Is THIS Behind Your Muscle Tension?

I'm in the midst of the most incredible decline in muscle tension of my life.

I made the case in Maybe THIS is Why You’re Hangry that a sneaky little compound called S-sulfocysteine could be behind “hypoglycemic” symptoms between meals when people aren’t measuring their blood sugar.

I’m currently in the midst of the greatest strides in declining muscle tension I’ve ever experienced, which I attribute to supplementing with 600-1200 micrograms per day of Mo-Zyme molybdenum.

I don’t think that this dose of molybdenum applies to everyone or is anything anyone should undertake without care and proper testing, and sulfur metabolism is far more complicated than just taking molybdenum.

Nevertheless, molybdenum is one of the things you need to clear sulfur properly and to prevent the accumulation of S-sulfocysteine.

This is educational in nature and not medical or dietetic advice. See terms for additional and more complete disclaimers.

Through all of my adult life, my joints have ranged on a spectrum from feeling like I need to crack them and not being able to, to being able to crack them easily and frequently. I know that there is a whole other level of health obtained by being incredibly limber and never needing to crack anything, but I have never experienced that.

During this time, I have mainly cracked my back using mobility tools. I now often crack my thoracic spine simply by elongating it while in an upright position. When I am relaxed, I can crack it just as intensely as if a chiropractor were doing it for me, simply by bringing by knees to my chest and pulling them in with my hands. When I wake up in the morning, I can do this with almost zero effort. It’s the closest to melting like butter I’ve ever experienced.

But the most incredible part is my ankles.

When I started seeing my physical therapist a few years ago, we were mainly working on my neck, but we often had to fix my ankles. My right ankle would get particularly tight, and this would cause me to spontaneously point my right foot out to the side. This is because my ankle could not outwardly rotate with my foot on the ground, so it “cheated” by pointing my whole foot out.

This would lead me to walk abnormally. My right-side stride would not push all the way back and follow through. Instead, it would hit a point where my ankle mobility was limiting and then my foot would brush off to the right side.

Bad alignment forced bad movement and bad movement reinforced bad alignment.

What was stunning about the ankle thing, though, was how it caused tension in my calves.

My PT and I could show with pre-tests and post-tests that fixing my ankle could double my range of motion on a calf stretch.

The craziest thing was that we had tried all sorts of cupping and rolling and massaging, and all of that was a ton of work for very little result. But if she simply loosened up my ankle and then pulled on it, it would pop, and my calves would instantaneously limber up.

For my PT to “fix” my ankle would sometimes take 20 minutes to a half hour of prep work trying to make it more limber. Then she’d give it a good tug, as if pulling it out of its socket. Sometimes it worked great, sometimes not so great. Sometimes there was a huge loud crack. Other times a whimper.

I’ve stuck with my daily mobility exercises but I don’t do PT anymore because I moved away and have been focusing on other things.

Now, on my current molybdenum dose, I easily crack both my ankles in seconds multiple times a day, simply by standing with my feet in place and twisting my body to the left and right.

This is a stunning improvement to me because I had never been able to crack my ankles myself and my PT would expend far more effort for far longer to get a substantially less significant mobilization.

Now, rather than my ankle getting tighter and tighter for weeks until it needs an adjustment to restore a normal gait, I intuitively recognize it’s getting tighter in the course of hours and spend five seconds putting everything back in place.

There are some chicken-and-egg questions here about the relationship between muscle tension, alignment, movement, and metabolism.

I see it this way:

• Various cultural factors have us all moving suboptimally. The most critical one is going to school. Once you start going to school you are spending hours a day sitting in chairs and you begin the precipitous decline in posture, alignment, and movement quality. If you work in an office job, or on a computer, especially if you have a laptop and a phone, you will continue what you started when you were five for the rest of your working life. If you wear socks and shoes everywhere, this reinforces the insidious decline.

• Bad posture begets bad alignment. Bad alignment begets bad movement. Bad movement reinforces bad posture and bad alignment.

• Bad alignment makes the soft tissues tense up to protect the joints.

• Moving badly with bad alignment makes them tense up even more, because joints are in worse danger when they are moving badly than when they are sitting still in a bad position.

• Soft tissue tension then reinforces the bad alignment and bad movement. The tension is there to protect your joints from injury, not to make you move correctly. It’s a fear response.

• If you introduce even worse misalignment with injuries, you compound the problem.

• Movement training, manual therapy, and postural work can correct this.

• However, for metabolic reasons, some people have higher baseline muscle tension and others have lower baseline muscle tension. If you have metabolically higher muscle tension, correcting it is an uphill battle. If you have metabolically lower muscle tension, correcting it becomes easy.

I think this that for most people this is driven by neurologically controlled muscle tone. Glutamate and its assistant S-sulfocysteine promote greater muscle tone. Glycine and GABA, and their assistant taurine, promote lower muscle tone.

What you want isn’t high or low muscle tone, but rather optimal regulation. You want the Goldilox tone, which changes according to context and varies according to muscle group.

However, if you have a disruption in the signaling of one of those neurotransmitters, your tone can be globally off, either too high or too low.

I have noticed small effects from what I believe is mediated by glycine levels:

• Most glycine in the body is synthesized from glucose using NAD+, B6, and various other cofactors. (See Startled? Try Glycine for more details.) Cutting carbs in the range of 150 to 70 grams increased my muscle tension.

• High-dose biotin (10 milligrams per day) increased my muscle tension and my lactate. I take this to mean it overburdened my respiratory chain, which would have lowered the amount of NAD+ available to synthesize glycine from carbohydrate.

• Taking 20 grams of glycine a day mitigated but did not abolish the increase in tension that came from cutting carbs. That makes me think part of it was glycine, but part of it was from the increase in sulfur catabolism that is expected on a lower carb intake.

However, none of that compares to the very dramatic impact I have gotten from supplementing with molybdenum.

In the roughly 2.5 months I’ve been on high-dose molybdenum, I have spent a month with a net carb intake of 340 grams per day and the rest of the time with a net carb intake of 40 grams per day. The higher carb intake had a very slight effect in decreasing muscle tension, but at the expense of generating anxiety between meals and making it hard to feel normal or get enough sleep without adding a lot of calories and gaining weight. The low carb intake fixed that in less than one day, and has had only the slightest impact in raising muscle tension. The fact that my muscle tension is at an all-time low for my adult life on 40 grams of net carbs and 600 micrograms of molybdenum speaks volumes to how much more important the molybdenum is for me than the carb intake.

I will be writing more in the future about the very complex topic of dealing with sulfur catabolism.

Labwork for molybdenum is covered in the Cheat Sheet.

A brief discussion of my labs and how I used them to decide on molybdenum supplementation and to ensure my copper status is safe is available to Masterpass members below. You can sign up for the Masterpass here. You can learn more about the Masterpass here.

Masterpass members, head over to the lab work discussion here:

Do you have muscle tension? What has helped? Let me know in the comments!

The Sulfur Protocol

Click below to get my Sulfur Protocol:

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