Why do athletes love CBD?
Whether you’re a Golden State Warrior or a weekend warrior, you know that the day after an intense workout is usually filled with stiffness and sore joints. For every different sport, there’s a hundred different ways that people try to get their aches in check and their feet back on the turf. Some swear by anti-inflammatory drugs like motrin or tylenol, while others settle into a not-so-cozy ice bath and still others will even hang upside down until their face turns purple.
All of these things share one common feature: their end goal is the reduction of inflammation. An exploding trend over the last several years has been the use of CBD – cannabidiol – to relieve muscle aches and pains, limit inflammation, and boost the recovery efforts of our immune system. People from every walk of life are finally experiencing the powerful effects of CBD for a plethora of different conditions, and professional athletes are no different.
Change and Progress
Athletes like Nate Diaz from UFC turn to CBD to help their bodies heal and recover after a brutal athletic feat. According to Nate, CBD is great “for before, after the fight, training. It’ll make your life a better place.” He openly vaped a CBD concentrate at a post match press conference in 2016.
Recently, the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, made a subtle change in their 2018 draft of the List of Prohibited Substances. On past iterations of this list, many dangerous drugs like cocaine and many substances with names too long to be pronounced can be found. So can CBD. Finally, however, starting in January of 2018, a small footnote in the “cannabinoids” section reads “exempt: cannabidiol.”
Those two words represent decades of hard work and millions of collective hours of effort and willpower by those in the hemp and CBD industries, and they represent the chance for both healing and protection – protection from addiction. Addiction is a rampant epidemic in the professional sports world as many athletes turn to opiates to conceal their pain and inflammation before the next big match.
The fact that world regulatory bodies are coming around to the scientific truths surrounding cannabinoids like CBD is the latest in a series of steps in the right direction. People the world over recognize the therapeutic powerhouse that is CBD, and only good things can come from further exploration of this novel health miracle.
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