are just a bit wierd right now. I think I’ll take a couple of days off and see what happens.
Cheers,
J.
I have had the same problem during a few weeks of very heavy training (for me, 15+ hours per week). Usually it is a sign of overtraining. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and lay awake tossing and turning for hours. And my legs would twitch.
Is a rest/recovery week a possibility? It might help things.
I don’t sleep well the night after really hard workouts or races either – don’t have the twitching, but just general discomfort. I think I fare slightly better if I’ve done an ice bath afterwards, but, now that the weather is cool that is the last thing I want when I walk in the door…
Perhaps it’s just a sign I need a break. Next week will be a rest week as I leave Borneo to move back to London, so there will be a few days of not having access to a bike or pool and I won’t want to run for long due to jetlag and the weather.
Thanks for the advice.
I have trouble sleeping if I’ve been doing a high mileage week too - usually by the end my legs are so sore that I can’t find a comfortable way to lay.
One word:
Lunesta
It’s the miracle recovery supplement. My wife has some, and I popped one the evening after a half IM. It usually takes me 2-3 nights before I sleep normally after a hard half IM. I woke up 9 hours later feeling like I had slept for a year. I have never felt so refreshed in all my life. Amazing stuff.
I used to twitch all the time in college. That was during the days of 60K-100K meters per week in the pool. If you are training hard enough then you will twitch. I need to get back to the days of twitching, then I will know I am ready to race. I had no problem sleeping, but I would just twitch the whole time and sleep right through it.
Oh man I used to twitch like that too swimming all those miles in college. When we would go to Florida on training trip for a week, we would all twitch so badly we’d wake each other up. I literally could jump off the bed!
Something good about all that though. In a sick, twisted sort of way.
I agree about twitching while swimming in college. My coaches always explained it as a lactic acid build up in the muscles trying to be released, since muscles have to move to get rid of lactic acid. They always said if I twitched, I was not warming down enough at the end of practice. So they could be right or maybe they just always wanted me to warm down more.