Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Charley Horse

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

You know those terrible leg cramps that come out of nowhere? They may be named after a drunken baseball pitcher. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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,

aka crippling temporary leg cramp. You know what I immediately think of when I think leg cramps now, right? No. Remember when you were round up? That's right. You totally got one of these, didn't you? Like, wow, 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 you should suffer through all of them to try and find it, but I got it just out of nowhere leg cramping. It was so funny that we were like, all right, we should just leave that in there.

We have to keep it. I think I demanded that we keep it, and that was just so great. 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. Well, Chuck, you could have been over age 50 at the time.

No. You might have been dehydrated. Maybe, but I drink a lot of water. Perhaps you've been sitting too long without moving. 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

and your brain may have misdirected your leg to move, confusing your leg, resulting in a cramp. 50-50. So those are some risk factors for getting a Charlie horse. But before we explain what a Charlie horse is, we should talk about the origin of the word. 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 1800s 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.

Probably whatever flattened out the dirt, maybe. That's what I was thinking. That's all I can come up with. Or maybe the thing that the hot dog's spin on is they're cooking, I'm not sure. What's the other story? The other one is that Charlie Radborne, who was a pitcher.

Are you mean old horse? Old horse was another name of his. And I looked him up. He's the 74th greatest pitcher of all time based on ERA, yeah. He was also a terrible person. Lobster boy-esque from what I can tell. No murder involved, I don't think.

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

Yeah. Or knee somebody 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.

Right. 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 Charlie horse. But as you also know, I didn't touch you that time, you got one for internet roundup. It just came out of the blue.

Out of the blue. So a Charlie horse, 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. A Charlie horse is kind of leg cramp, but it's a little more specialized than that. It's like a knot that 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, mm, I don't know, here's some best guesses, but we're not 100% sure. Have you, did you used to do the thing called frogging someone? Yeah, that's essentially the same thing, except 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 frogged. I didn't do much frogging 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 and 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, you know? Yeah, I have a feeling you were a champion pencil breaker though. Yeah, no, I don't remember pencil breaking, what was that? Oh, you guys didn't do that? I mean, I remember, yeah, like somebody would hold two ends

the farthest ends of the pencil and somebody, you just karate chop it. Well, you would use another pencil and you would just take 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-scented pencils and all that? Yeah, yeah. That's what I think of. Those taste great. 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. Is that another encyclopedia of brown reference? I think so. Maybe we should take a break. Yeah. And we can go solve an encyclopedia of brown crime. Okay. And then come back and talk more about Charlie Horses.

All right. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? Get stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars

of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

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OK, so Charlie Horse, leg cramp, 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, there can be a few minutes.

I can't imagine, like the one I had an internet roundup was such a tight, violent thing. I can't imagine that going on for several minutes. No, because it lasted maybe 30 seconds, probably the longest 30 seconds of your life. 10 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. But in, I think, both cases, they don't know exactly what's going on. No, they don't. But and then 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. You can solve both by doing stretches before bed. And sometimes I get restless leg syndrome. I don't know if I have it to a clinical degree or whatever, but especially when I first lay down to go to bed, sometimes I can't sleep because my legs are just bugging me. And I'll get up and do this hamstring stretch,

and it works like a charm, like I'll be asleep in 30 seconds afterward. You know, they say stretching is just sort of one of the keys to life. Like if 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. Do you remember we did an entire episode on sarcopenia

that stoop that you get from old age? Did we? We totally did. And I think that that's a really good way to combat sarcopenia is to be limber and stretch your back muscles too. Yeah, it's all about keeping those muscles limber. Yeah, let's do it, Chuck.

Let's commit to stretching at least five nights a week. OK. OK. Deal. Pinky swear. 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? You're a chump. You're a sucker.

You're just asking for it. You are a chump. You know? You're a chump. You're a chucker. Oh, speaking of Charlie, I called you Charlie on an email, I think yesterday. I noticed that.

My head just ripped in two 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 Gwyneth Paltrow and sliding doors all of a sudden, like you very easily could have gone 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. Well, you call me Charles sometimes, though. Totally different from Charlie. Agreed. You know? Charlie, it's something.

In New Jersey, I went by Charles. Oh, ooh, la, la. Did you have a little pencil thin mustache, too? I did. You wore nothing but turtlenecks? Uh-huh. Charlie horses, I think we're done. Oh, I know.

There is one more thing about the old eat a balance 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. Yeah, especially I think I've read sodium and potassium have like a 23 to 1 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 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. 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 varieties. So yeah, eat a banana. Or I saw in avocados a really good balance of potassium and sodium too. We eat a lot of avocado in our house. Same here. Yumi found 5 for 99 cent avocados yesterday.

What? That's impossible. Yeah, she's like, they must have been about to rot or something like that. And I checked and they are all pre-ripened. They're on their way to being ripe. They're not rotted at all. She got them from H Mart, and I just couldn't believe it.

You're like, she got it at COVID-R-Us, so I think they're fine. No, I'm worried. I hadn't thought about that part. No, I don't think that's the case. COVID-R-Us, great. You got anything else about Charlie 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. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.