if your legs or another part of your body turn to jelly or feel like jelly, they suddenly feel very weak because you are nervous or frightened.
In fact, stress and chronic stress often cause heavy, tired, jelly-like, rubbery, weak, and stiff legs feelings because of how stress affects the body's muscles, including those in the legs.
Leg weakness can be caused by a variety of medical conditions, some of which are serious. Possible causes include stroke, systemic diseases, inflammatory conditions, nerve damage, muscle disorders, and medication side effects.
As a result, people with heart failure often feel weak (especially in their arms and legs), tired and have difficulty performing ordinary activities such as walking, climbing stairs or carrying groceries.
Causes of Leg Fatigue or Heaviness
They include: Varicose veins: The leg veins become enlarged. Peripheral arterial disease (PAD): Buildup of fat deposits in the artery walls, thus, causing inadequate circulation of blood in the legs. Overtraining syndrome: Excess training or physical activities to improve performance.
People will often experience shaky or weak legs when dealing with vascular issues in the leg, like deep vein thrombosis or blood clots. Clots are very serious if untreated because they could break off into the bloodstream and travel to an artery in the lungs, blocking blood flow.
Several medical conditions can make a person feel weak, shaky, and tired. They include dehydration, irregular heart beat, Parkinson's disease, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Treatment will depend on the condition a person has.
Another common symptom of chronic anxiety is weakness in the muscles, most commonly experienced in the legs and sometimes the arms. During the fight or flight response, the body is preparing to take action against danger.
Vitamin D helps your body use calcium. But when you're deficient in this vitamin, your legs may feel weak, sore and heavy. A vitamin E deficiency may be another reason your legs feel heavy after a run.
Vitamin D, magnesium, and calcium are all quite important for building bones and muscle tissue. Moreover, vitamin D deficiencies are exceedingly common among the elderly, and research has clarified that correcting that deficiency with supplements can help improve a person's strength.
The weakness can make your legs feel heavy, as if they are being weighed down by something. They may also ache and hurt. Some people with MS describe it as like having bags of sand attached to their legs. This muscle weakness combined with MS fatigue can be upsetting.
Combining running and walking with strength training and other forms of aerobic exercise like swimming, elliptical training and cycling can add variety to your workout and can greatly improve your performance. Sports like soccer and basketball are great for improving leg power as well.
You may feel mildly fatigued because of overwork, poor sleep, worry, boredom, or lack of exercise. Any illness may cause fatigue. It usually goes away as the illness clears up. Most of the time, mild fatigue occurs with a health problem that will improve with home treatment.
Often, the cause of weakness or pain in the legs when walking is a narrowing of the space around nerves that carry signals to the lower part of the body. When symptoms affect your legs, the condition is typically lumbar spinal stenosis.
Proper rest reduces the chance of health issues and undue stress on the body. People who stand all day for work are also at risk for leg-related symptoms, including tired, heavy legs. If possible, these individuals should take frequent breaks to rest their legs and avoid overuse.
However, tremors and other movement disorders are associated with vitamin deficiency, most vitamins B1, B6 and especially B12. B12 is very important for keeping your nervous system in good working order. Severe lack of Vitamin B12 is rare, but shakiness and tremors can occur even in mild deficiency.
Make an appointment with your health care provider if:
You have pain during or after walking. You have swelling in both legs. Your pain gets worse. Your symptoms don't get better after a few days of treating them at home.
Injuries and conditions affecting the low back cause more than just pain; they can cause sudden or on-going weakness in the legs, hips or feet. Back pain may even create weakness in the arms and hands.
These problems can come back or get worse after COVID as you are not using your joints and muscles as much as before. Using your joints and muscles less than you would normally can lead to them becoming weak and deconditioned, and you might find it hard to: Stand up. Climb stairs.
Warning signs and symptoms of heart failure include shortness of breath, chronic coughing or wheezing, swelling, fatigue, loss of appetite, and others. Heart failure means the heart has failed to pump the way it should in order to circulate oxygen-rich blood throughout the body.
People with heart failure have a tendency to retain fluid. This appears as swollen ankles and legs because of excess fluid building up. You may notice that your shoes don't fit and socks appear tight or leave a prominent indent above the ankle.