May 13, 2020 • 11 mins
You know those terrible leg cramps that come out of nowhere? They may be named after a drunken baseball pitcher.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
It's just the two of us. But we're here with
a horse named Charlie a k A crippling temporary leg cramp.
You know what I immediately think of when I think
like cramps? Now right? Remember round up? That's right. You
(00:25):
totally got one of these, didn't you? Like whow we
were recording? Yeah, it's on video everyone. If you want
to go look up one of our internet roundups. I
wish I could remember which one. Maybe I'll should you
should suffer through all of them to try and find it,
but I gotta just out of nowhere, like cramping. It
was so funny that we were like, all right, we
should just leave that in there. We have to keep it.
(00:45):
I think I demanded that we keep it, and that
was just just so great. Yeah, which is weird. I
don't cramp up like that much, so it was very
much out of nowhere. Um, I don't know what happened. Well, Chuck,
you could have been over age fifty at the time. No,
you might have been hydrated maybe, but I drink a
lot of water. Perhaps you've been sitting too long without moving.
(01:08):
There's always a chance of that, or standing too long
on a hard surface, probably not a chance of that.
Or you could have been sleeping in your brain may
have misdirected your leg to move, confusing your leg resulting
in a cramp. So those are some risk factors for
getting a Charlie horse. But before we explain what a
(01:28):
Charlie horse says, we should talk about the origin of
the word. Do you did you read about this? Yeah,
it's a word that is very much American. You won't
hear that word in England apparently. And there are a
couple of different stories that I saw, maybe more than
that even but in the late eighteen hundreds in baseball,
one story said that there was a lame horse named
(01:50):
Charlie and it said it pulled the roller at the
Chicago White Sox ballpark. I'm not sure what that means. Um,
probably whatever flattened out the dirt. Maybe that's what That's
what I was thinking. That's all I can come up with.
There may be the thing that the hot dog spin
on as they're cooking. I'm not sure what's the other story.
The other one is that Charlie Radborn who was a
(02:13):
picture you mean old hoss, Old Hoss was another name
of his knee. I looked him up. He's the greatest
picture of all time based on the r A. Yeah. Um,
he was also a terrible person, Um, Lobster Boy asked,
From what I can tell, Uh, no murder involved, I
don't think. But he apparently got a Charlie horse in
(02:34):
a baseball game in the in the middle of a
baseball game. He played for Providence in Boston mostly um,
and it's possible that it was named after him in
that significant event. Yeah, what I've always heard of Charlie
horse was, or how I've always used it, was not
just a leg cramp, but it was when you got
punched in the thigh or something, or or nie somebody
(02:56):
in the thigh and you would give someone a Charlie Horse,
and you had to say Charlie horse, as if they
didn't know what was happening. Don't freak out, you're not
imagining things. I just gave you a Charlie horse. And
this is called having the wind knocked out of you.
So the yeah, but it does seem to um. It
(03:18):
can come from that from a sudden blow to a
leg muscle, and usually it's your thigh muscle. Your calf
muscle or your hamstring is where you get a Charlie horse.
But as you also know, I didn't touch you that
time you got one for Internet round up. It just
came out of the blue. So Charlie horses. It's different
from like a leg cramps, say, like your muscles cramping
(03:39):
up from overuse on a long run. That's probably just
from dehydration or a loss of electro lights from sweating
too much. Charlie horse is kind of leg cramp, but
it's a little more specialized in that it's like a
not that just suddenly comes out of nowhere and affects
one of those areas and your legs. And what's interesting
to me is that medical science is like, no, I
(04:01):
don't know. Here's some best guesses, but we're not sure.
Have you what did you used to do? The thing
called frogging someone? Yeah, that's it's essentially the same things
that your knuckles on your fingers are a certain held
a certain way when you punch them right. Totally, it's
a knuckle punch. And I always was um frogged. I
didn't do much frogging because I was a nice guy,
(04:23):
but uh, someone would stick out their center knuckle and
do sort of a swiping punch across the arm, not
like a straight punch, and the knuckle would hit it
and cause the same sort of sensation like a little
not in a bump would form. Yeah. I was never
very good at that either. But some kids had like
almost a preternatural sense of like a muscular pressure point,
(04:45):
you know. Yeah, I have a feeling you were a
champion pencil breaker though, No, I don't remember pencil breaking.
What was that? Oh, you guys didn't do that? I mean, yeah,
like some somebody would hold two winds the farthest ends
of the pencil and somebody you just karate chop it. Well,
you would use another pencil and you would just take
(05:06):
turns until the pencil broke. But there are all sorts
of various techniques, you know, for maximum breakage. I'd forgotten
all about that. When I think pencils in school, Chuck,
I think, did you guys have the smelly pencils like
caramel corn? Yeah? Yeah, that's what I think. That This
tastes to great. Were you good at pencil breaking? I
wasn't very good. You know. There was always the one
(05:28):
bugs mini you could do it in one fatal blow.
Is that another Encyclopedia Brown reference? I think, so maybe
we should take a break. Yeah, then we can go
solve an Encyclopedia Brown crime and then come back and
talk more about Charlie horses. All right, Well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn
(05:50):
a thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck. It's stuff
you should know, all right, Okay, So Charlie horse, leg cramp,
(06:13):
sudden spasm, sudden muscle. Medical science is baffled. Go yeah,
so you can get a Charlie horse at night when
you're sleeping. It's called a nocturnal leg cramp, and just
like a daytime when it can go away very quickly,
or it can be a few minutes. I can't imagine,
like the one I had an Internet round up was
such a tight, violent thing. I can't imagine that going
(06:36):
on for several minutes because it lasted maybebe thirty seconds,
probably the longest thirty seconds of your life. Full minutes
of that would just be hell. Yeah. And this is
not the same thing as restless leg syndrome that also
happens at night, but that is when you sort of
have the Jimmy legs and you have the urge to move. UM.
(06:58):
But in I think both cases they don't know exactly
what's going on. No, they don't. UM. But and you
can actually solve both cases if you get Charlie horses
at night while you're sleeping and they wake you up,
or if you have restless leg syndrome the Jimmy legs, um,
you can solve both by doing stretches before bed. Um.
And sometimes I get restless leg syndrome. I don't I
(07:19):
don't know if I have it to a clinical degree
or whatever, but like, especially when I first lay down
to go to bed, sometimes I can't sleep because my
legs are just bugging me. And get up and do
this hamstring stretch and it works like a charm, Like
I'll be asleep in thirty seconds afterward. You know, they
say stretching is just sort of one of the keys
to life. Like if you start in your twenties and
(07:41):
thirties just stretching a really great uh every morning and
every night, then your body is going to be the
better for it. Do you remember we did an entire
episode on Sarcopania that's stoop that you get from old age,
did we? We totally did. And I think that that's
a really good way to combat sarcopenias, to to be
limber and stretch your back muscles too. Yeah, it's all
(08:02):
about keeping those muscles lumber. YEA, let's do it, chuck.
Let's let's commit to stretching at least five nights a week. Okay, okay,
so uh the other thing you have virtual Pinkie swear.
The other thing you can do, like you mentioned, is
plenty of fluids if you're exercising, especially because your muscles
(08:23):
need those fluids to relax and contract like they should.
And you just gotta you know, if you're going out
there and running or even doing a good exercise walk
and you're not stretching beforehand, and what are you doing.
You're a chump. You're a sucker. You're just a stump.
You know you're a chump. You're a chucker. Oh, speaking
of Charlie, I called you Charlie on an email I
(08:45):
think yesterday. I noticed that my head just ripped into afterward.
It just blew my mind. Why you're not a Charlie.
You're a chuck. But the idea that it's almost like
you turned into went with Paltrow and sliding doors all
of a sudden, like you very easily could have gone
(09:06):
the life of a Charlie, but you went the life
of a Chuck. And I guarantee you your life would
be different in noticeable ways had you been a Charlie.
Will you call me Charles sometimes though totally different from Charlie,
agreed Charlie. And in New Jersey I went by Charles.
(09:27):
Oh did you have a little pencil than mustache? Too?
You were nothing but turtlenecks, Charlie horses. I think we're done. Oh,
I know there is one more thing right about the
old eat a balanced diet thing, which they literally say
for every single condition known to humanity. In this case,
it's really true. If you eat a balanced diet, you're
(09:49):
gonna get some good calcium and potassium, magnesium, and that's
really going to help how your muscles operate. Those minerals
are super important to your muscles. Yeah, especially I think
read sodium and potassium have like a twenty three to
one ratio for your intake. Is what you're going for
on a daily basis, which is harder to do than
you would think. But they as I think, sodium goes
(10:13):
in potassium comes out and vice versa. And when they're
doing that, they actually produce this battery, this electrical charge
across your cell that helps conduct electricity throughout your muscles.
So yeah, you want to have these minerals and like
good amounts, and you also want to have water because
water is like the thing that everything, all of these
(10:35):
magnificent metabolic processes take place in. So if you're dehydrated
and you lose a bunch of electro lights or your
electro lights are out of proportion, you're much more susceptible
the muscle cramps of all varieties. So yeah, eat a
banana or I saw an avocado is a really good
balance of potassium and sodium too. We had a lot
(10:56):
of avocado in our house. Same here you be found
five for nine cent avocados yesterday. I was like, yeah,
she's like they must have been about to rot or
something like that, and I checked and they were all
like pre ripen. They're like on their way to being ripe.
They're not rotted at all. She got them from h
(11:17):
Mart and I just couldn't believe it. You're like, she
got it at covid r Us. So I think you're fine. No,
I'm worried. I hadn't thought about that part. No, I
don't think that's the case. COVID are us great? Are
you got anything else about Charlie horses? Sir? Are you
having one right now? I'm not. Well. That's good. Then.
That means everybody that short stuff is out. Stuff you
(11:43):
should know is production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works
for more podcasts for my Heart Radio is at the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
It's just the two of us. But we're here with
a horse named Charlie a k A crippling temporary leg cramp.
You know what I immediately think of when I think
like cramps? Now right? Remember round up? That's right. You
(00:25):
totally got one of these, didn't you? Like whow we
were recording? Yeah, it's on video everyone. If you want
to go look up one of our internet roundups. I
wish I could remember which one. Maybe I'll should you
should suffer through all of them to try and find it,
but I gotta just out of nowhere, like cramping. It
was so funny that we were like, all right, we
should just leave that in there. We have to keep it.
(00:45):
I think I demanded that we keep it, and that
was just just so great. Yeah, which is weird. I
don't cramp up like that much, so it was very
much out of nowhere. Um, I don't know what happened. Well, Chuck,
you could have been over age fifty at the time. No,
you might have been hydrated maybe, but I drink a
lot of water. Perhaps you've been sitting too long without moving.
(01:08):
There's always a chance of that, or standing too long
on a hard surface, probably not a chance of that.
Or you could have been sleeping in your brain may
have misdirected your leg to move, confusing your leg resulting
in a cramp. So those are some risk factors for
getting a Charlie horse. But before we explain what a
(01:28):
Charlie horse says, we should talk about the origin of
the word. Do you did you read about this? Yeah,
it's a word that is very much American. You won't
hear that word in England apparently. And there are a
couple of different stories that I saw, maybe more than
that even but in the late eighteen hundreds in baseball,
one story said that there was a lame horse named
(01:50):
Charlie and it said it pulled the roller at the
Chicago White Sox ballpark. I'm not sure what that means. Um,
probably whatever flattened out the dirt. Maybe that's what That's
what I was thinking. That's all I can come up with.
There may be the thing that the hot dog spin
on as they're cooking. I'm not sure what's the other story.
The other one is that Charlie Radborn who was a
(02:13):
picture you mean old hoss, Old Hoss was another name
of his knee. I looked him up. He's the greatest
picture of all time based on the r A. Yeah. Um,
he was also a terrible person, Um, Lobster Boy asked,
From what I can tell, Uh, no murder involved, I
don't think. But he apparently got a Charlie horse in
(02:34):
a baseball game in the in the middle of a
baseball game. He played for Providence in Boston mostly um,
and it's possible that it was named after him in
that significant event. Yeah, what I've always heard of Charlie
horse was, or how I've always used it, was not
just a leg cramp, but it was when you got
punched in the thigh or something, or or nie somebody
(02:56):
in the thigh and you would give someone a Charlie Horse,
and you had to say Charlie horse, as if they
didn't know what was happening. Don't freak out, you're not
imagining things. I just gave you a Charlie horse. And
this is called having the wind knocked out of you.
So the yeah, but it does seem to um. It
(03:18):
can come from that from a sudden blow to a
leg muscle, and usually it's your thigh muscle. Your calf
muscle or your hamstring is where you get a Charlie horse.
But as you also know, I didn't touch you that
time you got one for Internet round up. It just
came out of the blue. So Charlie horses. It's different
from like a leg cramps, say, like your muscles cramping
(03:39):
up from overuse on a long run. That's probably just
from dehydration or a loss of electro lights from sweating
too much. Charlie horse is kind of leg cramp, but
it's a little more specialized in that it's like a
not that just suddenly comes out of nowhere and affects
one of those areas and your legs. And what's interesting
to me is that medical science is like, no, I
(04:01):
don't know. Here's some best guesses, but we're not sure.
Have you what did you used to do? The thing
called frogging someone? Yeah, that's it's essentially the same things
that your knuckles on your fingers are a certain held
a certain way when you punch them right. Totally, it's
a knuckle punch. And I always was um frogged. I
didn't do much frogging because I was a nice guy,
(04:23):
but uh, someone would stick out their center knuckle and
do sort of a swiping punch across the arm, not
like a straight punch, and the knuckle would hit it
and cause the same sort of sensation like a little
not in a bump would form. Yeah. I was never
very good at that either. But some kids had like
almost a preternatural sense of like a muscular pressure point,
(04:45):
you know. Yeah, I have a feeling you were a
champion pencil breaker though, No, I don't remember pencil breaking.
What was that? Oh, you guys didn't do that? I mean, yeah,
like some somebody would hold two winds the farthest ends
of the pencil and somebody you just karate chop it. Well,
you would use another pencil and you would just take
(05:06):
turns until the pencil broke. But there are all sorts
of various techniques, you know, for maximum breakage. I'd forgotten
all about that. When I think pencils in school, Chuck,
I think, did you guys have the smelly pencils like
caramel corn? Yeah? Yeah, that's what I think. That This
tastes to great. Were you good at pencil breaking? I
wasn't very good. You know. There was always the one
(05:28):
bugs mini you could do it in one fatal blow.
Is that another Encyclopedia Brown reference? I think, so maybe
we should take a break. Yeah, then we can go
solve an Encyclopedia Brown crime and then come back and
talk more about Charlie horses. All right, Well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn
(05:50):
a thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck. It's stuff
you should know, all right, Okay, So Charlie horse, leg cramp,
(06:13):
sudden spasm, sudden muscle. Medical science is baffled. Go yeah,
so you can get a Charlie horse at night when
you're sleeping. It's called a nocturnal leg cramp, and just
like a daytime when it can go away very quickly,
or it can be a few minutes. I can't imagine,
like the one I had an Internet round up was
such a tight, violent thing. I can't imagine that going
(06:36):
on for several minutes because it lasted maybebe thirty seconds,
probably the longest thirty seconds of your life. Full minutes
of that would just be hell. Yeah. And this is
not the same thing as restless leg syndrome that also
happens at night, but that is when you sort of
have the Jimmy legs and you have the urge to move. UM.
(06:58):
But in I think both cases they don't know exactly
what's going on. No, they don't. UM. But and you
can actually solve both cases if you get Charlie horses
at night while you're sleeping and they wake you up,
or if you have restless leg syndrome the Jimmy legs, um,
you can solve both by doing stretches before bed. Um.
And sometimes I get restless leg syndrome. I don't I
(07:19):
don't know if I have it to a clinical degree
or whatever, but like, especially when I first lay down
to go to bed, sometimes I can't sleep because my
legs are just bugging me. And get up and do
this hamstring stretch and it works like a charm, Like
I'll be asleep in thirty seconds afterward. You know, they
say stretching is just sort of one of the keys
to life. Like if you start in your twenties and
(07:41):
thirties just stretching a really great uh every morning and
every night, then your body is going to be the
better for it. Do you remember we did an entire
episode on Sarcopania that's stoop that you get from old age,
did we? We totally did. And I think that that's
a really good way to combat sarcopenias, to to be
limber and stretch your back muscles too. Yeah, it's all
(08:02):
about keeping those muscles lumber. YEA, let's do it, chuck.
Let's let's commit to stretching at least five nights a week. Okay, okay,
so uh the other thing you have virtual Pinkie swear.
The other thing you can do, like you mentioned, is
plenty of fluids if you're exercising, especially because your muscles
(08:23):
need those fluids to relax and contract like they should.
And you just gotta you know, if you're going out
there and running or even doing a good exercise walk
and you're not stretching beforehand, and what are you doing.
You're a chump. You're a sucker. You're just a stump.
You know you're a chump. You're a chucker. Oh, speaking
of Charlie, I called you Charlie on an email I
(08:45):
think yesterday. I noticed that my head just ripped into afterward.
It just blew my mind. Why you're not a Charlie.
You're a chuck. But the idea that it's almost like
you turned into went with Paltrow and sliding doors all
of a sudden, like you very easily could have gone
(09:06):
the life of a Charlie, but you went the life
of a Chuck. And I guarantee you your life would
be different in noticeable ways had you been a Charlie.
Will you call me Charles sometimes though totally different from Charlie,
agreed Charlie. And in New Jersey I went by Charles.
(09:27):
Oh did you have a little pencil than mustache? Too?
You were nothing but turtlenecks, Charlie horses. I think we're done. Oh,
I know there is one more thing right about the
old eat a balanced diet thing, which they literally say
for every single condition known to humanity. In this case,
it's really true. If you eat a balanced diet, you're
(09:49):
gonna get some good calcium and potassium, magnesium, and that's
really going to help how your muscles operate. Those minerals
are super important to your muscles. Yeah, especially I think
read sodium and potassium have like a twenty three to
one ratio for your intake. Is what you're going for
on a daily basis, which is harder to do than
you would think. But they as I think, sodium goes
(10:13):
in potassium comes out and vice versa. And when they're
doing that, they actually produce this battery, this electrical charge
across your cell that helps conduct electricity throughout your muscles.
So yeah, you want to have these minerals and like
good amounts, and you also want to have water because
water is like the thing that everything, all of these
(10:35):
magnificent metabolic processes take place in. So if you're dehydrated
and you lose a bunch of electro lights or your
electro lights are out of proportion, you're much more susceptible
the muscle cramps of all varieties. So yeah, eat a
banana or I saw an avocado is a really good
balance of potassium and sodium too. We had a lot
(10:56):
of avocado in our house. Same here you be found
five for nine cent avocados yesterday. I was like, yeah,
she's like they must have been about to rot or
something like that, and I checked and they were all
like pre ripen. They're like on their way to being ripe.
They're not rotted at all. She got them from h
(11:17):
Mart and I just couldn't believe it. You're like, she
got it at covid r Us. So I think you're fine. No,
I'm worried. I hadn't thought about that part. No, I
don't think that's the case. COVID are us great? Are
you got anything else about Charlie horses? Sir? Are you
having one right now? I'm not. Well. That's good. Then.
That means everybody that short stuff is out. Stuff you
(11:43):
should know is production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works
for more podcasts for my Heart Radio is at the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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