CBD And Recovery For Athletes

Recovery is key to greater performance.

It's important to understand the biggest fitness gains don’t come from working out hard. The key is to manage recovery, which allows an athlete to regularly do challenging workouts.

Great workouts aren't happenstance or a fluke. A great workout can be an exciting glimpse of your full potential as an athlete. You can more often and better reach your potential – by getting your recovery right. Recovery is a cornerstone to CannaTape Sport because we formulated our transdermal CBD (derived from Hemp), White Willow bark extract, and MSM to fight inflammation, combined with DMSO for its powerful transdermal quality, Menthol, Peppermint essential oil for cooling these ingredients give you the confidence to know you are good to go for your next challenging workout. I once asked a coach of mine why do you think a teammate of mine was so good? Was it God-given talent, was it his size? What he said and it always resonated with me was, “He’s good to go every day, I’ve never seen him dogging it through a workout or practice. It’s 100% all the time with him”. That was a great point, and what I think my coach was saying in a roundabout way - my teammate managed his recovery properly from our toughest workouts so that the next practice he was able to perform at his highest level and therefore made the most of every time we hit the field.

Anyone can go out and feel the immediate effects of a single workout. But the key is to manage those workouts and manage your recovery in such a way that you can improve and continue to challenge your body as an athlete. It's the steady accumulation of working out and the frequency of those workouts that lead to real improvement.

There is also a subjective aspect to recovery. When you repeatedly feel you're getting less than you hoped for, you're more likely to become discouraged and less likely to dig down when it comes time to push. The same thing can happen when your workouts feel stale (See some tips for refreshing your workout here). You may feel physically fine – but mentally you just can't muster the willpower to train as you want and your efforts are compromised.

A challenging workout provides stimulus for your body to improve in a few ways by either building muscle, increasing endurance, or improving aerobic capacity. Think of a time when you ran to your limit. Your body reacts preparing for the next time you do this level of training by building more and stronger muscle fibers. But the downside, and as we have all experienced – afterward you really don't "feel better." You feel tired, you feel sore, and not likely going to feel like or capable of lifting more weight, running faster, or riding further the day after. These long or hard workouts cause microscopic muscle tears and can lead to Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) and Exercise-Induced Inflammation within 24-48hrs. But as time passes and the stress adaption process runs its course you get fitter and stronger in time. 

So, where does CBD and CannaTape Sport figure into all this? Proper training is a physical and a mental game. Understanding how both physical and psychological factors come into play and knowing your endocannabinoid system plays a key crucial role. Because this system helps your body cope with stress, mood, sleep, immune system, metabolism, and hormonal systems. It makes sense to say, CBD aids in balancing your endocannabinoid system (that deals with all those previously mentioned) - then, therefore, helps balance your workouts both physically and mentally.

In addition, CBD on its own is a powerful inflammation fighter. By nature, the majority of athletic injuries are soft tissue related. So calming areas of as well as general inflammation on a cellular level is an excellent strategy to shorten recovery time allowing your body to recover from DOMS, general soreness, aches, pains, and sprains without exposing your body to the dangers of over-the-counter medications (i.e. NSAIDs such as Ibuprofen) prescribed products (i.e. corticosteroids such as cortisone) while effective... lead to well-documented unpleasant side effects.

It can not be overstated the importance of sleep for an athlete. First, no one will tell you their best workout happened the day after a restless night. CBD is well documented to reduce stress and anxiety. Help in both those areas contributes to better and more restful sleep that should lead to faster recovery (to read more about CBD and Sleep see our other article here). High functioning and highly competitive athletes tend to have anxiety and insomnia issues so introducing CBD into their system, especially around bedtime or post workouts will help with recovery.