Megan Rapinoe, former captain of the World Cup winning U.S. Women’s team; Mike Tyson, youngest ever heavyweight boxing champion; Paul Pierce, former captain of the NBA’s Boston Celtics; Eddie Hall, crowned Strongest Man in the World in 2017; the list goes on and on and is growing every day. As professional athletes, champions, men and women whose health and fitness is their livelihood continue to promote and endorse CBD products around the globe, it is readily apparent that CBD is proving extremely beneficial to those with an active and athletic lifestyle. CBD is now permitted, used, and endorsed in the NBA, the NHL, and the NFL. In 2018 the World Anti-Doping agency removed CBD from its banned list and as a result it is now used and permitted in the Olympics and by FIFA. Athletes across the globe are embracing the positive effects of CBD!
Recreational athletes do not have agents negotiating endorsement deals for lightning-flavored sports drinks or expensive shoes on their behalf. But the incredible forces of competitive spirit and pride provide plenty of motivation for amateur athletes to better their skills. If you have any recreational league athletes in your family, you know how serious the competition can get.
But reaching the top of your game – whether it’s your company’s intra-mural league championship or an Olympic gold medal – requires hard work and the right tools. And recently, cannabidiol (CBD) has become a favorite supplement for a wide range of pros and joes in countless sports as its benefits become wider knowledge, as research progresses, and as anecdotal evidence piles up.
We might not be professional athletes, or going to the Olympics, but we all want to lead an active life. Let’s take a look at the 3Rs of an athletic lifestyle – RELIEF, RECHARGE, and RECOVER — and see how CBD can assist you in all three phases.
CBD helps you Relieve
Muscle Soreness
Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) affects us all, from gym novices to committed bodybuilders. But there’s no need for muscle soreness and inflammation to interfere with your fitness routine. Some studies have shown that the healing properties of CBD can contribute to muscle pain relief and reduced inflammation, meaning that you can get back to those reps sooner rather than later – even after leg day!
Acute discomfort after working out is all too common, whether it’s a mild tear or run-of-the-mill exhaustion. Applying topical CBD for muscle pain means you shouldn’t have to endure the after-effects of your workout for nearly as long. With their cooling and heating properties, topical CBD can ease or even eliminate those aches and discomfort.
Painkiller Alternative
Athletes in every sport can relate to having occasional pain and soreness. Pushing your body to its limits can significantly affect your muscles. As a result, many athletes turn to painkillers to relieve their pain and reduce inflammation.
The most common painkillers consumed by pro athletes are anti-inflammatories like naproxen and ibuprofen. However, in some cases, athletes may need more potent prescription drugs, which can be addictive. All of these pharmaceuticals have side-effects, the more potent ones have more potent side-effects. As a result, many athletes can end up feeling worse and face a higher risk of addiction.
CBD does not bind directly with your cannabinoid receptors, making it a safer painkiller. Research suggests that CBD can effectively reduce inflammation and pain without the harmful risk of addiction.
CBD can help you manage pain by acting on your opioid and TRPV receptors, helping you feel less pain and experience less inflammation.
Reduced Inflammation
Inflammation is a function of the immune system designed to protect and repair the body from invading bacteria, viruses, and injury. Some inflammation in the body is good—but too much inflammation can lead to a host of problems. This means that inflammation shouldn’t be eliminated. But instead, it needs to be controlled to support the body’s ability to heal and keep foreign particles in check. For an active lifestyle the key is dealing with acute inflammation, which is generally caused by the body’s reaction to an injury or illness.
Inflammation is designed to supply more blood flow to the area, and the pain you feel are signals from the brain telling you that there’s something wrong, and you should protect the damaged area.
Researchers have found that, of all the cannabinoids tested, CBD was the most potent immune response regulator. They determined that it activated the 15-lipoxygenase (15-LOX) enzyme, whose role is to terminate the inflammatory process and promote tissue regeneration and a return to homeostasis. It also suppressed the production of inflammatory molecules called leukotrienes.
CBD helps you Recharge
Appetite
Part of being an athlete is having a healthy diet. Your ECS (endocannabinoid system) helps control your appetite. By regulating ECS activity, CBD can help you attain your body fat percentage goals by helping you control your appetite.
Certain studies suggest that cannabinoids, like CBD, can help individuals achieve a smaller waist and reduced obesity rates. Unlike THC, CBD is a mild appetite suppressant that can help you relax without giving you the “munchies.” It does this by acting on the GABA-A receptor to help regulate behavior connected to hunger and appetite in a healthy way.
In addition, CBD can be beneficial for athletes with a lower insulin sensitivity by improving glucose and glycogen storage space in the muscles and liver.
Focus
Athletic performance relies on more than just being stronger and faster. A lack of focus and energy can have draining effects on your body and negatively impact your performance.
To enhance focus and boost energy, many athletes rely on pre-workout supplements. CBD can act as a natural pre-workout supplement by increasing energy, focus, and performance. Whether you lift heavy weights or run long distances, CBD may help you improve your focus and overall workout.
One of the reasons many athletes take CBD before their workouts is to reduce muscle burning and fatigue. Whether a run time or weight-lift, breaking a personal record can be challenging when your muscles are burning or tired. CBD can help athletes be their best and push their bodies further by alleviating muscle stress.
Unlike prescription medications or energy drinks that can cause adverse side effects and jitters, CBD can enhance focus and concentration abilities, offering sustained mental clarity throughout your day.
Before understanding how CBD for focus works, you must understand how the compound interacts with your body. The human body relies on the endocannabinoid system for essential brain and nerve responses. The endocannabinoid system (ECS) connects your peripheral and central nervous system with endocannabinoids (neurotransmitters) that bind to cannabinoid receptors.
You need a stable endocannabinoid system to regulate your stress, moods, emotions, memory, quality sleep, pain signals, hormones, and more. Cannabinoids from the cannabis plant can mimic the natural endocannabinoids that your body produces and trigger more endocannabinoid production, offering various health benefits, including focus.
Energy Boost
CBD can help bring about increased energy levels due to its ability to enhance protein synthesis and expression within areas of the brain associated with wakefulness. CBD also works to regulate the endocannabinoid system, which can modulate your body’s sleep-wake cycle to create lasting energy.
A study was conducted in 2014 that supported the hypothesis that CBD worked as a wake-promoting agent. Their findings showed that administration of CBD increased dopamine levels in the brain’s hypothalamus. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that promotes wakefulness and is involved in other processes such as learning and motivation, heart rate, and mood. it is known as the “feel-good neurotransmitter,” as dopamine levels rise when we are expecting or experiencing some form of perceived reward and as such, we feel higher levels of energy.
Unlike coffee, CBD doesn’t make you feel energized by pumping you full of caffeine (potentially with the jitters as side effects). Instead, a dose of CBD is thought to support the areas of your brain that are responsible for keeping you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when you need it without caffeine’s side effects. The resulting feelings of greater energy are also the result of the minimising of many of the factors that deplete your energy — anxiety, sleeplessness, pain, and stress.
CBD Helps you Recover
Sleep
There’s no denying the importance of a good night’s sleep for general wellness, but restful sleep is also vital for efficient muscle recovery and optimal athletic performance. By interacting with receptors in the body’s endocannabinoid system, CBD can encourage deeper, healthier sleep and help people with sleep disorders such as insomnia.
As an athlete, your body relies on quality sleep for recovery. Unfortunately, the stress of competition and exertion, along with the toll it takes on the body can make it difficult for athletes to get the sleep they need.
To promote better sleep and recovery, many athletes will take prescription sleeping pills or OTC medications. Unfortunately, these methods can have long-term effects on your sleep pattern.
One of the many benefits of CBD is its ability to control your sleep cycle. It does this by reducing the three primary causes of troubled sleep: Anxiety, Stress and Pain. By regulating these factors, you can achieve better and deeper sleep, which is essential for your body’s recovery.
Muscle Recovery
When we engage in intense athletics, we sustain microscopic tears to our muscle fibers. Repairing this damage is how our body builds bigger, stronger muscles, but it’s also a source of soreness and strain. CBD is a potent antioxidant, meaning it can slow cell damage, prevent inflammation, and return athletes to their peak condition quicker than before. Many athletes combat muscle strain proactively by consistently applying CBD after workouts. When used regularly, it might have a preventative effect by encouraging minor muscle repair before anything major happens, like a pulled muscle. For the best results, massage a CBD topical or oil deeply into the affected area shortly after finishing your exercise.
Among the things you immediately get after a strenuous workout are stiff muscles and painful joints. Fortunately, CBD may help relax your muscles thanks to its interaction with your endocannabinoid system. CBD is believed to stimulate muscle relaxation by inhibiting the release of hormones that induce muscle spasms and rigidity. This effect has been studied in many people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Being a powerful antioxidant, CBD can also reduce the inflammation that results from tissue damage. This enables you to move easily and freely. Indeed, multiple studies show that CBD supplements help reduce spasticity, pain, and fatigue, ultimately improving mobility.
Research-based evidence suggests that CBD speeds up the healing of broken bones. This happens when it combines with a protein called collagen – found in bones – to stimulate the growth of new bones. Even with all these listed recovery benefits that the interaction between CBD and your ECS results in, the greatest recovery benefits by far may lay in CBD’s effective improvement in dealing with your stress levels, your feelings of anxiety, and most importantly your ability to achieve deep and lasting sleep; for it is these three factors that play the greatest roll in muscle recovery. 
Stress & Anxiety
CBD is well-regarded as a stress- and anxiety-relief aid. By lessening symptoms of anxiety and stress, CBD can indirectly (and yet significantly) impact your athletic performance. It is natural to feel slightly nervous before a long run or a competition, for instance, and the overwhelming pressure and anxiety may negatively influence performance. By clearing the mind of anxious thoughts, CBD can assuage nervousness, while cognitive function and focus are dramatically improved. We’ve all been there, it’s the night before the big game and your stomach is in knots, you can’t sleep and your keep bouncing your leg up and down. This is all pretty normal behavior, most sports related stresses and anxiety are pretty common before the event and they usually wash away the minute the whistle is blown.
But what if the anxiety stays, or even worse, it intensifies. This is what’s known as performance anxiety. Performance anxiety is almost always psychological, but it can also bring on a lot of physical symptoms such as increased heartbeat, dry mouth, nausea, diarrhea and rapid breathing. This is due largely to the fact that your body misinterprets the fear of preforming as a threat to the body.
CBD stimulates our ECS in a positive way and that positive way is what helps reduce anxiety and stress. The ECS can become dysregulated when the body feels under stress, when we take CBD it helps re-balance our ECS by stopping our CB1 receptors from becoming overstimulated and by increasing the natural endocannabinoids we already possess. When we stimulate our ECS it can trigger anxiety, by stimulating our GABA receptors and increasing the firing of neurons in our brain. CBD is able to work with our GABA receptors to decrease the neurons firing, naturally inducing the calming effect GABA provides to our body.
Bubba Watson who is a two-time Master champion and all-around golf fan favorite is a leading athlete on the benefits on CBD. Watson uses CBD for game-day stress, pain management, recovery and most importantly, injury prevention. Watson who recently turned 40 says using CBD will help him prolong his career while also making sure his body doesn’t deteriorate along the way. Watson recently spoke to CNN about CBD and how it has helped his golf game and is keeping his body finely tuned.
WHEN THE BODY SAYS NO, BUT THE WILL WANTS TO GO
