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Hello there. I've spent a very long time in life with the symptoms of RLS and I want to talk about things I've done over the last couple of years and how they relate [I think] to the issues I've been having.
Rewind to when I was in my teens, I used to ride my bicycle to school a lot. It was around 6km, so roughly 12-13km daily I would ride, for a few years. As a result of this, I had very muscular legs, and I had assumed from that quad and calf strength that this meant that my legs and core overall were very strong.
As the years went by into adulthood, I did many things in terms of jobs, and did very little in terms of exercise outside of the workplace. As most of us know, work tasks aren't always consistent with good form or practical exercise, so I think I developed a lot of bad habits, and poor muscular development in other areas.
A few years back I got pericarditis from exposure to raw cow's milk, and had a three-or-four day stay in the hospital, with about 24 hours in the ICU. Let's just say that pericarditis is kind of like the dull version of a heart attack, so not the most fun. The reason I want to talk about this is, that before I left the hospital, the nurses gave me a pair of bed stockings and instructed me to wear them to improve my circulation, just for safety's sake. Upon taking them home, I wore them to bed and found that my night's sleep was drastically improved: I didn't get that pinching sensation in the back of my legs to the effect of it waking me up several times throughout the night. The joy was shortlived though, as the body stockings started to lose their elasticity, and the RLS issues started to pick back up again. For the longest time I could not find a proper solution to this issue.
As an aside, I had really big problems with stress, anxiety and some traumatic events in my earlier life that I won't go into too much detail about. After having some friendships and relationships break down as a result of my anxiety problems, I embarked on a quest to find a solution to this problem. Now, the thing I'm going to talk about is a kind of bridge thing, but it helped immensely too.
I got into something called TRE. It's a series of short exercises designed to dissipate built up stress and tension in the body, through working two main muscle groups: a wallsit exercise for the quads, and a kind-of... pre-glute bridge position when you splay your knees out at roughly 45 degrees, then lift your hips an inch or two off the ground, tensioning the psoas muscle until you start to tremor. This was an almost immediate fix to some pretty deep-seated nervous system issues, and it's been one of the greatest things that I've ever experienced. I still do it to this day, and the results - while not as stark as they were the first time - every time you do these exercises, it's kind of a little more capacity to deal with the stresses of life and emotionally handle certain situations. It also made my RLS symptoms somewhat less difficult to deal with: I would wake up in the night at times with the sensations, but they were rarely as intense as they used to be.
This is all merely personal experience, and it's not intended to be medical advice. That said, I started looking at other groups of muscles that I could work in a way that was not unlike TRE's concept. One area of my fitness issues has been core muscles, particular gluteus maximus, glute medius, and basically all of the hip flexors, and I presume a lot of this had to do with my earlier years of bicycle riding where I didn't take appropriate amounts of time to strengthen other muscle groups so that there was some kind of balance to it all.
There's a yoga pose, called malasana: it's basically the kind of squat you'd do if you only had leaves out in the wilderness, if you follow. I'm unable to do this pose flat-footed, because my hip flexors are very weak in spots. I've been attempting this for some time, and doing glute bridges to activate my glute maximus muscles. Also been doing some one-leg wall squats, with a swiss ball, hip-dips on a step or a block, both to work the glute medius muscles. The first time I ever did either of these exercises, I was shocked to realise how incredibly poor in strength my glute medius muscles were. I was shaking whilst standing on one leg, I couldn't hold my balance, and I really struggled to do any kind of reps beyond about 2 or 3 without my muscles screaming at me to stop.
I'm kind of persistent with things, especially if they're a problem for me; I'm compelled to do something about it, and this was no exception. Over the last few months, I've spent a lot of my time doing glute medius stretches, attempting malasana, lots of hip flexor and glute work generally, and what I've found is that I don't have RLS symptoms anymore.
It might be a complete coincidence, but I really don't think it is. This was a nightly thing for me, and would sometimes even happen in the daytime if I was sedentary for a while. There would be times where my foot would pull inwards to my glute, and my knee would shoot upwards in the middle of the night, waking me up. My sleep was really poor, and I struggled with this - like I said - for 20 years.
I'm convinced that had I not done work on strengthening glute and hip flexor muscles, that the symptoms would still be here to this day. There's a huge relationship between peoples health issues and the strength and flexibility of their muscles. The fact that many muscles are innervated clearly shows that there's a deep relationship between the nervous system functions and your muscles.
These health issues that people have, I'm sure from my experiences, can be improved in terms of physical, emotional, mental health issues. The mere fact that we distinguish these issues, that are all inter-related, boggles my mind. I recommend personally, that if you have RLS symptoms, that you do a little bit of research into exercises that can spot issues in your muscles - particularly your core muscles of your glutes and hip flexors - and see if you have any muscular issues that you could work on, that might offer you some assistance. If you get any relief over the course of a few weeks, or a couple of months from doing these kinds of exercises, then you'll realise what you can do to start to fix it.
Again, not medical advice, not guaranteeing anything, but I've been doing this sort of stuff for the last year or so, and I've never slept better.
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