Should I Take CBD Before or After a Workout?
It’s no secret by now that a couple of drops of pure CBD oil in your morning coffee will leave you reaping a whole host of health and wellness benefits. Its calming properties that help keep stress and anxiety at bay, improve skin health, reduce inflammation, and improve concentration are sure to set you up right for your day ahead.
But there’s one benefit of CBD that you may not have considered, and that’s its impact on your workout routine. That’s right – studies have shown that CBD offers a number of physiological, biochemical and psychological effects that have the potential to benefit athletes. And you don’t have to be the next Usain Bolt to bask in the glory of its success!
Join us as we explain how using CBD oil before or after a workout can have a positive impact on your fitness.
How to Use CBD Pre-Workout
1. As a Sleeping Aid
If you’re the type to pack your gym bag and lay out your activewear the night before, you’re in luck. CBD can easily be incorporated in your bedtime hot chocolate and work its magic by the time you wake up ready for your workout the following morning.
Why? Good Hemp’s pure CBD oil is beneficial as a sleep aid, which is also prime time for the body to repair itself for the day ahead.
As we sleep, our body gets to work restoring our immune, nervous, skeletal and muscular systems, which are vital for maintaining our mood, memory, cognitive and other important functions. All of this contributes to ensuring that we’ll be optimally prepared for a workout the following day.
CBD has been shown to reduce the amount of time spent in REM sleep and increase the amount of time in NREM Stage 3, otherwise known as deep sleep. During deep sleep, the brain, body temperature and heart rate fall, as the brain is using less energy in this state, promoting a better night’s rest overall.
2. To Combat Anxiety & Arousal
Besides being physically prepared to exercise to the best of our ability, we should be mentally and emotionally prepared too. Anxiety and arousal are a key issue in sport psychology, specifically related to physical and technical performance. In a sport setting, arousal is often linked to anxiety, and this negative emotional state can increase muscle tension, affect coordination, and in some cases, cause sweating and nausea. This means you’ll be more likely to take your eye off the ball, literally.
Using CBD before your workout can significantly help to lessen the effects of anxiety and reduce blood pressure, allowing you to bring your A-game from the word go.
CBD For Muscle Recovery After a Workout
1. To Relieve Muscle Soreness
Whether you’re a novice exerciser, or someone who gets their reps in regularly, you’ll almost always find yourself subject to post-workout soreness and inflammations. But that doesn’t mean your DOMS – that’s short for delayed onset muscle soreness – should determine your entire routine.
Recent studies have shown that CBD oil can help relieve delayed onset muscle soreness and exercise induced muscle damage, which naturally occurs after physical activity due to microscopic damage to muscle fibres, since its healing properties are known to reduce muscle pain, bodily aches and inflammation. Whether taken orally or topically, CBD offers a more natural form of relief than many other products such as protein supplements or Tiger Balm.
So does that mean that just a few drops of CBD oil in our post-workout smoothie will have you skipping back to the gym 24 hours after leg day? Well… yes! Maybe not skipping, exactly, but your muscles will be feeling miles better than if you had simply suffered in silence.
2. To Promote Mobility
Further scientific studies around CBD oil and its pharmacological effects reveal that this magical compound can also promote mobility in people with Multiple Sclerosis – whose symptoms often lead to reduced physical activity and functional mobility. According to a study in Frontiers In Neuorology, this is because CBD is “anti-inflammatory, antioxidative, antiemetic, antipsychotic, and neuroprotective.”
Lotions and potions aside, every little helps when it comes to recovery, so we’ve highlighted some easy post-workout recovery hacks you can try to help you hit the ground running time and time again, without any unwanted setbacks!
Why Choose Good Hemp CBD Oil?
Call us biased, but there’s a bundle of reasons why we believe Good Hemp’s CBD oil is the best in the business. Our range of oils use CBD isolate, which means it only contains CBD and no other cannabinoids, such as its psychoactive cousin THC. Its purity means it avoids the hallucinogenic compound of the cannabis plant, so you can drop it like it’s hot and reap the benefits without getting high!
While we’re on the subject, Good Hemp promotes 100% natural and eco-conscious products, since we’re planning to save the world and all.
That means that all of our products are made without chemical additives or any other nasties you might find in other varieties of CBD oil on the market.
As we’ve explored, there are plenty of different ways you can take CBD oil before and after your workout. Whether you prefer a few drops of the stuff in your pre-workout coffee, whizzed into a healthy smoothie, or even baked into a gooey chocolate and macadamia protein loaf, you’ll find a CBD-based post-workout treat worth sweating for!
Discover our top-selling CBD oil products and start gearing up for those gym gains today.