Fitness Archives - In the Now Mag

July 30, 2020July 30, 2020

Can CBD Tinctures Help With Bodybuilding, Weight Loss, And Muscle Recovery?

The worlds of bodybuilding and weight loss are not shy when it comes to using supplements and formulas to gain an advantage. Whether real or perceived benefits exist, the fitness industry spends billions of dollars on nutritional supplements and vitamins to sell so it can be challenging to weed out truly effective supplements from false claims. Can CBD tinctures help you with your fitness goals? Let’s investigate.

How Do We Build Muscle?

Building muscle mass is an important part of keeping healthy. As we age, our muscle naturally begins to atrophy (shrink). Whether you are looking to gain muscle mass as part of keeping fit and healthy, or building muscle mass to compete in weight lifting sports, the process is the same. When we place our muscles under regular resistance or weight, we create tiny tears in the fiber of the muscles which need to be repaired. During this repair process, our body fuses the tears together which increases the size of the muscle. This process is called muscle hypertrophy and it involves hormones such as testosterone, human growth hormone, and insulin.

The Endocannabinoid System and Muscle Growth

Although scientists are still exploring the endocannabinoid system as it’s a relatively new discovery, we do know it’s linked to processes such as appetite, digestion, muscle growth, as well as other mood and emotional processes. Since the endocannabinoid system is responsible for regulating hormones and assisting our bodies with maintaining or returning to homeostasis (a balanced state), it makes sense that there is a link between CBD and muscle growth. CBD is an anti-catabolic, meaning it protects the muscle mass from being broken down by the body’s natural metabolic processes. CBD also inhibits cortisol levels, the stress hormone, which allows for better muscle regeneration as cortisol is responsible for breaking down muscle tissue. These properties of CBD could enhance the body’s natural ability to not only maintain muscle, but to also build it.

CBD and Increasing Endurance and Stamina

It’s hard work building muscle. Regular exercise and challenging yourself to a new personal record means dedication to sweat and tears. In order to push through barriers and plateaus, increased endurance and stamina is required. CBD can help with increasing your stamina in a couple of different ways. The first way in which adding a CBD tincture to your workout routine is by increasing energy. Low doses of CBD reduces your cortisol levels and increases your serotonin which allows you to focus and feel a rush of energy. To be clear, this is not the same sensation as being high from THC. For an in-depth look at the difference between CBD and THC, check out Can I Buy CBD Legally? and Everything You Want to Know About CBD Gummies. This rush of energy can help you get through a tough workout before feeling the fatigue that inevitably sets in. The second way in which CBD can help you build muscle is by reducing your sensitivity thanks to CBD’s ability to reduce pain and inflammation. With less pain and sensitivity, you can withstand a high-intensity workout or train longer or harder than usual. This does not mean you will suddenly become a Marvel hero, however it could give you enough of an edge to boost your performance and take you into the next level of training.

How do CBD Tinctures Help With Muscle Recovery?

Muscle Recovery is an essential part of weightlifting as it’s impossible to keep gaining muscle without allowing time for the body to heal. If you overtrain you run the risk of injury as well as fatigue. Thankfully, CBD can help with this process as well to really round-out your training routine.

Muscle Recovery Through Sleep to Impact Gains

Like we mentioned in How Do CBD Tinctures Help with Boxing and other Combat and Grappling Sports?, our bodies need restful sleep in order to recover from workouts. When we have a restful sleep, it allows our body to synthesize protein into muscle as it repairs the microtears of the muscle fiber. Not enough sleep means our body can’t properly heal itself and not only will we not build the muscle we want as easily, we’ll also be too sore and fatigued to train efficiently. Taking a CBD tincture after a hard workout or before bed can help relieve your muscle pain, lower your cortisol levels, and allow you to fall into a deep sleep that will help you recover from your training.

Muscle Recovery Through Anti-Inflammation

We’ve discussed at length how CBD is a natural anti-inflammatory. With this effect, it’s no wonder weight lifters and gym enthusiasts are flocking to CBD tinctures. Adding CBD to your workout regimen can help your muscles feel better after working out, allowing for a faster recovery time and more time to hit the weights.

CBD and Cytokines

You might be hearing the term cytokines a lot now, especially with research into COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 ramps up. Researchers are currently looking at how CBD may be used to treat some of COVID-19’s worst symptoms such as lung damage. The reason for this link is cytokines. Cytokines are protein signals that act as messengers between cells within the immune system. They are responsible for binding to targeted cells in the immune system to regulate disease, infection, and so on. There are several types of cytokines depending on which area is producing them and what their effect is. Bodybuilders and weight trainers, however, are most interested in the balance between proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines that are secreted from the immune cells. As mentioned, CBD is a natural anti-inflammatory. In effect, CBD reduces the proinflammatory cytokines, meaning your body is less inflamed and you can recover faster. There is little difference, from a process perspective, between inflammation caused by microtears or injury, and inflammation caused by a pathogen or disease. Either way, the body’s immune response activates and begins a healing process, beginning with the attempt to reduce inflammation. Adding a CBD tincture to your exercise routine can help your body’s overall health and keep you at the bench press longer.

How do CBD Tinctures Help with Weight Loss?

Not everyone hitting the gym is looking to bulk up and compete on stage. Luckily, CBD has some great potential when it comes to good ol’ fashioned weight loss too. The science is still under investigation, however there is promising research showing how CBD’s affect on CB1 receptors affecting metabolism and fat production, appetite suppression, and insulin resistance can aid with weight loss.

What Is The Metabolism

Although we’re often told that weight gain and weight loss is a matter of calories, in actuality, it’s a lot more complicated than that. The metabolism is a complex system with three main purposes: converting food to energy in order to run processes at a cellular level; converting food and fuel for proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates; and eliminating nitrogenous wastes such as ammonia, urea, uric acid, and creatinine (usually through liver and kidney filtration in the form of urine). When we’re losing weight in a healthy way, the body has to balance and regulate the digestive system, immune system, and nervous system and it does this all through the endocannabinoid system. CBD interacts with two main receptors in our endocannabinoid system; the CB1 receptor and the CB2 receptor.

To recap:

CB1 receptors are primarily located in the brain and spinal cord, otherwise known as the central nervous system, however, they also exist in other areas like the liver and fat tissue. These receptors are responsible for regulating brain function and releasing neurotransmitters (or hormones) such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate.
CB2 receptors are primarily located in the immune system, however, can also be found in areas such as the gastrointestinal tract, peripheral nervous system, fat tissue, and liver. These receptors are responsible for inflammation, and cell survival.

Why is CB1 important to weight loss?

A couple of reasons. First, the central nervous system is responsible for feeding processes such as assessing how much energy our body needs to function and having feelings of hunger. That feeling we get to signal we’re hungry is controlled by the hypothalamus, the small part of the brain located near the pituitary gland that’s responsible for releasing hormones and regulating body temperature. This trigger occurs when there is an imbalance within our hormones, as well as by the binding of the endocannabinoids 2-AG (known for being associated with pain relief, suppression of nausea and vomiting, and the stimulation of appetite) and anandamide (also called the “bliss molecule”) to the CB1 receptors in the hypothalamus. This means that when there are elevated 2-AG levels, it can lead to overeating and obesity. Secondly, there is a dopamine response related to food intake thanks to the CB1 receptor, which is why we love eating foods that are high in sugar or fat and can become addicted to fast food and candies, etc. CB1 antagonists like CBD might indirectly inhibit the dopamine effect of food which can lead to weight loss.

Brown Fat, White Fat, and CBD

You might remember from high school science that we have 2 different types of fats: white fat and brown fat. White fat stores energy in big singular droplets of oil throughout the body and in large quantities, leading to obesity or metabolic disorders like diabetes, for example. This is the type of fat we want to lose and maintain a healthy amount of. Brown fat, however, contains many small droplets of oil and also contains a high amount of iron-containing mitochondria, making this type of fat capable of generating heat. Brown fat is what turns fat into energy. As we age, we lose brown fat. Adults who have a healthy active lifestyle have more brown fat than those who do not exercise regularly. CBD has been shown to help boost the metabolism of fat, meaning the proteins responsible for breaking down fat are stimulated therefore aiding in fat loss. It can also increase the mitochondrial activity leading to more calories burned and reduces the process of lipogenesis, otherwise known as the creation of fat cells.

Insulin Resistance and CBD

When we eat, our metabolism is supposed to follow a pattern: We consume food which causes our blood sugar levels to rise. In response to this rise, our pancreas releases insulin which helps the glucose from food to enter our cells. Finally, our cells use the glucose as an energy source. When we overeat glucose (a high sugar diet, for example), our cells are unable to contain the glucose and, despite the signal from our pancreas, our body stops listening and becomes insulin resistant. This causes people to feel hungry then sluggish as their blood glucose levels aren’t steady. Instead of a healthy metabolism pattern, someone who is insulin resistant will have a pattern more like this: They will consume food which causes their blood sugar to rise. The pancreas releases insulin which helps the glucose from food to enter their cells. The insulin won’t work so their blood sugar levels continue rising. The liver converts sugar to fat in order to protect the body from the high levels of sugar, however your cells still need energy so they trigger the appetite response, causing them to eat again and repeat the process. Where does CBD come in? CBD has been shown to enhance our cells’ ability to absorb glucose, meaning we can convert less sugar to fat and as a result, suppress our appetite.

Final Thoughts

With the legalization of CBD in the US and most countries around the world, new research has opened up surrounding the possibilities for CBD as a treatment to disease, disorders, and ailments. In addition to this research, it is also providing a clearer picture of how CBD interacts with the body and what potential it might hold. CBD has a lot of applications, many of which we are likely still unaware of. One thing is clear, however, adding CBD tincture to your workout can improve results whether you want to gain muscle or lose weight.

July 25, 2020July 26, 2020

The Best Abs Workout for a Six-Pack – Best Abs Exercises you can do at Home

Abs can be pumped up in 30 days. True, if you download it correctly. The fact is that the muscles of the press are very hardy in nature and almost do not react with the appearance of cubes for pumping with a large number of repetitions. From such a load, the press becomes hardy, but almost does not increase in volume.

Therefore, if you need to pump up the press cubes as quickly as possible, you need to train it in a power style (7-9 reps per approach). Download every other day and instead of crunching without weight, do the prayer exercise on the block, raise your legs in the hang and twist on the fitball with extra weight.

We offer high intensity ab workout that will build you beautiful six pack relief if you do this workout at least 3 times a week. Stay tuned and be healthy

July 25, 2020July 26, 2020

Best Butt Workouts – Video Exercises for a Bigger Butt – Simple Bum Workouts

Many girls, in pursuit of a quick result, tend to “load” themselves as much as possible immediately and use large weights. The logic is clear – more weight, which means the buttocks pump up faster.

This is not true. For a high-quality “pumping” of the priests, you need to choose the weight so that you feel the work of the gluteal muscles, and not the tension of the whole body. By the way, sometimes, trying to pump up the buttocks, girls “by mistake” swing the front surface of the thigh.

If you “swing” too often or too rarely, you will not have a beautiful priest. Frequent workouts are not effective because the rest is as necessary for the muscles as the load, and without it the muscles simply will not grow. About rare training, and so everything is clear. Muscles are weaned from loads, and you will simply “stagnate” – there will be no result.

The ideal training regimen for the buttocks is 2-3 times a week for three approaches. Use our workout and you will see the first results after a month.

July 25, 2020July 26, 2020

Yoga for Beginners – 30 Minute Home Yoga Workout Exercises Video

In contrast to the prevailing opinion, yoga brings to the norm not only the physical form. Its main goal is to improve the physical, mental and spiritual state, bring them to harmony. Practice is based on this principle: not being able to control your body, a person cannot control his emotions and his life. In the long run, practicing leads the practitioner to inner silence and peace.

To see the specific result of classes, at the initial one should be engaged at least 1 time per week. After 6-8 weeks of regular practice, you can increase the number of workouts up to 2 times a week. The second lesson can already be carried out independently at home. In the future, it is optimal to engage in three times a week. Many yogis practice daily. Regular exercises will teach you to own your own body, develop all muscle groups, increase sensitivity. Yoga helps to gradually lose weight and get fit. However, this result will not be fast.

Also, breathing practices and hatha yoga help get rid of congestion in the body, normalize blood circulation. This returns the skin a healthy color and freshness. We offer a good yoga practice for beginners that will help you to feel your body. Do it once a week and in one week you will be ready for intermediate level.

July 22, 2020July 29, 2020

CBD Tinctures and Wellness: How to use CBD for Meditation and Yoga

CBD has many medical applications for those suffering from illness and disease, but can it be part of a wellness routine too? What are some benefits of CBD tinctures (How to Buy CBD Oil Tinctures) for those of us practicing our ohm? Let’s take a closer look at how CBD can enhance our body and mind wellness connection.

CBD Tinctures and Yoga

I like to think that if you could bottle up yoga, it would be CBD tincture. CBD yoga is a resurgence of an ancient trend that marries the healing effects of yoga with the healing effects of CBD into a perfect package of overall wellness. CBD and yoga share many of the same health benefits including reducing chronic pain, improving sleep, increasing focus, and even promoting muscle recovery.

How Can CBD Enhance Your Yoga Practice?

Adding CBD tincture to your yoga practice can help you achieve deeper relaxation and, as a result, a deeper focus into your meditative state and potentially move you deeper into poses. As we know, CBD is a cannabinoid that binds to endocannabinoid receptors located throughout our bodies and provides many health benefits through this binding effect. Research has shown that stretching, like the way we do when practicing yoga, actually activates endocannabinoids, which can potentially allow greater stimulation from CBD.

In short, when we add CBD to our yoga practice, our bodies are more open to using the CBD in our tissue and fascia. It’s like painting a room with a primer before the color. Everything works much better. Over time, this additional CBD boost can lead to deeper poses, faster recovery, and greater flexibility. Taking the CBD as a tincture is ideal for yoga as it is quick acting so you don’t need to time out your dosing in order to fit with your workout.

The Mind/Body Connection

Practitioners of yoga often attribute their exercise to an increased relaxed state and lower stress levels. Focused breathing, holding poses, and clearing the mind are all tenants of yoga and a CBD tincture can enhance them tenfold. We know CBD improves sleep and aids with relaxation, however, did you know CBD is also an antioxidant? When our bodies are overcome with oxidative stress, an imbalance between the free radicals and antioxidants in our body, CBD can help repair the damage done to the cells affected. How exactly does this work? Let’s break it down a little further.

Free Radicals and Oxidative Stress

Free radicals are molecules that contain oxygen and have an odd number of electrons. This odd number means they can easily react with other molecules in the body as they receive donations of electrons. Because they are capable of making so many reactions, they can cause large scale chemical reactions throughout our bodies. While free radicals are required for certain things like fighting pathogens, too many can pose a real threat to our health. A vital process, oxidation occurs, for example, when our bodies convert food to energy. In short, when we eat food, our body metabolizes the food and converts it to energy. This process releases free radicals, which are normally controlled by various enzymes. However, when too many free radicals are being created or introduced to our bodies through things like pollution, sugar, deep fried food, cigarettes, etc., our bodies can no longer keep up and a process known as oxidative stress occurs. Oxidative stress is responsible for damaging fatty tissue, proteins, and even our DNA. This can lead to conditions like diabetes, hypertension, inflammatory diseases, Alzheimer’s and cancer. Oxidation stress is also responsible for the aging process.

Antioxidants and Oxidation Stress

Now that we understand free radicals, let’s dig into antioxidants. Antioxidants are the antidote to free radicals. These molecules are capable of ending the chain reactions caused by the free radicals by giving up one of their electrons to neutralize them. Interestingly, when this occurs, it converts the antioxidant into a free radical itself and this is why we need to eat foods rich in antioxidants. There are also several enzymes within our bodies that work to neutralize free radicals, most notably vitamin E, C, and beta-carotene. When we have a nutrient-rich diet, we give our bodies a better chance to fight off oxidation stress. Without the addition of antioxidants to our bodies, the free radicals take over and wreak havoc on our system.

What Does Yoga Have To Do With Oxidative Stress?

Now that we’re caught up in the science of oxidative stress we can look at the connection between CBD, yoga, and our bodies. Studies have shown that regular yoga practice not only helps relieve stress, it can also help lower inflammatory markers and prevent diseases that increase inflammation. In other words, yoga can also help with oxidative stress. When you’re physically feeling better, you’re more easily able to handle stress loads and, since CBD is a natural antioxidant, adding the use of a CBD tincture to your yoga routine can further help relieve the oxidative stress occurring in your body and result in a healthier you. It’s important to note that the antioxidants added to foods and supplements are rarely effective. There is little scientific proof that they benefit our bodies at all in that form. CBD, however, is a natural product that is bioavailable and as such, can be readily absorbed into the body and can have a greater impact on free radicals.

The Feeling of Zen

One of the major reasons people gravitate towards yoga is to bring a greater sense of balance and relaxation to their life. Yogis, the trainers leading yoga classes, take great care in creating a calm and safe atmosphere where practitioners can focus, breathe, and meditate throughout their routine. Despite all their best efforts, it can still be challenging to leave everything you enter the studio with outside the door. This is where a dose of CBD tincture can really provide a boost of focus and intention. CBD provides a deep relaxation, a sense of overall well-being, and increases focus thanks to its role in binding to serotonin, anandamide, and dopamine. Being able to truly focus and meditate will not only improve the immediate effects of your yoga workout, it will also contribute to long-term feelings of happiness and serenity as you reach deeper levels of self-awareness and reach your personal yoga goals. For more detailed information on the benefits of CBD for treating pain, stress, anxiety, nausea and aiding sleep, be sure to check out this informative blog post.

July 22, 2020July 29, 2020

How Do CBD Tinctures Help with Boxing and other Combat and Grappling Sports

How Do CBD Tinctures Help with Boxing and other Combat and Grappling Sports?

Now that we’ve covered yoga, meditation and relaxation, let’s look at the other end of the spectrum: combat sports like boxing, kickboxing, MMA, etc. There is a rising popularity in these high intensity workouts and many swear by their health benefits of increased discipline and hand-eye coordination, among other things. Can incorporating CBD tinctures into your combat routine improve your workout and recovery? Here are some facts.

How Can CBD Tinctures Improve Workouts and Matches for Fighters?

Although it seems counterintuitive, fighting requires a certain amount of relaxation and calm in order to maintain focus. There is also a high risk for injury, both acute and chronic, as a result of training and matches. With the risks involved in this high intensity sport, it makes sense that athletes are keeping a close eye on the science of CBD and turning to it in order to help improve their body and their craft. There are 3 main reasons CBD tinctures are becoming so popular in these grappling sports: reducing inflammation, increasing focus, and improving recovery.

Reducing Inflammation: Muscle Soreness

Training for any sport is a gruelling task and very hard on the body. Athletes in contact sports like MMA, boxing, UFC, etc, are especially exposed to inflammation as they receive hits, use tight grips and train for muscle conditioning. All of these things result in widespread inflammation. When we exercise, we create microtears in our muscle fiber. Our body then goes into action to repair these tears and we experience inflammation. This is why we experience muscle soreness after a good workout. Because of the physical nature of grappling sports, athletes will experience muscle soreness as part of their regular training. This muscle soreness is safe and normal, however recovering from it can be challenging and hinder further progress in training if they’re not recovering quickly enough. This is where CBD can be particularly effective. As a natural anti-inflammatory, CBD tinctures can help reduce the time needed to recover from muscle soreness so that athletes can continue to increase their training without injury.

Reducing Inflammation: Joint Pain

Like weightlifters, athletes who compete or train in combat sports like boxing, wrestling, and various martial arts, use their hands a great deal. The repeated stress on their hands can be debilitating. There is plenty of research that demonstrates CBD’s anti-inflammatory properties and its benefits for arthritis and joint pain. After a training session in gloves landing uppercuts and right hooks, a CBD tincture can help alleviate pain and inflammation from the tension and impact, as well as help any additional inflammation in other joints used.

Reducing Inflammation: Brain Inflammation

One of the biggest risks for athletes participating in combat and grappling sports is head injury. As more research has been completed on concussions, traumatic brain injury (TBI) and the long-terms effects that may lead to Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), athletes need to take particular care of their brains. A concussion, or TBI, occurs when the head is struck at such a force that the brain bounces off the skull, resulting in inflammation and even cell death. Repeated concussions increase the chance of CTE, a neurodegenerative disease that leads to permanent brain damage, change in mood and behavior, cognitive impairment. Adding CBD to a routine can help improve brain health and may even reduce the risk of brain injury. More research is needed to understand how CBD works with brain injury, however there have been some promising studies, especially in terms of using CBD tinctures for dementia and alzheimer’s in the elderly, showing improved brain health with regular CBD use as well as CBD use assisting in the recovery of TBI thanks to its ability to reduce brain inflammation.

How Do CBD Tinctures Increase Focus?

Training for any sport requires focus and energy, however, one-on-one combat sports require a heightened alertness in order to predict your opponent’s moves, have awareness of your spatial surroundings, and move within your body both offensively and defensively as the situation calls for. Studies have shown that thanks to CBD’s ability to inhibit certain receptors that influence anxiety, using CBD can increase focus and improve concentration. CBD allows for more serotonin, the chemical that alleviates anxiety. Anxiety is one of the largest causes of lack of focus. Anxiety and stress is very common before a match. The body is full of adrenaline, cortisol, and the stress response is activated. Taking CBD prior to a match can reduce that surge and increase your focus, improving your performance.

How Do CBD Tinctures Improve Recovery?

All athletes have to deal with the struggle of muscle recovery. Symptoms like acute muscle pain, delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), the pain felt several hours or days after completing a strenuous activity or an activity that engages muscles not typically worked, and fatigue, can interfere with training. As mentioned above, CBD can help with the inflammation that is caused during workouts or even post injury, but recovery isn’t just about inflammation. Along with inflammation, recovery involves sleep, and fatigue. CBD can have positive impacts for all of these symptoms.

Improving Recovery: Sleep

One of the most important recovery tools for humans is sleep. Restorative sleep allows our bodies to repair tissue, manage stress and even emotions. During a proper restorative sleep, our body releases growth hormones to aid in tissue repair. A good night’s sleep even helps our immune system repair itself. CBD is heavy-hitter in bed. The benefits of CBD on sleeplessness are being well-documented and athletes that are training can greatly improve their sleep, and by extension, their performance. CBD can help lengthen the time of restorative sleep, meaning more healing.

Improving Recovery: Fatigue

When taken at higher doses, the calming effects of CBD take a front seat and can help you drift off to a restful sleep. At smaller doses, however, CBD can relax your mind enough to eliminate the causes of fatigue and stress enough to help you feel focused, energetic, and a little bit lighter. In addition to dosage, the terpenes included in the CBD tincture can help provide an extra boost. What are terpenes? Terpenes are aromatic oils that are responsible for giving cannabis its unique smell and color. Common terpenes usually fall within the categories of citrus, berry, mint, and pine, however there are currently over 100 terpenes identified. Some terpenes are more conducive to relaxation, such as Myrcene, while terpenes like Terpinolene or Limonene, are more conducive to providing energy. Using CBD tinctures that offer these terpene profiles will provide an extra boost to combat the fatigue that accompanies training, allowing you to feel more rested and recovered.

Final Thoughts

The popularity of combat sports is on the rise and so too is the desire to train more efficiently and safely. Adding CBD tinctures to your daily workout routine can have numerous benefits. From assisting with inflammation to aiding in the recovery of muscle tissue and injury, CBD should be a staple in your gym kit.