Masters swimming that’s the thing where adults in their 30s and 40s get up at 5 a.m. to swim laps before work and then talk about it like they’ve done something heroic. I’m one of those people. I’ve been swimming competitively since I was a teenager and I picked it back up four years ago after my kids got old enough to not need constant supervision.
The cramping started around year two. Not every session but often enough to become a real problem. Mid-workout, usually around the 800-meter mark of a hard set, my calf would lock up and I’d have to flip onto my back and float while I stretched it out. The 70-year-olds in the lane next to me were politely pretending not to notice. Mortifying!
I tried the standard stuff. Bananas, sodium tablets before hard sessions. Stretching more, less stretching, none of it stuck. A teammate who swims at a much higher level mentioned she’d been using magnesium lotion for cramps for about a year. I asked her where she found it. She sent me a link to myhirelief.com, I picked one, started using it and tracked what happened over the next 14 weeks.
The first two weeks: no change
I want to be honest about this because most reviews skip it. Weeks one and two were not different. I cramped four times in roughly eight sessions, same as before. I applied the magnesium lotion for cramps every evening after dinner to both calves and the bottom of each foot. Nothing happened yet. I kept going.
See also: Technology Behind Modern Games
Weeks three and four: maybe something
Two cramp incidents in ten sessions. Could be training variability, could be the lotion, I wasn’t sure, so I kept going.
Weeks five through ten: this is where it got real
Three cramping incidents across roughly 30 sessions. My pre-lotion rate would have been eight to twelve in that span. The foot cramps, the arch-pulling variety that are arguably worse than the calf ones stopped entirely after week six. Zero in the following eight weeks. I’m not a scientist, I don’t know exactly why. But I stopped getting foot cramps and the only thing I changed was the magnesium lotion for cramps applied every night.
I should say: I was also slightly more careful about hydration during this period because I was paying attention to the whole thing. Could that have helped? Sure. But I’ve been trying to drink more water at various points for four years and it never made a dent in the cramping by itself.
One thing I got wrong
I assumed applying it right before a morning session would help. Like putting on sunscreen before going outside. That’s not how it works. It’s a cumulative thing, the daily application builds up over weeks. Using magnesium lotion for cramps works because you do it consistently every night, not because you slather it on right before you get in the pool. I wasted about two weeks thinking the pre-workout application was the key thing.
The competition
At the end of the 14-week block I swam at a regional masters meet. Four events over two days and zero cramps. I can’t chalk that entirely up to the lotion, taper week helps, race adrenaline helps, better sleep before competition helps. But I went into that meet more confident in my legs than I had in two years.
Final thoughts
If you’re an athlete dealing with regular cramps and you haven’t tried magnesium lotion for cramps, it’s one of the lower-effort things you can add to your recovery routine. Apply it every evening to the muscles that tend to cramp. Give it at least three weeks before you judge it, the first two weeks don’t feel like anything. The product matters too; a lot of what’s out there is too diluted to do much. The version I use I found through HiRelief and the concentration is meaningfully higher than most. That seems to matter.
