We all know that regular weed use has been known to provide people with a bevy of mental and physical health benefits. Yet, most people would never think of cannabis as a type of performance-enhancing drug.
To be honest, there has never been a clear cut connection between smoking weed and working out until very recently. Due to the spread of the marijuana legalization movement throughout the United States, some of the world’s top athletes have actually started using cannabis as a type of training aid.
The question is, can smoking weed before working out be beneficial for you? Let’s take a deeper look at this counter-intuitive connection between weed and exercise.
Does Cannabis Affect Athletic Performance?
While marijuana can provide a variety of health benefits, on the surface it would seem that cannabis would negatively affect athletic performance. This is because cannabis is known to disrupt visual perception, slow reaction time, interrupt hand-eye coordination, and cloud attention.
Studies have also shown that using weed can cause a large increase in errors in complicated and taxing tasks. This is primarily due to the way blood flow in the brain changes when under the influence of cannabis.
Decreased blood flow to any part of the brain means that region will also have a decreased function. Weed use causes reduced blood flow to the temporal lobe. The temporal lobe is a critical area of the brain for handling complicated tasks. Therefore, it only makes sense that athletic performance would suffer from cannabis use.
However, marijuana use also causes the blood flow to lateral cerebellum and frontal lobes to be significantly increased. The lateral cerebellum and frontal lobes are important for making decisions, handling emotions, and sensory perception. The increased blood flow to these areas of the brain could account for the reason that so many marathoners, triathletes, and mixed martial art fighters report such amazing benefits of the use of cannabis during their training regimens.
It makes sense to not smoke weed before any new exercises or protocols that are very advanced or complicated. But, if the pain-relieving, bronchodilatory, and/or mental focusing effects of marijuana help you get through a grueling workout easier, why not use it? Just make sure to not overdo it because getting too high before anything strenuous can be a recipe for disaster.
Can Marijuana Help You Lose Weight?
Here is yet another potential health benefit of using weed that is not immediately obvious. This is probably due to the “munchies” side effect that cannabis is famous for causing. Even after calculating these bouts of uncontrollable hunger, recent research has counter-intuitively shown that regular cannabis use can actually cause you to lose weight.
A study that was performed in 2013 showed that cannabis users of all ethnicities, genders, and ages had significantly lower obesity rates than those who had not used any marijuana in the past year. Another study explained that weed users had far lower fasting insulin levels and insulin resistance levels than their non-smoking counterparts. These effects of cannabis not only help with fat loss but also provide protection against diabetes.
Now that you understand the potential benefits of smoking weed after working out, you might be feeling ready to try a new strain to incorporate in your exercise routine. If you are, visit calixpress.com!
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