Basic Information
Muscle pain in the legs can create an overriding annoyance in your life that detracts from all your activities, physical or otherwise, and creates the worst possible outlook. Muscle pain, if it’s chronic, can color your attitude, and can cause you to have a negative outlook on life as you consistently feel the throbbing pain in your legs. Thus, leg pain can do more than just cause pain in and of itself. It may cause pain through emotional pain, time lost from work, crying and emotional anxiety, and bouts of restlessness.
Muscle pain in legs is sometimes called charley horse as a common moniker, for short. These are common in many people, and they may come and go without serious medical attention. Dehydration and hot weather can precipitate them.
Shin splints, phlebitis, intermittent claudication, and growing pains are more specific forms of leg pain. Shin splints are caused when the legs are overused in very high-impact activities, and they are cause unknown, according to the medical literature. Phlebitis is caused by an inflammation of the vein. Decreased blood flow that goes into the leg muscles through hardening of the arteries can also cause leg pain. Growing pains are common for children between the ages of 6 and 12, and these are nothing to worry about.
It’s critical to go to a doctor and get a battery of diagnostic tests done if you have leg pain because they can be caused by underlying conditions that are deadly if left untreated. All leg pain should be an indication to get a specialist to run tests if it’s chronic. Chronic leg pain can distract you from work or play, and it is no small condition when it occurs every day, day in and day out.
It’s best to avoid eccentric actions on your leg muscles. These are actions that you don’t normally do each day, and tey can be caused by sports, working out, construction, or heavy lifting. Normal training for a sporting event can precipitate it. Downhill running can also cause leg pain if you don’t engage in proper precautions. Uphill hiking can be devastating too. Just modulate yourself and don’t do activities that are out of tune with your normal pattern of activity.
Leg Muscle Pain Causes
While leg muscle pain commonly happens after an injury, leg pains can also occur because of non-traumatic reasons or certain medical conditions. Pain on the muscles of the leg can be caused by injury or inflammation of leg structures including joints, muscles, blood, vessel, nerves, ligaments, tendons, and skin. Inflammation of leg structures can be caused by pain in back knee or numbness of the leg.
Types of Lower Leg Muscle Pain
Muscle Cramps – Commonly called ‘charley horse’, muscle cramps causes sudden, tight, intense, and painful lower leg muscle pain. What causes muscle cramps are often dehydration, heat, and muscle fatigue. Muscle cramps commonly happen to older person and athletes who are not well conditioned. In most cases stopping muscle cramps is done by stopping its cause. Applying heat to the leg muscle pain can ease the pain caused by cramps. To athletes proper stretching, conditioning, and warm up exercise is needed.
Shin Splints – This kind of leg muscle pain is caused when the connective tissues and veins along the shin of the leg are inflamed. Inflammation of connective tissues commonly occurs after running or jumping on hard surfaces. Too much outward rotation motion of legs and flat feet could worsen the inflammation but the pain usually disappears after a person has rest. Applying cold compress and taking anti-inflammatory medicine could help lessen the pain of inflammation. Athlete’s usually wears supporters during running to prevent lower leg pains that they can harness from repetitive overload of force to the legs muscle.
Sprained ankle or knee and broken bone – The pain on the back knee could be caused by sprain or the bones of legs have been broken. For mild sprains it can be treated by elevation, ice compression, and rest. Severe leg pain for broken knee needed the treatment of physical therapy. Commonly broken knee are treated by putting cast or brace to support bones from obtaining another injury.
Musculoskeletal pain affects the leg muscles, bones, ligaments, nerves, and tendons. Musculoskeletal pain can be categorized widespread and local. Local musculoskeletal pain is a pain in only one part of the leg and widespread musculoskeletal pain could be a pain of the whole leg.
Pulled hamstring – Hamstring is the group of muscles on the entire leg. Hamstring is located on the lower side left side of knee, pulled of hamstring usually happens to athletes. Ice compress and therapy can lessen the pain of hamstring.
Deep vein thrombosis can also cause pain of muscles in lower leg vein thrombosis can also called blood clotting. Blood that clots on the veins of the leg most often occur if a person is overweight, in active for long time, active smoker, and taking medications. Symptoms of deep vein thrombosis are lower leg pains. To reduce the risk of having deep vein thrombosis a person should take time to become active. These lessen the risk of having lower leg muscle pain.
There are so many cures for lower leg pains that you can find. Whether mild muscle pain or severe muscle pain you can easily find cure. The most important thing to remember is to do things that could prevent lower leg muscle pain in order to reduce the risk of treatments necessary for leg pains.
