Magnesium is one of my all time favorites for a variety of reasons which I'll get into in this presentation. So magnesium it's an essential life mineral and hundreds of processes of the body literally really critical for a lot of things including sugar metabolism, glucose, brain and nervous system function including nerves immune function, and also in energy and protein regulation and production. So the sources anything green basically has chlorophyll and you can find magnesium in that green leafy vegetables. Lemons apples, figs unrefined cereals are some of the basic sources of dietary magnesium. How it works, it's a muscle relaxer. Just as a side note is one of my favorite supplements that I use and recommend for all my athletes, particularly when training in hot weather ambient temperature.

It just really helps with recovery and most muscle function feeling less sore and recovering after some hard workouts. But for the purposes of this talk, it's about sleep. That relaxes muscle tone. It's documented in sleep studies to help with restless legs and periodic limb movement disorder, which I talked a little bit about in the sleep problems section. And the bonus here is that it improves sleep efficiency. This was documented in a sleep article 1998 the references there for you if you're curious.

So some of the other benefits, asthma and migraine headaches when I was working in a large urban trauma mercy center, we used a ton of magnesium when we had a crashing asthmatic who was about to get intubated and put in the ventilator. Magnesium, oftentimes an IV form was enough to really calm things down, relax the bronchial tubes and really kind of stave off a crisis situation, and it works for migraines too. I've know plenty of people who have taken it in supplement form to decrease their migraines. I've used it a lot in IV form and treating migraine headaches in the emergency department also has some cardiovascular benefits, decreases blood pressure, less strain on the heart is the theory behind that. And also for PMS, obviously if it's a muscle relaxer can help some uterine cramps potentially, and has been believed to help with PMS symptoms. So how much is enough and how much is too much?

Well, in the US anyways, the RTA recommends between 303 20 milligrams per day for females and for men a little higher 400 to 420. Those are just rough numbers. I think it's based largely on the notion that men are typically larger and women in terms of body mass, not always, but that's the recommendation. So being that this is an educational course and I'm your your teacher. For this purposes, I'm going to share a functional medicine perspective and how I recommend magnesium for my clients and athletes and how I take it myself and so between 200 400 milligrams taken twice a day taken in the morning, usually wait till I'm done working out and take it then and then again in the evening, whether after supper before bedtime for the sleep benefits and also from covery From a physical training standpoint, so that's just some anecdotal information for you, but it's replete in the functional medicine literature.

So side effects, not likely for most supplements, I guess I'll get into the specifics of certain supplements in a moment. But the diarrhea is one of the one of the side effects. And people who have heart disease and kidney disease really need to talk to their primary personal physician before adding magnesium in terms of supplements to their diet. So what types of magnesium are good and what are not so good? Well, the big box stores so magnesium oxide, that's really not well absorb it. So basically, it's a waste of your money.

Okay, so you see magnesium oxide as the primary form of magnesium, I would put the bottle down and move on to something else. The forms that I typically recommend would be magnesium glycinate, and mallet and those are probably the the easiest to find. mag citrate. However, that's something that comes in a liquid form that we use for constipation and evacuation so be cautious with that. I do on occasion take some eggs citrate, just to kind of mix up the different forms of magnesium just seems to help it be absorbed better, whether it's it's born on the literature research data, I'm not sure but just wanted to throw that out there for you