My Wife Woke Me Up At 2 A.M. With Leg Cramps. That's How I Ended Up Building A Magnesium Supplement.
For two decades my family made one product: a natural relief oil my father started in a small Australian town in 2005. This is the story of why we finally made a second one, and what most of the supplement aisle gets wrong about sleep.
My wife woke me at 2 a.m. a few years ago. She was 58. Her legs were cramping again. She'd been awake since midnight and she was tired in the way you get when you haven't really slept properly in months.
I'd love to tell you I had the answer for her that night. I didn't.
What I had, sitting on the bedside table, was a roll-on bottle of our oil. The one my father built this whole company around twenty years ago. She uses it every day for her shoulder. It is wonderful for what it's designed to do.
But the oil doesn't help you sleep. The oil doesn't relax your nervous system. The oil doesn't fix the fact that the average American adult is walking around magnesium-deficient and has no idea.
I told her I'd think about it. I went back to bed. I lay there in the dark.
That night is the reason Outback Magnesium+ exists.
A short note about my father
I should back up a minute, because part of why I'm writing this is to explain how someone gets to be 60 years old and decides to start something new.
My father is Ralph Linford. He's the one who created our original oil. In 2005, at the age of 80, he refused to take pharmaceutical painkillers for his arthritis, drove into the Australian outback to find a healer named Bardo, and came home with the formula that became the topical we've now shipped over 2.1 million bottles of.
He was a stubborn man about ingredients. He wouldn't compromise the formula to hit a price point. He wouldn't add filler to the bottle to make the label look impressive. He had four ingredients he believed in, and he didn't put a fifth one in just because the marketing team wanted it.
I learned how to be in this business from him. So when I sat down to think about what to do about my wife and the customer letters that had been piling up about sleep, I knew exactly what kind of bottle I was not going to make.
The letters that were already piling up
For about two years before that 2 a.m. wake-up, customer service had been forwarding me a particular kind of letter. The customer would write to say the oil was great for their daytime aches, but they were still up at 2 a.m. with cramping legs. Or they were tossing through the night. Or they were getting older and losing the kind of deep, restorative sleep they used to take for granted, and they wanted to know if we made anything else for that.
We didn't. For 18 years, our family made one product. One.
The polite answer was that there was a perfectly good supplement aisle at every drugstore in America and they could go pick something off the shelf. But every time I gave that answer, I felt a little uneasy about it. Because I'd read the labels on those shelves. And I knew what was actually in most of those bottles.
So I sat down and started reading the research. Not the marketing. The research.
What I learned that made me angry
Here is what nobody in the magnesium business wants to tell you.
The form of magnesium that ends up in the cheapest bottle on the drugstore shelf, which is the bottle most people buy first, is called magnesium oxide. It is the least absorbable form of magnesium your body can be given. Most published estimates put its bioavailability somewhere around 4 percent. The other 96 percent passes through and, on the way through, pulls water into your gut. That's the cramping. That's the urgent bathroom trip. That's the "I don't think magnesium works for me, it just upsets my stomach" experience that millions of Americans have had.
It's not that magnesium doesn't work. It's that the form most people buy first doesn't work.
The forms that do work are called magnesium citrate and magnesium bisglycinate chelate. They absorb cleanly. They're gentle on the stomach. The bisglycinate version is what most clinicians who actually study this recommend for nighttime use, because it's bound to a calming amino acid called glycine. They cost more to manufacture. They don't end up on the $9 shelf.
What we put in the bottle
It took us 18 months to land on the formula. Most of that was arguing internally about what to take out.
What we ended up with uses both of the absorbable forms of magnesium. We call the blend our TwinChelate Blend, which sounds fancy but really just means we use a 2:1 ratio of bisglycinate chelate and citrate, the way you'd use two different kinds of yeast in bread. Together they deliver 300mg of elemental magnesium per serving, which is roughly the amount the average American adult is short of on any given day.
Then we added the things magnesium needs alongside it to actually do its job. B3, B6, B12, methyl folate, and zinc. Magnesium doesn't work in isolation in the body. It depends on these co-factors. Most brands leave them out because adding them costs money. We didn't.
Then we added two herbs that have been used for muscle relaxation and restful sleep since the 1800s: cramp bark (a North American shrub, named exactly what it sounds like) and passionflower (a flowering vine traditionally used for evening calm).
That's the whole formula. No mystery proprietary blends. No filler ingredients to pad the supplement facts panel. No "30 magical ingredients" theater. Just the things the body needs at night to do what it's supposed to do on its own.
I think my father would have approved of this one. He was strict about that kind of thing.
What my wife said three weeks in
I gave my wife the first batch we ever made. I didn't tell her what was in it. I just told her to take it before bed, every night, and to give it three weeks before she made up her mind.
She came down to the kitchen on the second Tuesday.
She said the leg cramps had stopped. She said she'd slept through the night four times that week. She said she'd been waking up before her alarm, which she hadn't done since she was about 45. And she asked, with the suspicion she's always carried about anything I sell her, what was actually in the bottle.
I handed her the supplement facts panel. She read it carefully. She told me it was a good formula.
(My wife does not give those compliments lightly.)
The letters from other people's families
Once we started shipping Magnesium+ to actual customers, the same kind of letters my wife would have written started showing up in the inbox.
The promise I want to make you
Here is what I'd like you to do, if you've read this far.
I'd like you to try Outback Magnesium+ for a full year. Take it nightly, 30 to 60 minutes before bed. Give it the 2 to 4 weeks it needs to build up properly in your system. Pay attention to how you sleep, how your legs feel, how you wake up.
If at any point in those 365 days you decide it isn't for you, write to us. Call us. Text us. Send a smoke signal. We'll refund every penny of your purchase.
You keep the bottles. There's nothing to send back. No return label. No partial refund. No fine print about how many bottles you opened.
Worst-case scenario, you've got a few bottles of supplements you can give to someone in your family who needs them.
I hope you do try it. And I hope, more than anything, that the next 2 a.m. wake-up in your house is about something other than not being able to sleep.
Yours,
Mark Linford