The recovery routine is crucial to creating healthy habits and yet often one of the most overlooked aspects of an athlete’s overall performance and success.
The reality? When it comes to performance, recovery isn’t just an important aspect of your training, it’s equally as important as the training itself. By mastering your recovery game, you will prepare your body to push through the pain, train harder day after day, and ultimately crush your goals that once seemed impossible.
Now, you may already have a slate of stretches, products, supplements, and routines you use to release tension and ease aching muscles, but today, we’re going to amp things up.
How?
By incorporating CBD into your recovery routine.
You might be wondering, is CBD good for muscle recovery?
The short answer: absolutely. The long answer: well, keep reading!
Key Takeaways:
- CBD has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties that can help soothe muscle tension and enhance the recovery process.
- CBD is non-psychoactive—that is, it won’t get you high.
- You can take CBD in three main forms—sublingual, topical, or digestive—depending on your CBD product needs and routine.
The Science of Exercise Recovery
Exercise and workout recovery entails allowing your muscle soreness to heal prior to your next workout. According to Current Opinion in Physiology:
The overall goal of postexercise recovery is to restore homeostasis in many of the body’s physiological systems. After exercise, fluids and fuels lost or consumed during exercise must be replaced, body temperature and regular cardiovascular function must be restored, and damaged tissue must be repaired.
Proper recovery from muscle inflammation is what ultimately allows your body to push harder and encourages muscle growth. It heals the micro-injuries in the damaged muscle tissue, strengthening them in the process.
Common recovery for sore muscles can include activities like:
- Stretching
- Cupping
- Active recovery movements
- Massage
- Acupuncture
According to a 2018 meta-analysis, all of these “share common processes that allow decreases in exercise-induced muscle damage and inflammation.”
How Does CBD Fit Into This?
To understand CBD’s active role in recovery, it’s important to briefly review what it is.
Cannabidiol (CBD) is one of 100 chemical cannabinoid compounds that can be found in the cannabis plant. CBD itself is derived from the hemp plant (which by law cannot contain more than 0.3% THC).
CBD partially binds to receptors in your ECS (endocannabinoid system), a system that helps regulate your:
- Mood
- Organ systems
- Pain response
- Inflammatory response
- Sleep
- Memory
- Motor function
- Appetite
Although the plant is part of the marijuana family, the CBD that comes from it is not itself psychotropic; that is, it can’t get you high. That’s due to the low concentrations of THC, which is the cannabinoid that causes the tell-tale marijuana high.
The interaction of CBD with the endocannabinoid system causes many positive effects throughout your body.
How CBD Benefits Your Recovery
So, why use CBD to help with your recovery from physical activity? Because it addresses many of the issues that tend to hamper your body’s ability to recuperate.
While there are dozens of physiological benefits, the essential ones include:
- Reduces post-exercise inflammation – Do you experience swelling and aching after a hard workout? Do problem areas redden? Then you’re likely dealing with inflammation. This is your body’s natural response to injury and heavy lifting. Although it’s part of the healing process, inflammation and muscle pain can make it difficult to perform at peak levels the next day.
Taking CBD or applying it to hotspots increases blood flow, aids muscle recovery, and alleviates tightness. All of this helps you recuperate faster and more effectively.
- Eases joint stiffness – If you’ve ever had stiffness in your joints, you know how much of an impact it can have on your mobility and strength, particularly when even the slightest movement causes discomfort. For example, rock climbers will have significant trouble gripping their handholds or maneuvering into positions if the joints in their wrists and fingers aren’t loose. By applying CBD topicals directly to the impacted areas, you can lubricate immobile joints and get back to the task at hand.
- Soothes aches and discomfort – Being sore is your body’s natural response to a hard day’s work or an intense workout. It’s how your muscles signal to you that they’re in restoration mode. But soreness and muscle fatigue shouldn’t be a reason to take a rest day, especially if there are no serious injuries.
By stimulating your ECS, CBD works as a natural alternative to enhance your post-workout routine and promote an optimal recovery process. It helps reduce both the discomfort and tightness you experience in your muscles. This ensures that pain won’t overly impact your sleep, daily activity, or exercise.
- Supports a deep and restful sleep – A full night’s rest is one of the most important ways your body recuperates, particularly when it’s exhausted. When you are running low on sleep, it’s extremely taxing both mentally and physiologically. Sleep deprivation negatively impacts your ability to recover and respond to physical activity.
CBD can help calm your mind and relax your body so that you fall asleep faster. And then when you fall asleep, it helps you stay that way. With it, you’re sure to get the most restorative benefits from every single REM cycle.
At the end of the day: the faster you recover, the quicker you can get back into the gym. That’s the ultimate goal, right? Big gains, quick turnarounds.
For that, CBD can help.
CBD Uses—Sublingual, Topical, and Ingestion
So, how do you take CBD?
There are three common ways to use CBD products to enhance your exercise recovery:
1. Sublingually
2. Topically
3. Ingestion
Each type relieves your muscles in a slightly different physiological way. So, it’s up to you to pick and choose what works best for your anatomy and recovery goals.
#1 Sublingual CBD Use
Sublingual, or below the tongue, means that the skin under your tongue is the primary vehicle for absorption. Sprays, tinctures, lozenges, and drops are all sublingually absorbed. A major benefit of sublingual formats, like oils, is that they are thought to bring quick relief.
According to a 2018 study:
Oral bioavailability [of CBD taken sublingually] is low (between 13 and 19%) but you can increase its potential. As CBD is a highly lipophilic molecule, it is logical that CBD may dissolve in the fat content of food, increasing its solubility, and absorption and therefore bioavailability.
Thus, you can use liquid CBD oil for recovery via Resilience’s full-spectrum CBD oil or its full isolate CBD oil. The main difference between the two is that the full spectrum oil includes other compounds from the hemp plant, whereas the full isolate is CBD in its purest form.
Topical CBD Use
Topical products are creams and CBD lotion. The CBD is then absorbed through the skin, affecting the area where you used it. Subdermal CBD applications are meant to go straight to the source of your discomfort. It provides the most localized effects, especially when you mix it with ingredients like Eucalyptus, Menthol, and Rosemary.
Resilience offers both topical sports cream and body lotion, as well as bath bombs (in both Recover and Revive).
Ingested CBD Use (Gummies!)
You can also use CBD for recovery by ingesting it in the form of chewables such as gummies.
Of all the methods discussed here, absorption is slowest when CBD is ingested because of the time it takes to digest and then metabolize. Regardless, gummies are a perfect, mess-free, on-the-go option.
Since they take about 45 minutes to 2 hours to kick in, you can pop one when you get out of bed to start your morning and another after your workout.
It’s the recipe to feeling great all day long.
Our CBD gummies are made with fruit juice and safflower oil, the latter having additional anti-inflammatory benefits on top of those already in the CBD!
Will CBD Show Up on A Drug Test?
If you’re an athlete, particularly one that’s participating in competitive sports, there’s no point to recovery if you end up being barred from competition.
So, naturally, you might wonder whether CBD would cause you to fail a drug test.
The answer to that is no. Our CBD topicals use broad-spectrum Hemp CBD, meaning there’s zero THC content. Even our full-spectrum products are guaranteed to contain less than .3% THC.
Worry not. You can take Resilient CBD for your recovery without fear of failing a test!
Resilience CBD – Your Recovery Aid
Recovery is one of the most important facets of an athlete’s life. For the rest of us who are trying to stay active and in shape, it’s arguably just as imperative.
The better you recover, the harder you can work out, and the fewer days of training you’ll be forced to miss. By adding CBD to your recovery routine, you can push further and harder than ever before since it’ll help you:
- Sleep deeper
- Feel less sore
- Loosen joints
- Alleviate exercise-induced inflammation
Are you ready to up your recovery game? Resilience is here to help.
Sources:
1. Peake, Jonathan. Recovery after exercise: what is the current state of play? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468867319300379
2. NCBI. An Evidence-Based Approach for Choosing Post-exercise Recovery Techniques to Reduce Markers of Muscle Damage, Soreness, Fatigue, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5932411/
3. NCBI. Antioxidative and Anti-Inflammatory Properties of Cannabidiol. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023045/#:~:text=Acting%20through%20the%20PPAR%CE%B3%20receptor,elevated%20by%20CBD%20%5B92%5D.
4. NCBI. A Systematic Review on the Pharmacokinetics of Cannabidiol in Humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6275223/
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Written by: Michael Tatz | Linkedin
Michael Tatz is the Co-Founder of Resilience CBD, and a passionate leader in the health & fitness world helping others rise to and crush their wildest goals. A former Division 1 college wrestler, Army Officer, and investment manager at Goldman Sachs, he has pushed his body and mind to the limits on the mats, dressed in camo, and in the boardroom.
Today, he spends his time leading Resilience CBD to develop the absolute best recovery products for athletes everywhere. Resilience was founded after CBD personally impacted Michael’s life, and the brand was built to partner with everyday athletes in pursuit of conquering their most difficult challenges, rebounding after their toughest performances, and rising to their goals that once seemed impossible.
