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The Athlete’s Guide to CBD – Recover as Hard as you Train!

The best type of recovery for the human body is sleep. As an athlete and an individual committed to your personal health and fitness, you owe it to yourself to optimise the quality of your sleep.

You train hard and work towards your goals, so don’t shoot yourself in the foot and hold back your progress by neglecting your sleep. CBD is an excellent tool to help you relax, reduce anxiety and sleep more effectively.

Make sure you choose the highest quality, Resilience CBD.

Whether it is actually nodding off, or the quality itself, it is crucial that we support healthy sleep. The importance of good sleep cannot be underestimated for repair and regeneration. The effects of poor sleep can seriously impair your progress and health.

Your body needs to produce three things for good sleep: Tryptophan, serotonin and melatonin.

Tryptophan

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid that serves several important purposes, like nitrogen balance in adults and growth in infants. It also creates niacin, which is essential in creating the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Serotonin

Serotonin impacts every part of your body, from your emotions to your motor skills. Serotonin is considered a natural mood stabilizer. It’s the chemical that assists with sleeping, eating, and digesting. Serotonin also helps:

  • reduce depression
  • regulate anxiety
  • heal wounds
  • stimulate nausea
  • maintain bone health

Melatonin

Melatonin is a natural hormone that is produced by the pineal gland in the brain and then released into the bloodstream. Darkness prompts the pineal gland to start producing melatonin while light causes that production to stop. As a result, melatonin helps regulate circadian rhythm and synchronize our sleep-wake cycle with night and day.

How does CBD Ensure Good Sleep?

Harvard Medical School reported that “CBD helps with both falling asleep and staying asleep.”

CBD Eases Discomfort

Studies have found promising evidence that CBD gives the human body’s endocannabinoid system an extra boost in aiding pain relief. When it comes to recovery, this can help dramatically with DOMS (Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness) and general comfort, making it much easier to relax and recover effectively.

Learn more about the amazing effects of CBD!

Resilience CBD

“Resilience was born when its founders, U.S. Military Veterans, personally experienced the effects and impact that CBD had on their own mental and physical obstacles. Their focus was sharper, their mental stress was calmed, their fitness stamina was increased, and their bodies felt less pain and inflammation after intense workouts. It was a shared vision among the founders that this incredible supplement had not only changed their life, but had the power to provide unbelievable benefits to family, friends, athletes, fellow Veterans, and ultimately the entire fitness community!”

The team at Resilience takes great pride in staying on the cutting edge of developing the most innovative products in the CBD industry. If we can recover better today, whether from fitness or from life, we can achieve more tomorrow. That is why we have a constant focus on Research and Development – discovering more effective integrations of CBD supplements – ensuring you can push your body’s mental and physical limits while maintaining the necessary balance.

Find the right Resilience CBD product for you

Nutrition and Sleep

Specific foods and nutrients can balance hormones and neurotransmitters that have been either elevated or suppressed during exercise. Cortisol is crucial for energy production so we want it to be high when we exercise, but consistently elevated levels will impair sleep and recovery.

Boosting melatonin, serotonin and growth hormone levels will help to induce healthy sleep and kick start your recovery. As we can see in figure 1, we want cortisol to be low in the evening to allow growth hormones to be secreted in the initial stages of sleep. If we get our nutrition on point we can take advantage of this spike in growth hormone to maximise your gains.

Foods that will help achieve this include carbohydrates. Yep thats right I said it – eat carbs in the evening! Why? You have just smashed your body through a brutal WOD, it is primed to absorb carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores. This is essential if you are training the next day. Carbohydrates will also lower cortisol levels due to insulin secretion. The consumption of certain foods that increase the availability of tryptophan, alongside synthesis of serotonin and melatonin, will aid in promoting sleep.

Keto diet and crossfit strengthSource: StevieD Photography

Eating some protein containing Omega-3 fatty acids is also recommended. I don’t need to tell you the importance of protein for muscle repair, but eating quality protein in the evening can also increase serotonin levels. Omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to reduce cortisol, boost growth hormone and lower the inflammatory response from exercise. The last thing you want to be doing is eating foods that heighten the inflammatory response. Foods that are deep fried or high in refined sugar should not even be on the radar. DO NOT LISTEN TO ANYONE WHO SAYS YOU CAN EAT WHAT YOU WANT AFTER YOU HAVE TRAINED. REFUEL YOUR BODY WITH QUALITY!

Good foods to aid sleep are sweet potato, green veg, almonds, walnuts, seeds, cherries, prawns and seafood and berries.

Calm the Nervous System with Specific Nutrients and CBD

After exercising your sympathetic nervous system is dominant. We need this DURING exercise but want to switch into a parasympathetic state to kick start recovery and help sleep. There are a few key nutrients that can help achieve this. Magnesium has been shown to boost your parasympathetic nervous system to help you recover faster.

The best forms of magnesium include bisglycinate, citrate, L-threonate and malate. Do not buy magnesium oxide – this is poorly absorbed.

Omega-3’s, taurine, vitamin C and glutamine are also good additions to your evening supplementation plan. These will help to clear cortisol, boost glycogen replenishment and lower inflammation, all of which are crucial to ensure you are maximising your training stimulus.

Recover Mentally with CBD: Create a Sense of Calm

Anxiety and stress are great ways to seriously limit the capabilities of our bodies to recover.

Anxiety and depression can be debilitating. CBD’s effects within the central nervous system suggest that it may provide fast-acting relief for anxiety, balancing out cortisol (stress) levels, improving behavioral responses to stress, and helping to boost overall mood.

Resilience CBD Oils work internally to relieve mental and physical stress and their delicious Gummies promote stamina, focus, sleep and reduce soreness.

Their products are all natural and top quality, offering excellence for the everyday athlete. Resilience include many highly effective natural products such as Tumeric and Cucurmin.

crossfit recoverySource: StevieD Photography

How Tumeric and Cucurmin Work

Turmeric is a plant that has a very long history of medicinal use, dating back nearly 4000 years. In Southeast Asia, turmeric is used not only as a principal spice but also as a component in religious ceremonies. Because of its brilliant yellow color, turmeric is also known as “Indian saffron.” Modern medicine has begun to recognize its importance, as indicated by the over 3000 publications dealing with turmeric that came out within the last 25 years.

Turmeric and especially its most active compound curcumin have many scientifically-proven health benefits, such as the potential to prevent heart disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer.

It’s a potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant and may also help improve symptoms of depression and arthritis.

Anxiety damages Sleep Patterns. CBD reduces Anxiety

Stress is an intruder which is increasingly difficult to avoid given the demands of our society. Stress can be alleviated by exercise and proper sleep, but it may also wreak havoc in the other areas, as it can destabilize one’s diet and greatly decrease the quality of sleep by keeping the body in a constant state of tension.

This situation is created as a result of stress hormones being secreted, which keep the organism alert in the face of an imaginary imminent danger. CBD helps the body to relax and return to a calm state which is absolutely essential for achieving good quality sleep, and therefore recovery.

How to Establish Good Sleep Hygiene

“Sleep hygiene” is the term used to describe the habits and rituals you have around bedtime and sleep.

It is up to you if you practice good or bad hygiene during this time. There are several reasons why you should work on establishing good sleep hygiene that can all have hugely positive effects on your health. These habits will support a good night’s sleep and prevent you from lying awake, tossing around and waking up tired and exhausted.

Follow these tips to reduce stimulation, lower stress hormone levels and induce quality sleep.

  1. Switch off electronics 45 minutes before bed
  2. Take Resilience CBD
  3. Engage in some deep breathing (belly breathing for 10 minutes)
  4. Ensure you have a completely dark room
  5. Read, listen to music or do something else that you find pleasure in

So, what can you do on a daily basis to support good quality of sleep?

A good sleep routine is not only created in the evenings. It already starts with your behaviour throughout the day:

Make sure you get some sunshine. Our circadian rhythm and our sleep-wake cycle are closely connected. Exposure to sunshine during the day will help the brain understand that it’s supposed to sleep when it’s dark.

Limit naps during the day except for short power naps (max 20-30 minutes).

Watch what you eat and drink. Avoid going to bed with a full stomach or drinking lots an hour before going to bed. Stay away from caffeine or similar stimulating substances from noon onwards.

Source: StevieD Photography

Watch when you train. Try not to have your final session close to the time that you are planning on going to bed.

Resilience CBD recently launched a sleep CBD softgel called “Rest”. Each softgel contains 25mg of broad spectrum (THC Free), water soluble, nano-emulsified CBD, as well as 1mg of melatonin. It’s cutting edge technology as it pertains to CBD, and it’s AMAZING if your looking for something to help with sleep.

Furthermore, there are several other things you can do to support quality sleep:

Develop a bedtime routine such as taking a warm bath, meditating, reading a relaxing book, and go to bed at the same time.

Limit screen time and blue light exposure at least one hour before going to bed as this will trick the brain into daylight exposure and wake you up again.

Create the “perfect” sleep environment. Make sure you sleep in a completely dark and cool room (16-18c) and eliminate noise. If completely silence is uncomfortable, using “white noise”. It might be useful to also leave anything that might wake you up again (mobiles, TV, books) out of the room.

Sounds logical but is often underestimated: find the right mattress and pillow for you.

Recover as Hard as you Train

When it comes to recovery, sleep is king.

You already train intelligently and purposefully in the Box, so make sure to direct that determination towards your recovery as well.

Establish good sleep hygiene, optimise your nutrition and add CBD into your routine and you will drastically reduce anxiety and maximise your performance and health.

As an everyday athlete, you are in an ongoing pursuit to achieve personal wellness. Recovering mentally and physically allows you to focus on crushing your goals, not on your pain.

Optimise your recovery now

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