My latest injury seems to involve my left calf. Rolling last night, I got a massive cramp deep in the muscle, one that took a little longer than usual to come around.
Come around it did, and I was able to roll with Rodrigo some (before his sea urchin injury caught up with him). But my calf has been pretty sore ever since. I can walk around fairly normally. But I decided to take the night off of training to let it heal up a bit more. I can easily see it cramping up on me given the way it feels right now.
I think the problem is actually the smaller calf muscle, the soleus. I usually do a pretty good job of the regular, straight leg calf stretch that stretches the larger gastrocnemius. But I almost never, ever do the bent leg version that stretches the smaller, long soleus muscle that is underneath and below it.
That would also explain the location, a little lower than the "head" of the calf, the sensation of the cramp being particularly deep, and the reason why massaging my calf didn't seem to help very much last night - which almost always works with my regular leg and calf cramps.
Truth told, my hydration was lousy and that was probably the primary culprit. Even though I downed a full jug of Gatorate 90 minutes before time, I suspect my body soaked that up like a sponge, leaving me with little left after the hour of jiu jitsu.
I need to get to the point where that jug of Gatorade feels excessive, so that it isn't quenching my thirst, at all. That only happens if I make sure to increase the water intake pretty seriously earlier in the day.
I'm doing those soleus stretches tonight, lightly and for the most part just trying to imbed the stretch in my memory so that it will become a part of my routine. Those calf cramps were bad enough during training. Now that one has actually kept me off the mat, they're all the more a problem to deal with as soon and as effectively as possible.
