If you are having pain in your muscles, try putting 2 or 3 cups of Epsom salts in a bath of hot water. Try to have the water as hot as you can stand it. Soak in the bath for at least 15 minutes.

If you cannot get into the bath, or don’t have one, try soaking a towel in a basin of hot water and Epsom salts [ 1 cup ] and lay the towel on the sore area.

I used to think that using epsom salts on sore muscles was an “old wives tale”, but I am a firm believer in it now.

If you have sciatica, you should try this. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. Sciatica is very often related to tight muscles and the salts have helped in some cases.

Tight muscles very often cause back pain, and again the salts are worth trying.

After spending six months in a foetal postion, with my knees tucked into my chest, I had to learn how walk all over again. During this time, just about every muscle in my body had seized up and contracted. I had muscle knots all over my entire body. Some as small as little dots and others the size of golf balls. The Epsom salts worked wonders for me.

How does it work ? Muscles take in nutrition, work and give out waste products. Even when you are sitting still, your muscles are still in an active state. One of the waste products is called lactic acid. This is the same stuff that makes milk taste sour. Lactic acid is one of the main things that makes muscles sore. When you use the Epsom salts, the lactic acid is drawn out by a process called osmosis.

When your brain sends a signal to a muscle, the muscle normally responds. In both cases electrical signals are generated which travel through the nerves.

Even when you are sitting still, the brain sends a signal to the muscles, telling them to assume “normal resting tension”. Without this signal, your muscles would just sort of collapse like a putty. In fact, this is what happens to many people with spinal injuries.

Now, when the muscle has achieved its correct state of tension, it sends a message back to the brain saying “Hey, I’m at the correct tension”. This is what is called a “feedback loop”.

However, if there is a lot of lactic acid in the muscles, the signal going back to the brain gets blocked. At this point, the brain does a rather strange thing. You would imagine that the brain would just say “OK, I’m not hearing from the muscle, I’ll just let things be”. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The brain actually sends a signal to the muscle to increase it’s tension. They are not sure exactly why it does this but the latest thinking is that the brain is almost trying to “squeeze” some sort of response, any response, from the muscle. Again , the brain does not hear from the muscle [ due to the blocking effect of the lactic acid ]so it once again sends a signal to the muscle telling it to increase it’s tightness. This continues until the muscle cannot tighten any more. In reality, the tightness really only continues in the muscle knots that are present, but we can think of this as being throughout the whole muscle.

What this means is that if we can get rid of the lactic acid [ through stretching, trigger-point therapy, rolfing, Epsom salts etc ] then the brain can allow the muscle to relax.

Epsom salts by themselves can only do so much, and are not a replacement fro stretching etc, but can help.

Here’s an interesting fact: if you take a muscle that has been completely stretched and has all the lactic acid removed, you can put an enormous amount of pressure on the muscle and feel almost no pain. I’ve had this done where the therapist has put all his force on my leg and I’ve barely felt a thing. However, that was not the case before treatment.

This post was mainly about Epsom, you are welcomed to comment here about Epsom.

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