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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 Wellness: How to use CBD for Meditation and Yoga

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.

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.

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

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.