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Hey, and welcome to the show. It's the fun 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.

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You know what I immediately think of when I think leg cramps now, right? No, remember. Oh, yeah. Round up. That's right.

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You totally got one of these, didn't you? Like while we were recording.

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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 should. You should suffer through all of them. Sure. To try and find it. But I got it just out of nowhere. Like it was so funny that we were like, all right, we should just leave that in there.

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We have to keep. I think I demanded that we keep it. And that was just so great.

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Yeah. Which is weird. I don't cramp up like that much. So it was very much out of nowhere. I don't know what happened.

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Well, Chuck, you could have been over age 50 at the time. Know you might have been rehydrated maybe, but I drink a lot of water.

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Perhaps you've been sitting too long without moving.

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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, 50/50.

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So those are some risk factors for getting a Charlie horse. Before we explain where to charge the horses, we should talk about the origin of the word. Do you did you read about this? Yeah.

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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 Charlie and it said it pulled the roller at the Chicago White Sox ballpark. I'm not sure what that means.

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Probably whatever flattened out the dirt. Maybe that's that's what I was thinking. That's all I can come up with. There may be the thing that the hot dogs spit on as they're cooking.

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I'm not sure what's the other story? The other one is that Charlie Red born, who is a pitcher.

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You mean old Hoss? Old Hoss was another name of his. And he I looked him up. He's the seventy fourth greatest pitcher of all time based on our. Yeah. He was also a terrible person. Lobster boy. Ask from what I can tell. No murder involved I don't think.

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But he apparently got a Charley horse in a baseball game in the middle of a baseball game. He played for Providence in Boston mostly. And it's possible that it was named after him and that significant event. Yeah, what I've always heard a Charley 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. Yeah.

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Or or need somebody in the thigh and you would give someone a Charley horse and you had to say Charley horse as if they didn't know what was happening.

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Don't freak out. You're not imagining things.

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I just gave you a Charley horse and this is called having the wind knocked out of you. Right.

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So, yeah, but it does seem to it 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 Charley horse. But as you also know, I didn't touch you that time. You got them for internat round up. It just came out of the blue.

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Out of the blue. So a Charley horse is it's different from like a leg cramp, say, like your muscles cramping up from overuse on a long run. That's probably just from dehydration or a loss of electrolytes from sweating too much. Charley Horse is kind of leg cramp, but it's a little more specialized than that. It's like a not. It just suddenly comes out of nowhere and affects one of those areas in your legs. And what's interesting to me is that medical science is like, no, I don't know, here's some best guesses, but we're not sure.

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Have you what did you used to do? The thing called frogging someone?

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Yeah, it's essentially the same thing to your knuckles, on your fingers or a certain held a certain way when you punch them, right?

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Totally. It's a knuckle punch. And I always was frog. I didn't do much frog and because I was a nice guy, but 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 knot in a bump would form.

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Yeah, I was never very good at that either. But some kids had, like, almost a preternatural sense of like a muscular pressure point, you know. Yeah.

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I have a feeling you were a champion pencil breaker, though. Yeah, no, I don't remember a pencil breaking, what was that? Oh, you guys didn't do that. I mean, I remember game.

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Yeah. Like some somebody would hold to the farthest end of the pencil and somebody you just karate chop it.

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Well, you would use another pencil and you would just take your pencil broke. But there are all sorts of various techniques, you know, for maximum breakage.

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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 to and all that?

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Yeah, yeah. That's what I think of the states did great.

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Were you good at pencil breaking? I wasn't very good. You know, there was always the one Bugs Meany who could do it in one fatal blow.

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Is that another Encyclopedia Brown reference? I think so. Maybe we should take a break. Yeah. And we can go solve an Encyclopedia Brown crime, OK.

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And then come back and talk more about Charlie horses.

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All right. Well, now you're on the road driving in your truck. Why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, it's Bobby Bones, executive producer of Make It Up as we Go, the brand new podcast from Audio Up and I Heart Radio brought to you exclusively by Unilever's Noor and Magnum Brands. The story follows a songwriter's journey as well as the songs themselves and how they make it to country radio from executive producer Miranda Lambert and creators Scarlett Burg and Jared Goosestep, a story inspired by the competitive world of Nashville writing rooms featuring original music by Scarlett Burke, director and executive producer, featuring some of the biggest names in country, including The Cool Guy and Everything Now Nowadays.

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Just like now, it's feeling like one day on a Saturday night, make it up as we go only on the podcast network in association with audio of media created by Scarlett Burke and Jared Goosestep. OK, so Charley, horse leg cramp, sudden spasm, sudden muscle. Medical science is baffled, go. Yeah.

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So you can get a Charley 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 roundup was such a tight, violent thing. Yeah.

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I can't imagine that going on for several minutes because it lasted maybe 30 seconds, probably the longest 30 seconds of your life and four minutes of that would just be hell.

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Yeah. And this is not the same thing as restless leg syndrome. Yeah. That also happens at night, but that is when you sort of have the Jimmy legs and you have the urge to move. But I think in both cases they don't know exactly what's going on.

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No, they don't. But you can actually solve both cases. If you get Charley horses at night while you're sleeping and they wake you up or if you have restless leg syndrome, the Jimmy legs, you can solve both by doing stretches before bed. And sometimes I get restless leg syndrome. I don't I 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 I really get up and do this hamstring stretch and it works like a charm, like I'll be asleep in thirty seconds afterward.

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You know, they say stretching is just sort of one of the keys to life. Like, you start in your 20s and 30s, just stretching really great every morning and every night, then your body's going to be the better for it.

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Do you remember we did an entire episode on Sarcopenia, that stupe that you get from old age, did we? We totally did.

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And I think that that's a really good way to combat Sarcopenia is to to be limber and stretch your back muscles, too.

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Yeah, it's all about keeping those muscles limber. Yeah. Let's do it, Chuck. Let's let's commit to stretching at least five nights a week.

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OK, OK. Deal. Pinky So the other thing. Yeah. Virtual pinky swear. The other thing you can do, like you mentioned, is plenty of fluids if you're exercising, especially because your muscles need those fluids to relax and contract like they should. And you just got to you know, if you're going out there and running or even doing a good exercise walk and you're not stretching beforehand, then what are you doing?

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You're a chump. You're a sucker.

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You're just actually, you know, you're a chump.

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You're a chucker. Oh, speaking of Charlie, I called you Charlie on an email.

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I think yesterday I noticed that my head just ripped in two afterward.

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It just blew my mind. Why? You're not a Charlie, you're a chuck.

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But the idea that it's almost like you turned into Gwyneth Paltrow and sliding doors all of a sudden, like you very easily could have gone the life of a Charlie. But you want the life of a chuck. And I guarantee you your life would be different, you know, in noticeable ways had you been a Charlie.

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Well, you call me Charlie sometimes, though. Totally different from Charlie. Agreed. You know, Charlie and you know, thing in New Jersey, I went by Charles.

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Oh, la la. Did you have a little pencil thin mustache? I did. You are nothing but turtlenecks. Oh. Huh. Charlie horses.

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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. Right. In this case, it's really true. If you eat a balanced diet, you're going to 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.

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Yeah, especially I think bread, sodium and potassium have like 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 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 in, like, good amounts and you also want to have water because water is like the thing that everything all of these magnificent metabolic processes take place in.

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So if you're dehydrated and you lose a bunch of electrolytes or your electrolytes are out of proportion, you're much more susceptible to muscle cramps of all variety. So, yeah, eat a banana or so. An avocado is a really good balance. Yeah, potassium and sodium too.

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We eat a lot of avocado in our house.

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Same here you me found. Five for 99 cent avocados. Yesterday, I was like, yeah, she's like, oh, they must have been about Geraud or something like that. And I checked and they are all like pre ripe and they're like on their way to being ripe. They're not rotted at all. She got them from Kmart and I just couldn't believe it.

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You're like, she got it at covid R US, so I think you're fine.

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No, I'm worried. I hadn't thought about that before.

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No I don't think that's the case. covid are great. You got anything else about Charley horses. No, sir. Are you having one right now. I'm not. Well that's good then. That means everybody that short stuff is out.

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Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?