Education for runners and endurance athletes. Learn to train smart, run fast, and be strong.
These articles are free.
Please help keep them alive by buying me a beer:
Buy me a beer.
This article is part of a series:
→ Part 1 — What causes cramps?
→ Part 2 — How to prevent & treat cramps.
→ Part 1 — What causes cramps?
→ Part 2 — How to prevent & treat cramps.
Muscle cramps. Part 1 of 2:
What causes exercise-associated muscle cramps during training and racing?
Stop immediately blaming it on dehydration and a lack of salt.
Thomas Solomon PhD.
11th Dec 2021.
In my Alpine neck of the woods, tis that traditionally jolly time of year when Krampus comes to town to scare the naughty kids. But, in modern times, Krampus also haunts the festive races and takes down any ill-prepared athletes in his way. In this first instalment of a two-part series, I will visit the phenomenon of sudden involuntary muscle contractions — exercise-associated muscle cramps — aka a runner’s nightmare.
Reading time ~12-mins.
Or listen to the Podcast version.
Or listen to the Podcast version.
Some folks get cramps when they sleep. Some folks get cramps during pregnancy. Some folks have cramps associated with liver disease and dialysis. Some folks suffer from cramps associated with neurological movement disorders (dystonia). And, some folks — athletes — get muscle cramps during sessions and races. Exercise-associated muscle cramps are sudden, involuntary, and often painful muscle contractions during or after exercise that feel like a knot in a specific part of, or even the entire, muscle. In runners, cramps most commonly occur in calves, quadriceps, and hamstrings. They don’t rear their ugly head every day but when they emerge, they are game-changing. Consequently, it is natural to immediately diagnose why the cramp occurred so you can prevent and/or treat it in future.
I did my first club running race in 1990, and have since run, hiked, biked, lifted and climbed regularly, sometimes competitively, most times for fun. On average, I've exercised at least once per day for at least 30-minutes. So, since my running debut, I’ve completed at least ~10,000 sessions accumulating at least 5,000 hours of exercise. But I imagine my lifetime total is much higher given that, last year alone, I completed 544 hours of running, hiking, biking, lifting, and climbing.
Through all these minutes of exercise, I recall muscle cramps just a handful of times. The precise number is unknown; definitely more than the 4 memorable races when cramps thwarted my progress but also less than “a lot”. I know cramps might dwell on your mind but, for me, they do not because, for me, they are uncommon.
What has not been uncommon is that on every occasion when my muscles have “cramped” my style and I’ve told someone about it, I have ALWAYS had the same response:
But, let’s put my “small world” anecdotes aside and look at the bigger picture...
In the early 1930s, researchers at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory studied workers building the Hoover Dam in extremely high temperatures (30-40°C) and found decreased plasma volume and low plasma chloride concentrations in workers with muscle cramps. A team from the same lab led by Bruce Dill also studied workers at the Hoover Dam and in steel mills in Ohio working in hot conditions. They found that workers who developed heat cramps displayed characteristics of both dehydration and hyperhydration — low plasma volume (dehydration); low blood sodium and chloride (hyperhydration) and little to no sodium/chloride in their urine; increased red cell count and blood total protein (dehydration). These workers also had high sweat rates and drank a huge amount of water during their shifts. This is a similar picture found in athletes with hyponatremia who have drunk too much water during a race. Dill’s team then gave a sample of Steelworkers 0.1% (1 gram per litre) saltwater to drink during their shifts (0.04% in winter) — this eliminated muscle cramping and heat exhaustion in all workers! Up to that point, it was not unusual to send ~20 men home every day due to cramps or exhaustion. So it was impressive when the saltwater was rolled out to 12,000 workers the following year and there were only 22 cases of heat stress, 11 with cramps and 11 with heat exhaustion.
This epic of studies at Harvard was game-changing for manual workers and findings were replicated in the 1940s with studies of men in the desert, which found that exercise-associated heat cramps almost never occurred without blood sodium deficiencies and were quickly relieved after i.v. injection of sodium chloride. This body of work convincingly shows that:
In the heat, excessive sweat loss combined with excessive water intake causes hyponatremia (low blood sodium) and increases the incidence of muscle cramping.
And that,
This is prevented when a high sodium drink is consumed.
From all this, we learn that...
Why do I say that?
Because muscle cramps during exercise occur when you are fatigued (more on that in a minute). Plus, there is a large body of evidence that finds no association between exercise-associated muscle cramps and measures of hydration status and electrolyte balance.
Let's look at that evidence…
A study of 350 collegiate athletes found no differences in sweat rate or sweat electrolyte concentrations (sodium, chloride, and potassium) between folks with a history of cramps and those who had never had a cramp. Ron Maughan’s 1986 study of 82 male marathon runners with similar race performance and training status found no differences in the race-induced changes in plasma volume or blood electrolyte concentrations (sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphate, and bicarbonate) between runners suffering from cramps during the race and those unaffected. While other data has shown that when susceptibility to electrically-stimulated muscle cramps in cramp-prone athletes is not associated with measures of hydration status ( including total body water, intracellular water, or extracellular water).
Similar outcomes are found during ultra running events where profound fatigue and muscle damage occurs. Blood electrolyte concentrations and hydration status were not associated with exercise-associated muscle cramping (EAMC) in 72 runners competing in the Two Oceans 56 km ultramarathon. During an Ironman, rather than dehydration or low plasma sodium, increased running speed and previous cramps predicted exercise-associated muscle cramping in 210 triathletes. And, at the Western States 100-miler, neither hydration status, plasma sodium concentration, or during-race sodium intake were different between those with and without cramping and sodium intake during the race was not associated with less muscle cramping. Plus, folks with cramping were more likely to have a prior history of muscle cramping during races and greater muscle damage during the races than those without cramping. A 2016 meta-analysis confirmed these observations, showing that blood electrolyte concentrations are not clearly associated with exercise-associated muscle cramps.
This mass of evidence indicates that dehydration and sodium are rarely associated with cramps during exercise. But, we must note the limitations of these studies:
Blood samples were not taken at the time of cramping, and
What is circulating in the blood may not reflect what is actually happening locally in the affected muscle.
Yes, dehydration and sodium depletion may be involved in cramping, particularly during exercise in the heat and especially if you are dehydrated at the start. But, the dilemma is that consuming sodium does not always remedy the issue and cramping also occurs when it is cool and in athletes who are well hydrated and not lacking sodium. Cramps also nearly always occur when an athlete is fatigued during a session or race.
So, if fatigue is the common denominator, perhaps...
But this is not a novel concept.
Remember the morse code tappers’ finger cramps discovery in the 1880s and early 1900s (here and here). Scientists of that era concluded that cramping was a disease of the central nervous system — a weakening of the cerebral control of the finger tapping muscles after many hours of “morsing” (or whatever the lingo was).
One of the earliest studies to associate prior fatigue with cramping was published in 1957 in which 115 young adults held a prolonged maximal bicep contraction in a shortened position until cramping occurred (try it) either before or after 20 to 30-mins of moderate-intensity exercise. The authors found that muscle cramps were more likely to occur when the maximal contraction followed exercise rather than preceding exercise (30 out the 115 subjects vs. 21/115). In the same study, patients with diseases characterised by cramping including those with paraplegia were also studied and prolonged contractions and other electrical stimuli were able to induce muscle cramps. These findings from the 1950s suggested that the unusual muscle fibre contractile activity during cramping very likely arises via a neuromuscular mechanism and that prior fatigue may be a risk factor.
Many moons on, the “muscle fatigue hypothesis” was proposed by Martin Schwellnus and colleagues in the 1990s as a cause of cramps during exercise. In runners, one of the largest studies supporting the muscle fatigue hypothesis came in 1996 from Tim Noakes’ lab. They studied risk factors for cramping in ~1400 marathoners, of whom 536 reported a history of cramps. Weekly training load, training speed, drinking patterns during races, and sodium intake were not different between crampers and noncrampers but 60% of crampers reported that muscle fatigue preceded their cramping during marathons and 80% reported their cramps occurred after 30 km. Compelling, but these are cross-sectional observations, not causal associations — there are limitations because everyone “feels” fatigue during a marathon and the study did not report the level of fatigue in the marathon runners who did not suffer cramping.
Since the 90s, a wealth of data from animal and human experiments (including prolonged contraction- and electrical nerve stimulation-induced cramps) and epidemiological studies in athletes with cramps now highlights local muscle fatigue as a primary cause. This evidence has been discussed in detail in several narrative reviews (here, here, and here) but to summarise it, the theory of neuromuscular fatigue is highly plausible because:
Factors causing muscle fatigue are associated with the occurrence of cramping.
Inducing muscular fatigue with exercise or electrical stimulation causes cramps.
Muscle fatigue that leads to cramping also alters neuromuscular control (i.e. it changes the electromyographic activity of muscle fibres).
So, like electrolyte depletion and dehydration, fatigue can also cause cramps. Since muscle fatigue is literally a lack of nerve impulses firing the muscles and/or a lack of muscular response to nerve impulses, and since the involuntary muscle contractions that characterise cramping are due to nerve impulses, there is one thing we can all agree on: cramping has its roots in the nervous system and involves neuromuscular function in some way or another.
But it doesn’t end there, because…
It is highly unlikely that a single factor causes your cramps or that the same cause is responsible each time you experience cramping.
Experimental and epidemiological evidence teaches us that exercise-associated muscle cramps can involve:
Dehydration and sodium depletion due to excess “salty sweating” and/or excess water intake, typically in the heat.
Fatigue and/or muscle damage, which change neuromuscular function.
The reality is that your cramps might arise from:
A combination of some, or all, of the above.
Or something else we’ve yet to discover. For example, a 2018 cross-sectional study of ~15,000 distance runners found that cramps during running were also associated with underlying chronic disease, medication use, history of injury, and being a more experienced runner.
So, you can stop immediately blaming cramps on dehydration and a lack of salt.
How very complicated… But, fear not. There is a lot we do know and that knowledge can inform us how to prevent cramping rearing its ugly head and how to scare off the Krampus monster when it attacks. However, that story is for next time…
Until then, don’t “cramp” my style… Stay nerdy and keep empowering yourself to be the best athlete you can be, by training smart…
Thanks for joining me for another “session”. I am passionate about equality in access to free education. If you find value in my content, please help keep it alive by sharing it on social media and buying me a beer at buymeacoffee.com/thomas.solomon. For more knowledge, join me @thomaspjsolomon on Twitter, follow @veohtu on Facebook and Instagram, subscribe to my free email updates at veothu.com/subscribe, and visit veohtu.com to check out my other Articles, Nerd Alerts, Free Training Tools, and my Train Smart Framework. To learn while you train, you can even listen to my articles by subscribing to the Veohtu podcast.
I did my first club running race in 1990, and have since run, hiked, biked, lifted and climbed regularly, sometimes competitively, most times for fun. On average, I've exercised at least once per day for at least 30-minutes. So, since my running debut, I’ve completed at least ~10,000 sessions accumulating at least 5,000 hours of exercise. But I imagine my lifetime total is much higher given that, last year alone, I completed 544 hours of running, hiking, biking, lifting, and climbing.
Through all these minutes of exercise, I recall muscle cramps just a handful of times. The precise number is unknown; definitely more than the 4 memorable races when cramps thwarted my progress but also less than “a lot”. I know cramps might dwell on your mind but, for me, they do not because, for me, they are uncommon.
What has not been uncommon is that on every occasion when my muscles have “cramped” my style and I’ve told someone about it, I have ALWAYS had the same response:
“You were dehydrated and didn’t get enough electrolytes.”
… “Next time, eat some salt.”
This is solid advice to an impressionable youngster. But, I’ve always been an inquisitive ginger fellow and when I’ve rebutted, “are you sure?”, the reply is always, “yes, without a doubt”. Bold! For me, this narrative has been echoed by athletes I have trained with, athletes I have coached, and I’ve lost count of the number of times at the end of a race when competitors have said “Man, i needed salt today, my cramps were so bad”. In my small world, it has become dogma to blame cramps on dehydration and a lack of salt.
… “Next time, eat some salt.”
But, let’s put my “small world” anecdotes aside and look at the bigger picture...
The history of muscle cramps.
Exercise-associated muscle cramps have probably affected humans since the dawn of time, but the sun rose on the dawn of cramp science in the 1880s when finger cramping was reported in Post Office morse code tappers. Further studies confirmed these observations in 1912. In the early 1900s, there was also a wave of heat research identifying cramps in men working heavy labour. In 1904, two cases of cramps were reported in excessively hot weather and, in 1923, cramping was documented in coal miners during long shifts in hot conditions (>35°C). The miners’ sweat rates were very high during work but hugely variable between workers and the studies found that cramps were associated with higher air temperatures, excessive water intake, and prolonged hard work and that cramp susceptibility was greater in miners with a poorer physical condition.In the early 1930s, researchers at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory studied workers building the Hoover Dam in extremely high temperatures (30-40°C) and found decreased plasma volume and low plasma chloride concentrations in workers with muscle cramps. A team from the same lab led by Bruce Dill also studied workers at the Hoover Dam and in steel mills in Ohio working in hot conditions. They found that workers who developed heat cramps displayed characteristics of both dehydration and hyperhydration — low plasma volume (dehydration); low blood sodium and chloride (hyperhydration) and little to no sodium/chloride in their urine; increased red cell count and blood total protein (dehydration). These workers also had high sweat rates and drank a huge amount of water during their shifts. This is a similar picture found in athletes with hyponatremia who have drunk too much water during a race. Dill’s team then gave a sample of Steelworkers 0.1% (1 gram per litre) saltwater to drink during their shifts (0.04% in winter) — this eliminated muscle cramping and heat exhaustion in all workers! Up to that point, it was not unusual to send ~20 men home every day due to cramps or exhaustion. So it was impressive when the saltwater was rolled out to 12,000 workers the following year and there were only 22 cases of heat stress, 11 with cramps and 11 with heat exhaustion.
This epic of studies at Harvard was game-changing for manual workers and findings were replicated in the 1940s with studies of men in the desert, which found that exercise-associated heat cramps almost never occurred without blood sodium deficiencies and were quickly relieved after i.v. injection of sodium chloride. This body of work convincingly shows that:
In the heat, excessive sweat loss combined with excessive water intake causes hyponatremia (low blood sodium) and increases the incidence of muscle cramping. And that,
This is prevented when a high sodium drink is consumed.
Electrolyte depletion and dehydration are classical causes of cramps.
In the 2000s, it almost became dogma that cramping was caused by fluid and electrolyte imbalances — hydration and sodium/salt. This was due, in part, to the media attention given to small observational case studies of American Football players. In 2005 Stofan and colleagues reported that 5 players with a history of cramps had greater sweat sodium loss during a hard session in hot conditions than 5 players with no history of cramps, and in 2009 Horswill replicated these findings in 6 “crampers” and 8 “non crampers”. Now is an important time to emphasise that these observations are “in the heat”. It is also a good time to echo the often-used scientific proverb: the plural of anecdote is not evidence. Fortunately, some experimental studies have confirmed that, under hot conditions, excessive sweat loss and excessive water intake makes muscles more susceptible to electrical stimulation-induced muscle cramps (a laboratory model), which are prevented when a high sodium drink is consumed (see here & here ). Entire business models like Gatorade and Precision Hydration have been built on this premise. For example, Precision Hydration started because its CEO developed cramps during his triathlons, making the assumption that dehydration and/or plasma sodium loss was the cause of his race day demise. But, what if he was simply unaccustomed to and/or physically unprepared for the event.Why do I say that?
Because muscle cramps during exercise occur when you are fatigued (more on that in a minute). Plus, there is a large body of evidence that finds no association between exercise-associated muscle cramps and measures of hydration status and electrolyte balance.
Let's look at that evidence…
A study of 350 collegiate athletes found no differences in sweat rate or sweat electrolyte concentrations (sodium, chloride, and potassium) between folks with a history of cramps and those who had never had a cramp. Ron Maughan’s 1986 study of 82 male marathon runners with similar race performance and training status found no differences in the race-induced changes in plasma volume or blood electrolyte concentrations (sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphate, and bicarbonate) between runners suffering from cramps during the race and those unaffected. While other data has shown that when susceptibility to electrically-stimulated muscle cramps in cramp-prone athletes is not associated with measures of hydration status ( including total body water, intracellular water, or extracellular water).
Similar outcomes are found during ultra running events where profound fatigue and muscle damage occurs. Blood electrolyte concentrations and hydration status were not associated with exercise-associated muscle cramping (EAMC) in 72 runners competing in the Two Oceans 56 km ultramarathon. During an Ironman, rather than dehydration or low plasma sodium, increased running speed and previous cramps predicted exercise-associated muscle cramping in 210 triathletes. And, at the Western States 100-miler, neither hydration status, plasma sodium concentration, or during-race sodium intake were different between those with and without cramping and sodium intake during the race was not associated with less muscle cramping. Plus, folks with cramping were more likely to have a prior history of muscle cramping during races and greater muscle damage during the races than those without cramping. A 2016 meta-analysis confirmed these observations, showing that blood electrolyte concentrations are not clearly associated with exercise-associated muscle cramps.
This mass of evidence indicates that dehydration and sodium are rarely associated with cramps during exercise. But, we must note the limitations of these studies:
Blood samples were not taken at the time of cramping, and
What is circulating in the blood may not reflect what is actually happening locally in the affected muscle.
So, if fatigue is the common denominator, perhaps...
Impaired neuromuscular control also causes cramps.
Perhaps you have experienced cramping during an isometric hold — a prolonged contraction of a muscle in a shortened position. Similarly, maybe you have had cramps during a long hard session or race. Prolonged or repetitive muscle contractions lead to muscle fatigue, at which point there is a change in motor unit (muscle fibre) firing patterns and a loss of neuromuscular control. Sometimes this causes spasms — spontaneous random muscle contractions, i.e. a cramp.But this is not a novel concept.
Remember the morse code tappers’ finger cramps discovery in the 1880s and early 1900s (here and here). Scientists of that era concluded that cramping was a disease of the central nervous system — a weakening of the cerebral control of the finger tapping muscles after many hours of “morsing” (or whatever the lingo was).
One of the earliest studies to associate prior fatigue with cramping was published in 1957 in which 115 young adults held a prolonged maximal bicep contraction in a shortened position until cramping occurred (try it) either before or after 20 to 30-mins of moderate-intensity exercise. The authors found that muscle cramps were more likely to occur when the maximal contraction followed exercise rather than preceding exercise (30 out the 115 subjects vs. 21/115). In the same study, patients with diseases characterised by cramping including those with paraplegia were also studied and prolonged contractions and other electrical stimuli were able to induce muscle cramps. These findings from the 1950s suggested that the unusual muscle fibre contractile activity during cramping very likely arises via a neuromuscular mechanism and that prior fatigue may be a risk factor.
Many moons on, the “muscle fatigue hypothesis” was proposed by Martin Schwellnus and colleagues in the 1990s as a cause of cramps during exercise. In runners, one of the largest studies supporting the muscle fatigue hypothesis came in 1996 from Tim Noakes’ lab. They studied risk factors for cramping in ~1400 marathoners, of whom 536 reported a history of cramps. Weekly training load, training speed, drinking patterns during races, and sodium intake were not different between crampers and noncrampers but 60% of crampers reported that muscle fatigue preceded their cramping during marathons and 80% reported their cramps occurred after 30 km. Compelling, but these are cross-sectional observations, not causal associations — there are limitations because everyone “feels” fatigue during a marathon and the study did not report the level of fatigue in the marathon runners who did not suffer cramping.
Since the 90s, a wealth of data from animal and human experiments (including prolonged contraction- and electrical nerve stimulation-induced cramps) and epidemiological studies in athletes with cramps now highlights local muscle fatigue as a primary cause. This evidence has been discussed in detail in several narrative reviews (here, here, and here) but to summarise it, the theory of neuromuscular fatigue is highly plausible because:
Factors causing muscle fatigue are associated with the occurrence of cramping.
Inducing muscular fatigue with exercise or electrical stimulation causes cramps.
Muscle fatigue that leads to cramping also alters neuromuscular control (i.e. it changes the electromyographic activity of muscle fibres). But it doesn’t end there, because…
Muscle damage is also associated with cramps.
A 2020 study of 98 male and female runners found a significant association between markers of muscle damage and cramping during a marathon but no association with hydration levels or plasma electrolytes. This observation that muscle damage is a risk factor for exercise-induced cramping confirmed earlier work from Schwellnus et al. in a 2011 study of 49 runners competing in the 56 km Two Oceans ultra. The 20 runners who developed cramps during the race had greater pre-race muscle damage (as measured by plasma creatine kinase concentrations). They had also trained more during the 3-days before the race and ran faster during the first half of the race when compared to the 29 runners who did not suffer cramping. I.e. crampers eff dup their taper and ran too hard too early in the race — does this ring any bells? So, the golden question...What causes your muscle cramps during exercise?
This answer is gonna suck… It is highly unlikely that a single factor causes your cramps or that the same cause is responsible each time you experience cramping.
Dehydration and sodium depletion due to excess “salty sweating” and/or excess water intake, typically in the heat.
Fatigue and/or muscle damage, which change neuromuscular function.
A combination of some, or all, of the above.
Or something else we’ve yet to discover. For example, a 2018 cross-sectional study of ~15,000 distance runners found that cramps during running were also associated with underlying chronic disease, medication use, history of injury, and being a more experienced runner.
So, you can stop immediately blaming cramps on dehydration and a lack of salt.
How very complicated… But, fear not. There is a lot we do know and that knowledge can inform us how to prevent cramping rearing its ugly head and how to scare off the Krampus monster when it attacks. However, that story is for next time…
Until then, don’t “cramp” my style… Stay nerdy and keep empowering yourself to be the best athlete you can be, by training smart…
×
![]()
Thanks for joining me for another “session”. I am passionate about equality in access to free education. If you find value in my content, please help keep it alive by sharing it on social media and buying me a beer at buymeacoffee.com/thomas.solomon. For more knowledge, join me @thomaspjsolomon on Twitter, follow @veohtu on Facebook and Instagram, subscribe to my free email updates at veothu.com/subscribe, and visit veohtu.com to check out my other Articles, Nerd Alerts, Free Training Tools, and my Train Smart Framework. To learn while you train, you can even listen to my articles by subscribing to the Veohtu podcast.
Disclaimer: I occasionally mention brands and products but it is important to know that I am not affiliated with, sponsored by, an ambassador for, or receiving advertisement royalties from any brands. I have conducted biomedical research for which I have received research money from publicly-funded national research councils and medical charities, and also from private companies, including Novo Nordisk Foundation, AstraZeneca, Amylin, A.P. Møller Foundation, and Augustinus Foundation. I’ve also consulted for Boost Treadmills and Gu Energy on their research and innovation grant applications and I’ve provided research and science writing services for Examine — some of my articles contain links to information provided by Examine but I do not receive any royalties or bonuses from those links. These companies had no control over the research design, data analysis, or publication outcomes of my work. Any recommendations I make are, and always will be, based on my own views and opinions shaped by the evidence available. My recommendations have never and will never be influenced by affiliations, sponsorships, advertisement royalties, etc. The information I provide is not medical advice. Before making any changes to your habits of daily living based on any information I provide, always ensure it is safe for you to do so and consult your doctor if you are unsure.
If you find value in this free content, please help keep it alive and buy me a beer:
Buy me a beer.
Share this post on your social media:
Want free exercise science education delivered to your inbox? Join the 100s of other athletes, coaches, students, scientists, & clinicians and sign up here:
About the author:
I am Thomas Solomon and I'm passionate about relaying accurate and clear scientific information to the masses to help folks meet their fitness and performance goals. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Exercise Science and am an ACSM-certified Exercise Physiologist and Personal Trainer, a VDOT-certified Distance running coach, and a Registered Nutritionist. Since 2002, I have conducted biomedical research in exercise and nutrition and have taught and led university courses in exercise physiology, nutrition, biochemistry, and molecular medicine. My work is published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journal publications and I have delivered more than 50 conference presentations & invited talks at universities and medical societies. I have coached and provided training plans for truck-loads of athletes, have competed at a high level in running, cycling, and obstacle course racing, and continue to run, ride, ski, hike, lift, and climb as much as my ageing body will allow. To stay on top of scientific developments, I consult for scientists, participate in journal clubs, peer-review papers for medical journals, and I invest every Friday in reading what new delights have spawned onto PubMed. In my spare time, I hunt for phenomenal mountain views to capture through the lens, boulder problems to solve, and for new craft beers to drink with the goal of sending my gustatory system into a hullabaloo.
Copyright © Thomas Solomon. All rights reserved.
I am Thomas Solomon and I'm passionate about relaying accurate and clear scientific information to the masses to help folks meet their fitness and performance goals. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Exercise Science and am an ACSM-certified Exercise Physiologist and Personal Trainer, a VDOT-certified Distance running coach, and a Registered Nutritionist. Since 2002, I have conducted biomedical research in exercise and nutrition and have taught and led university courses in exercise physiology, nutrition, biochemistry, and molecular medicine. My work is published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journal publications and I have delivered more than 50 conference presentations & invited talks at universities and medical societies. I have coached and provided training plans for truck-loads of athletes, have competed at a high level in running, cycling, and obstacle course racing, and continue to run, ride, ski, hike, lift, and climb as much as my ageing body will allow. To stay on top of scientific developments, I consult for scientists, participate in journal clubs, peer-review papers for medical journals, and I invest every Friday in reading what new delights have spawned onto PubMed. In my spare time, I hunt for phenomenal mountain views to capture through the lens, boulder problems to solve, and for new craft beers to drink with the goal of sending my gustatory system into a hullabaloo.
Copyright © Thomas Solomon. All rights reserved.