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5 Ways Athletes Can Benefit From CBD

5 Ways Athletes Can Benefit From CBD

 

Thanks to how CBD impacts the body, it may help to boost performance, speed up recovery, and reduce pain.

Read on to learn more about how you can use CBD to improve your performance and your health.

Why Athletes Should Use CBD

When you work out, you put stress on your body to encourage it to grow. By breaking down muscle fibers, you allow them to grow back, stronger and faster than they were before.

But anyone who has ever pushed themselves hard when training knows that this process comes with difficulties. If you push too hard, recovery can take you out of the game for days at a time, and injuries are even harder to bounce back from.

Even when you’re physically at your best, if your energy levels are low or you feel stressed or depressed, it can tough to perform well. At its extreme, fatigue, depression, or anxiety can keep you from getting out of the house, stifling your growth altogether.  

Fortunately, nutritional supplements exist that can help us take on all these challenges and be the best that we can be. The newest performance-enhancing natural supplement to hit the market is CBD.

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a compound extracted from the Cannabis sativa plant that offers impressive advantages for human health. CBD has been found to:

  • Fight inflammation
  • Combat oxidative damage
  • Improve mood
  • Reduce stress
  • Enhance blood flow
  • Protect brain health and function
  • Relieve pain

With such a long list of potential benefits, it’s no wonder that more and more athletes are adding CBD to their supplement regimen. Read on to learn about the five major advantages athletes supplementing with CBD experience.

1. CBD Speeds Recovery and Fights Fatigue

When you work out, you put stress on your body to encourage it to grow. This physical stress results in increased oxidative damage, too much of which can harm performance and slow recovery. What’s more, it can lead to mental and physical fatigue.  

By reducing oxidative damage, CBD may help athletes recover faster and perform better. The faster we recover, the more we can work out and the better we’ll feel when we do.

2. CBD Helps to Reduce Pain

Inflammatory pain is the most common pain that athletes experience. This is the type of pain that occurs when you work your muscles to their max or when you injure yourself. Inflammatory pain is traditionally treated with over-the-counter non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like Advil (ibuprofen) or Aleve.

Unfortunately, long-term use of NSAIDs is incredibly detrimental to your health. Excessive use of these painkillers has been tied to heart attacks, strokes, gastrointestinal bleeding, kidney damage, and more.

Researchers are beginning to examine the potential of using CBD as a safer treatment for inflammatory pain. Animal studies have found CBD to effectively reduce this type of pain, and if the same holds true for humans, CBD could work as a safer alternative to NSAIDs.

3. CBD Can Promote an Optimal Mood

Most of us have struggled at one time or another with stress, anxiety, or depression. All three of these can deter us from leaving the house and getting active. Even when we push through these emotions, they can wreak havoc on how well we perform.

Depression and anxiety are known as motivational disorders, and research suggests that CBD may help. Even small-scale human studies have found CBD to help with certain forms of anxiety.

If you find that pre-game jitters, anxiety, or a depressed mood negatively impact your athletic prowess, CBD may provide relief.

4. CBD Helps You Get a Good Night’s Sleep

If you have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep throughout the night, or sleeping for a full 8 hours, you may be suffering from insomnia.

Poor sleep hinders athletic recovery and performance. We need a full 8 hours for our bodies to heal after a strenuous workout. Plus, when we don’t sleep enough, we won’t be able to give it our all the following day.

If your sleep troubles come from pain, anxiety, or another condition that CBD can help, it may also help you sleep better. But for healthy individuals, limited research suggests that CBD can promote wakefulness.

Try CBD out for yourself if you have sleep troubles to see whether you find improvement. These and other studies suggest that CBD may serve those with conditions that make sleep harder, but not healthy individuals.

5. CBD Can Help You Lose Weight

One study of more than 4,000 adults found that those who use or have used, marijuana, tend to weigh less than non-users. While this study only outlines the link between whole-plant cannabis use and weight, new research suggests that CBD itself may promote weight loss through alterations in our fat cells.

The idea that all fat is “bad” and leads to weight gain is a common misconception. Humans have two types of fat cells: brown and white. White fat is our “bad” fat that leads to excess fat storage and weight gain. But you can actually change how your fat cells work by turning this white fat into brown fat. Research suggests that the higher your quantities of brown fat, the lower your BMI is likely to be.

CBD increases the browning of adipose tissue, per the findings of a preliminary study. Simply by taking CBD, you may find weight loss easier.

Professional Athletes Are Already Using CBD

With how new CBD is to the supplement market, there is still a lot of research that needs to be done before we can know exactly what to expect. Fortunately, a lot of people around the world are using CBD and sharing their experiences.

Andrew Talansky, a former pro cyclist and triathlete, has touted CBD oil for its benefits following a hip flexor injury. In Outside magazine, Talansky was quoted as saying,

“I took it for a couple of weeks, and there was a noticeable difference immediately. And it wasn’t just that my hip was feeling better. I was less anxious, and I was sleeping better.”

Multiple NFL players to have shared their CBD success stories. Titan’s linebacker Derrick Morgan regularly uses CBD in hopes of preserving his brain and protecting it from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). With the devastating news stories that come out far too often about a football player suffering from CTE, some athletes want to be proactive.

 

Ready to improve your life (and athletic performance) with CBD? Shop our full collection at one of our three store locations in Toronto, Hamilton and Burlington or right here!
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