- Morning Trainiacs.
CBD, hemp, what you might think of is cannabis, THC,
what little bit of the wacky tobaccy, the devil's lettuce.
This has been something a lot of triathletes
have started thinking about incorporating
into their supplementation regime for better sleep
for inflammation, for improved performance and longevity.
Now, is it legit?
We're gonna get into that today with some experts
and pros, really good ones.
(upbeat music)
So Trainiacs CBD has been all the rage for supplementation.
A lot of people are talking about starting to use
it for all kinds of things like, my mother-in-law
using it for pain and seizures to my actually mother
using it to help with depression.
But in a lot of cases athletes are starting to talk
about using it for reduced inflammation,
for improvement of sleep,
for all kinds of performance enhancing benefits.
But as we've learned over the past couple of decades,
not all supplements are as good as is originally touted.
So what we did this past week is we got on
Craig Alexander, five-time world champion
and Dr. Andy Pruitt, who has been a researcher
in sports performance his entire life on our podcast.
By the way the Triathlon Taren Podcast is still
the most highly rated triathlon podcast in the world,
you should go check it out.
Because both of them are associated with the company
iKOR, which is one of the sports specific CBD
companies out there.
And we asked them a lot of the questions
that you are asking.
The very first one that a lot of people ask is, what is it?
I'll share what Dr. Andy Pruitt explains CBD is,
but in general, it is the non-psychoactive,
the non-brain altering, the non-getting you high,
not the wacky tobaccy, not the devil's lettuce.
It is the part of the cannabis plant that is derived
from hemp, that doesn't get you high but has benefits
to you from a health perspective.
But Andy explains it
in much more intelligent sounding terms.
- Cannabis Sativa is the mother plant, right.
And from that particular plant two things are derived.
And they're separate plants, so marijuana
comes off of cannabis sativa and it has THC, CBD
and over 100 other cannabinoids.
So, the cannabinoid is 100, I've seen numbers
as high as 115, some as low as 90-some.
But these cannabinoids are the potential active
ingredients in the oil that comes out of the plant.
Industrial hemp is the cousin of marijuana
and it has been bred to eliminate, to the best
of science's ability, to eliminate the THC factor.
So industrial hemp has less than 0.3% THC by law.
With good selective farming and breeding.
We can never say it's nonexistent,
but the THC traces is unperceivable
and you don't test positive from the good CBD product
because of the type of the farming and selective
breeding that they're doing.
- Next question that you had is is obviously
what are the benefits?
Why should people be taking it?
And a lot of people asked a lot
of different questions about that.
And one thing to note is that there aren't necessarily
exact studies that are showing taking CBD improving
triathlon performance.
There are other studies out there that show
very definitively that cortisol is lowered,
so stress is lowered, you have a more calming sensation
and this is thought to then improve things like sleep,
lower inflammation.
And if you can do both of those two things
it has this cascading effect of improving
a lot of your performance.
- I've been thinking about it and I personally,
as an aging athlete began to experiment with how
I'm always tired.
What can I do?
I was looking for mostly recovery.
I was suffering from a lot
of delayed onset muscle soreness, DOMS.
And the older I got the worse it got.
- I had noticed from about 42 or 43 years onwards
that I just, my body was starting to deteriorate
a little bit, and not the cardiovascular,
not the endurance, I think that's still strong.
Just more the wear and tear around my body.
I've always had a few issues with my lower back.
So things like that were just more prevalent
and I noticed them a lot more than I had
for the previous couple of decades I guess.
But, and I mean if you read the science
and the research it says, it lowers anxiety.
So is that the reason I sleep better?
'Cause I've never really suffered from anxiety,
I don't think.
Other than what a normal person would with the daily
concerns of the kids and whatever else.
So who knows?
I mean is it because you sleep better
and you get that deeper sleep that your body recovers
better or is the actual inflammatory,
antiinflammatory properties of the iKOR itself?
It's hard for me to pinpoint what it is
other than I just get a general sense,
a better sense of health and wellbeing when I take it.
I certainly sleep better.
And you know as a 47-year-old, I still train
at quite a high level.
So I think it does help me back up the sessions.
- The next question that people as was
with regards to sleep.
Rightfully so, because sleep is like up here.
Training, nutrition, it's all down here.
But you have to get sleep right to allow
your body to absorb all of that training
and proper nutrition.
Let's say CBD doesn't necessarily even directly improve
performance or directly improve inflammation,
but it does improve sleep.
It will improve performance and it will improve
inflammation just because of improving sleep.
- Well the most common are improved sleep, less anxiety.
I mean that's really what it's really,
the number one thing you think about is lowering
that anxiety level, keeping inflammation in check.
Those are things that are gonna be early,
it's kind of a hum without a high.
It just kind of slows down things.
It'll lower blood pressure, right.
It'll augment your blood pressure medicine as needed
or maybe not even require blood pressure medicine.
It's really antianxiety, antiinflammatory if you will.
- What I know is with iKOR is it certainly helps me sleep.
I sleep a lot better when I take it.
And I only really figured that out
because I had been taking it and then I went on a trip
and I forgot to take it with me
and I wasn't able to get on the timezone
as quickly as I had been.
So yeah, I just don't wake up during the night.
I just don't wake up during the night.
- Of course then the very intelligent folks out there
asks what are the downsides?
Well personally anecdotally, I have seen a couple of things.
Number one, it doesn't work for all people.
In my case, no, no this is still legal
and I actually have my medicinal marijuana card.
If there is any THC in a product and depending
on the formulation, I get really agitated.
I'm up very late and we've also had friends here
locally who have felt that same sort of thing
and it actually increased their anxiety
depending on the formulation because the reaction
is not stable across the board.
Not everyone has the same reaction.
We'll get to that.
And then more seriously, Dr. Pruitt talks
about how their is a level of liver toxicity
that if you're taking upwards of 5000 milligrams a day
that it can actually kill you.
Like a rat died, as he put it.
- So the prior downside would be
lightheadedness, nausea, dry mouth.
Those that we can attribute directly to CBD.
In huge doses it can cause liver disease.
I'm talking about 1000 milligrams a day in huge doses.
It killed a rat at 1000 milligrams.
I mean that's science right, the rat died.
I gotta tell you.
It can interact, like I was saying,
it can interact with other medicines
either accelerating their benefit
or decelerating their benefit.
So that's why we, I would strongly recommend
that people don't go out and by CBD
based on what they hear today.
That they call their physician and say,
hey, I'm thinking about it,
and make sure they get a buy-in
and make sure that they're not taking any medicines
that are gonna have a negative interaction with it.
Anything that's synthesized in the liver
may be affected by it.
There are some cholesterol medicines that are
accentuated by taking CBD.
So is it safe, absolutely.
- And finally the question was,
what is the proper usage?
And the thing that I'll say that I learned
from this podcast and if you wanna get
like basically the whole information because this here
would be a one-hour long, actually a 90-minute video
based on how much we talked to Craig Alexander
and Andy Pruitt, early in July we're going to be publishing
these two episodes on the Triathlon Taren podcast.
You can find it wherever you get your podcast.
Go listen to those two episodes
and it goes into this in much more depth.
But the general takeaway is that generally assume
that for most people you can take CBD morning and evening.
- I mean I take it twice a day so.
- The trick is to start with very very small doses
in the morning, gradually increase until you start
feeling a positive effect and then if you are still
feeling a positive effect then you can add in
an evening dose.
And that is going to hopefully start giving
you mechanisms to find out how much is enough
and when is a proper dose.
And then beyond that we talked about whether
you should be taking it through a tincture,
orally or pills or a liposomal delivery system or creams.
In general, here's what I'll say with my research
for CBD, it's not a be-all, end-all cure-all.
It seems to work really well for athletes
that are kind of at my late 30s, early 40s age
where you still want to train at a high level
but you're starting to feel a little beat up,
a little bit dumpy.
Maybe you're sleep is a little bit affected.
Personally, I wish that I had been taking it back in 2017
when my issues with overtraining and hormone problems
started, because if I could have stopped my cortisol
from ramping up and just saying at that super high level
for weeks and months on end, I would have been able
to absorb training for many more years.
Who's to know is a 4:28 half Ironman my peak?
Likely not.
Is at 9:41 Ironman my peak?
Likely not.
Because if I can absorb training a lot better
by having better sleep and lower cortisol,
this is a good thing.
Is it going to work for you?
We don't know, go check out the podcast,
try it for yourself.
Thanks to Crowey, Craig Alexander and Andy Pruitt
for being on the podcast.
We owe it to you that the Triathlon Teran Podcast
is the most highly rated triathlon podcast
in the world.
Find it wherever you get your podcast.
Check it out.
Later Trainiacs.