A New Way to Prevent Migraines
Michael Solberg, who works at the State Department, has had migraine headaches for about 10 years. He recently wrote me about how he discovered a new way to prevent them.
They’d been slowly getting worse and worse as I got older. [He’s in his early thirties.] About 4 years ago, I was getting about 3 or 4 a week. Fortunately, I had abortive medication, so when I get a migraine, the medication (Zomig) makes them go away in 1-2 hours.
Doctors tried to put me on all kinds of preventive medication – Amitriptaline (sp), Atenolol, Propanolol, and finally Neurontin (which gave me severe chest pain). Finally, I called it quits with the medication and decided to go at it on my own. I knew what my triggers are (lack of sleep, dehydration, low blood sugar, neck and/or eye strain mostly).
Quite independently, while I was living in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug 2005 to July 2008, I took up rock climbing. There’s not a lot to do in Jakarta, and rock climbing — on a rock climbing wall at a mall in Jakarta — was a way to be active. It was essentially a trainer-led workout. Wall climbing in Jakarta isn’t like anywhere else I’ve ever been — the instructors do all the belaying, and if you go in the evenings, they’ll run you through drills and exercises to build strength. A couple of times, I had to do 15 consecutive climbs in 10 or 15 minutes — hence the fatigued muscles and intense sweating (it was all outdoors).
After climbing for 2 or 3 months, I noticed that I wasn’t getting migraines any more. It was weird — I was getting a stockpile of my medication because I wasn’t using it nearly as often. I went from getting migraines 3 times a week to less than 3 times a month, and the ones I did get were very weak. I began to figure out that for about 7 to 10 days after I did a hard rock climbing training session, I would be migraine free! I’d only get them if I traveled somewhere and stopped the training for a week.
At first, I narrowed it down to three possible causes:
1. When rock climbing, I would sweat profusely, so maybe I was sweating out toxins from the body.
2. When rock climbing, I was building all kinds of muscle (and, in fact, I lost about 30 pounds when doing this, and I was already pretty skinny).
3. When rock climbing, you are exposed to a lot of magnesium in the form of the chalk climbers use keep their hands dry. I’d read a lot about how some migraine suffers were shown to have magnesium deficiencies in their blood stream. A lot of us take magnesium supplements along with multivitamins.
Towards the end of my time in Jakarta, I had less time for rock climbing, so I began a training program at home. I’ve pretty much convinced myself that it was the muscle-building component of the training that made the difference.
I’m not sure when I finally decided that hypotheses 1 and 3 were wrong, but I noticed that if I do a simple workout in the gym focusing on arms, upper back, and chest, the effect is the same — migraine free for 5-7 days. When I work out in the gym, I don’t sweat nearly as much as I did when I climbed. Because I got the effect by working out in the gym, I decided that muscle building exercises was the likely culprit.
When I was at home in Arkansas a few weeks ago, I spoke to a friend of mine who’s an holistic healer. He said that when you build strength in the shoulders, upper back, and arms, you stimulate the liver to rid the body of the toxins that can build up and trigger migraines.
But no holistic healer has come up with this prevention strategy as far as I know — if you know otherwise, please let me know.
I don’t know if that’s the case, but even now when I’m not rock climbing, I go to the gym once or twice a week to work on my shoulders, chest, and arms, and I’m more or less pain-free (about 1 or 2 per month).
Incidentally, I wrote to the National Headache Foundation, but they never wrote back. I also posted on a migraine message board, but got absolutely no response. I suppose it sounds too good to be true — free therapy for migraines — but I’m not selling anything and have nothing to gain or lose if people try this or not. It’s worked for me and has kept me pain-free. When climbing, I lost all kinds of weight, and probably paid out the same amount of money per month [for climbing] that I paid for all the drugs and vitamins.
If you try this to prevent migraines, please let me know what happens.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:45 am
I had migraine during my childhood, getting worse and worse, driving me up walls. The medication I got helped a bit, but not by much.
Funny thing is, the migraine went away over night. It took some months for me to realize it, but the migraine left me the moment I moved out from my parents and quit school, both for good.
Years later, in an stressful and unhealthy relationship, I started to get migraine attacks again – I knew I had to change my life, and ending the relationship immediately endet my migraine attacks.
Funny how life works out sometimes.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
A friend of mine use to get really bad cluster headaches. They’re much worse than migraines. He was able to get rid of them by running daily, self massage, and relaxation. He thinks that energy flow and circulation were key to his success.
There was a time when he was younger that he lifted lots of weights, but that didn’t help his headaches at all. Also at one point he did huge numbers of push-ups to get rid of a headache once he had one. But the push-ups didn’t prevent him from getting them in the first place.
It’s interesting that it was the aerobic exercise that worked for him and not the muscle building.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
This contradicts what doctors repeat, that the liver has nothing to do with headaches.
Maybe it is the same case as with acne and food, they deny a relation but if you reduce fats you get less acne.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
“Not selling anything” is death for a therapy. If there’s nothing to patent, there’s no profit to be made, so who could possibly be interested (other than sufferers, of course)?
October 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
My neurologist told me that exercise is related to migraine. For many years I did about 20 minutes of exercises a day–the Royal Canadian Air Force program. It had no effect on my migraines at all. If you can suggest a particular regimen that helps, I’d be most grateful.
October 11th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Edith, maybe your exercises weren’t hard enough. I think as you get stronger the exercises need to become harder so that the difficulty — the challenge — remains high. I think only when the muscles are stressed so much that they grow does the exercise make a difference. If I do 20 pushups today it will cause my muscles to grow. But if I do 20 pushups a day for many years doing 20 pushups will no longer cause my muscles to grow.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:57 am
So between the migraine/upper-body exertion connection and the sleep/one-leg standing exertion, there seems to be a new idea about exertion and brain function. It would be intreresting to try and switch one-leg standing and upper-body exertion to see if either produced the same effects on the other conditions, and also to test other aspects of brain function — concentration or memory for instance — on either of these exertion parameters.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I used to get migraines often when I was younger, probably once a month or so. Often, I went to my soccer games even with the headache. It would feel a little better after warming up and would usually go away early in the game. It felt like getting the blood pumping would force the blood vessels to loosen up.
Now that I eat less carbs, more fat, no breakfast, I rarely (maybe once a year) get a migraine. I think cereal or high carb/low fat for breakfast plus a late lunch that started with carbs would be the trigger. Once it started, I would down softdrinks to get me through the day and collapse when I went home.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I’m a headache doctor, and none of my patients have reported this. There is certainly an association between obesity and headaches, so the weight loss could have played a part. Most headache experts, while recommending a healthy lifestyle overall including avoiding any known food triggers, getting enough and regular sleep, and moderate exercise; recommend not exercising if you feel a headache coming on.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Migraine. 3 things.
Eat low carb.
Eat ZERO grain.
Consume ZERO caffeine.
Have seen ZERO migraine in clients that implement those three suggestions.
Of course, several have complained and whined about the suggestions and still have migraines which proves nothing except some people would rather complain than feel better…
Be well,
Ben Fury, CFT, CMT
October 19th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Nathan, that’s not correct. There is a legion of physical therapists who would be more than happy to charge you for helping you fulfill an exercise cure for migraines. Seth’s anecdotes are interesting, but personal accounts can’t always be counted on as reliable evidence via the scientific method (see his posts about acne, where many a teenager is cured of acne after finally discovering the magic elixir!… at 25.) It’s very interesting that the standard advice is to avoid exercise before a migraine, though.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I have experienced this.
I have been getting migraines about twice a month since the last 15 years. However, when I went to dance class (an hour a day on alternate days–comprising of rigorous aerobic exercises and dancing, definitely working up a good sweat for an hour), I became migraine free for that period. I went to dance class for about 6 months and was migraine free during those 6 months.
December 6th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Rock climbing might have helped you because you were in direct contact with earth/ground which in my opinion was (earthing you) just like an electricity plug. So all the extra electricity that might lead to a migraine finds its way to the ground.
just a thought….
September 17th, 2011 at 7:45 am
I also was suffering from migraines that were getting worse and worse. In the past, I was able to manage them with food restrictions, medications, and massage, but about 8 months ago, it quit working. I was getting bad migraines for about 3 days a week, and I was missing work because the meds (relpax, etc.) weren’t working for me. I started rock climbing and seeing a chiropractor at around the same time. Almost immediately, my migraine frequency lessened. It has been 2 1/2 months, and I have had about three, easy to manage migraines. I’ve been working in an office for the last 10 years, and I think my upper body muscles were weak and not properly supporting my head or spine. Before joining the rock climbing gym, I worked out 2-3 times a week with weights, but I was still very weak in my upper body.
It’s just another account, but I recommend it to anyone that’s suffering to give it a try.