Can CBD Enhance Your Endurance?

CBD is looking to become the health supplement of the 21st century as more of its benefits are unearthed and more people adopt it as a result. Nowadays, you can find CBD products everywhere, so it’s now harder to ignore. As more states legalize cannabis and CBD, we’ll see more of it pervade in our daily lives.

With that said, CBD has since become more embedded in sports and fitness. Some of CBD’s biggest advocates are professional athletes who tout its powerful anti-inflammatory effects for pain management and recovery. That has then created interest in studying CBD’s effects on physical performance, especially when it comes to endurance.

Let’s take a look at how CBD can affect your aerobic and anaerobic stamina, which may help you perform better, whether it’s getting through a workout or playing a sport.

Is CBD Banned for Athletes?

The year 2018 was big for CBD. Not only did the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill make the cultivation of hemp legal in the US (as long as it has a THC level of below 0.3%), but it also had its banned status in sports overturned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). After that, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) followed suit as well.

This gave athletes in both amateur and professional competition a green light to incorporate CBD in their supplementation and recovery regimen. No longer do they have to just depend on opiates for pain management as they can now take CBD without testing positive in drug tests and get competitive sanctions as a result.

CBD is also legal in the UK and the EU, so more athletes around the world now have greater access to CBD, letting them use it recreationally, during training, and leading up to game day to soothe the nerves and manage their anxiety.

CBD and the Heart

As it’s now widely known, CBD has incredible anti-inflammatory effects that can be beneficial on one’s health. But it goes even further than that, with studies coming out about CBD being good for treating a wide range of debilitating illnesses like diabetes and Huntington’s disease.

Also, there is now a growing body of evidence that suggests CBD being incredibly beneficial to one’s cardiovascular system as well. For instance, according to one study, CBD directly affects both acute and time-dependent vasorelaxation of arteries, which improves blood flow and relieves hypertension.

This is a very important benefit as the health of your arteries can certainly affect your longevity as many life-threatening conditions have a lot to do with aneurysms, dissections, and other catastrophic failures of arteries due to prolonged hypertension.

Therefore, if you wish to keep your heart in good shape in order to strengthen it, the major blood vessels should also be in good shape. It looks like CBD can definitely affect your cardiovascular health at the most fundamental level, making you better able to build stamina through training.

CBD and Stamina

Yes, CBD can directly affect your stamina. Much of how your muscles work is due to the transmissions from your brain. CBD seems to have a direct effect on the 5-HT1A receptors in the brain that are activated by serotonin, which is commonly known as the happiness chemical.

However, serotonin’s job isn’t only in mood regulation, but also how your body deals with its energy stores. A decrease in serotonin is directly proportional to a decrease in energy, as well as an increase in physical and mental fatigue as a result. The more serotonin there is flowing in your system, the more energetic you feel.

Therefore, if there’s more serotonin around at one time, the more energy you’ll have and the longer you can go on with your training, which then lets you build more stamina. You’ll have a lot less of those slow days, when you usually don’t feel like training. Thus, CBD can actually give you more motivation to work out and perform.

It also helps that CBD lets you remain feeling energetic after training, and then help with your body recover afterwards.

CBD and Blood Sugar

Another factor that affects the body’s overall stamina is being able to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. After all, the body can’t move if there is no constant source of fuel. It’s known that inflammation in the body is one of the main causes of insulin resistance, which then leads to Type 2 Diabetes. 

Being a powerful anti-inflammatory, CBD can definitely help counteract that insulin resistance, as well as aid the body’s immune system. By helping in regulating the metabolism of sugar into glycogen, the body gains a deeper pool of readily-available energy for strenuous physical activity, making sure that you’re less susceptible to “hitting the wall” while in the middle of exertion.

And since you’re able to better regulate and utilize your blood sugar, less insulin needs to be present in your system, thus less fat will be stored in the body. In turn, your body composition will be kept more optimized as less fat is stored and your muscles will take up a larger portion of your body. The more muscle you have, the better your metabolism will be, and even less fat will be stored.

Conclusion

With more and more evidence stacking on top of each other to prove that CBD is indeed beneficial to the body, it’s becoming harder and harder to claim the contrary.  This is even more so that we now have potential proof of its direct impact on athletic performance, especially in building stamina through multiple aspects.

Taking a CBD tincture or eating some CBD gummies can make your cardiovascular system more robust, your nervous system sharper and more uplifted, and your metabolism more balanced. All of these contribute to your body being better able to regulate itself during both strenuous activities and rest, which contributes a lot to the building of one’s endurance.

After training and performance, CBD then helps the body recover from damage and pain with its proven anti-inflammatory effects, letting you be able to relax and better manage pain throughout your body. No wonder many celebrities and professional athletes are jumping on-board the CBD bandwagon these days, and that’s definitely a good thing.