It didn’t take much detective work for 17-year-old Tommy to find the common thread among his Minnesota high school’s best athletes: They all smoked pot. “Everyone who had school records [and] state records … had been a user,” recalls the now 27-year-old teacher in Denver, who requested his last name be kept private.
So, Tommy tried it before his next track meet, too. The outcome? He broke the school record. Soon after, Tommy took star turns in soccer, basketball, baseball and football. He credited the weed.
“I thought it was what gave me the ability to do so and the ability to do better,” says Tommy, who still regularly smokes pot before playing volleyball and other sports, some of them highly competitively. While everybody’s different, he says, for him, the drug heightens the enjoyment of a given activity, accelerates his body’s transition into the anaerobic mode in which he thrives and allows him to “think ahead of the game” instead of acting too impulsively. When he runs long distances, he feels like he can run forever.
“I don’t get the munchies. I don’t get lazy,” Tommy says.
[Read: Beyond 26.2 Miles: Surviving an Ultramarathon .]
Researchers are beginning to take accounts like Tommy’s seriously — and there’s no shortage of them. T here are even athletic events like The 420 Games that aim to show cannabis can be used as part of “a healthy and responsible lifestyle,” the organization’s website says.
As marijuana laws change — it’s now legal for medicinal use in 23 states and the District of Columbia and for recreational use in four states and the District of Columbia — and the drug gains acceptance — 69 percent of Americans believe it’s less harmful to health than alcohol, according to a 2014 report from the Pew Research center — there’s more room for overlap between getting high and getting fit . After all, some of the places that have legalized the drug are among the fittest in the U.S.
Take Boulder, Colorado, where Arielle Gillman, a graduate student at the University of Colorado–Boulder, resides. “I’ve definitely heard, just anecdotally, people hearing people talk about [mixing fitness and pot],” says Gillman, who co-wrote a 2015 paper in the journal Sports Medicine summarizing the (very limited) research on marijuana’s effect on exercise. Everyone’s experience is different, she hears. “Some [runners] say, ‘It really helps me because I’m just admiring the beauty of the trail around me,'” she says, “whereas other people are like, ‘I could never do that.'”
Whether one of them is “right,” however, is very much up for debate. “At this point,” Gillman says, “most of what we can do is speculate.”
A Valid Theory?
Nicholas Edwards, an exercise physiologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, has worked with hundreds of athletes like Tommy who claim to use pot during exercise. Many say it improves their performance. “What’s interesting about it is, on a certain level, they’re kind of right,” Edwards says. If cannabis didn’t at least have the potential to help athletes, the World Anti-Doping Agency probably wouldn’t prohibit it in competition, Gillman points out.
Take the claim that marijuana blunts the pain of endurance exercise — something skiers and triathletes tend to report, Edwards says. “You kind of can just go because your mind mellows out to a place where you don’t experience the exertion you’re doing,” he says. “In a way, that’s seen like a benefit because they can just run.”
Gordy Megroz, a writer and editor in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for one, tested how marijuana affected his exercise performance by putting himself through a “poor man’s” version of VO2 max tests — a measure of aerobic capability — after smoking pot. Each time he took a hit before pushing himself to the limit on a treadmill, he found he could stay on 30 seconds longer.
[Read: What the Heck Is VO2 Max? ]
“When I did it sober, that’s not a fun test — it hurts,” Megroz says. “When you’re on the drug, it certainly dulls the pain.” Put another way: “It feels like a runner’s high before you actually run yourself into a runner’s high,” explains Megroz, who wrote about his experience in a 2015 story for Outside magazine.
The feeling probably wasn’t all in his head.
“A large part of exercise performance is psychological, and so there are some psychological effects [of marijuana] that we know could be related to exercise performance,” such as feeling like you’re exercising for less time, feeling more in tune with your body or being able to focus on something other than the pain, Gillman says.
Plus, part of the “high” associated with endurance sports may be linked to endocannabinoid pathways in the brain, Gillman’s paper notes. While it’s plausible that activating those pathways artificially by, say, smoking pot, may boost enjoyment of and motivation to exercise, there’s no direct research on the topic, Gillman says.
Other athletes may light up to help recover from exercise. “I could do a big, heavy squat session and not get as sore,” Megroz recalls. Former NFL player and Heisman trophy winner Ricky Williams has also spoken out about his use of the drug to aid recovery. Indeed, “emerging evidence” suggests marijuana can reduce pain, muscle spasms, stiffness and inflammation, according to Gillman’s paper.
“There are some compounds in cannabis, depending on the strain, that have been found to reduce inflammation, and we know that intense exercise causes inflammation,” she says. “Perhaps using it after exercise could reduce some of these negative anti-inflammatory processes.” On the other hand, the drug could interrupt normal, healthy muscle recovery, her paper notes.
The bottom line? “There needs to be more research in all of these areas,” she says.
“Rolling the Dice”
While the highs of using marijuana during and after exercise are scientifically unclear, the lows are not. Exercise aside, pot can affect teenagers’ brain development, impair thinking and problem-solving, and lead to longer-term breathing problems, to name a few health consequences listed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Some research suggests people can be dependent on, or even addicted to, the drug — something exercisers who use it should watch out for. “You can’t say, ‘I need this to win,'” Tommy says.
Trying pot for its performance-enhancing claims is “really rolling the dice,” Edwards adds. Just as the drug can seem to help athletes by numbing their pain, it can hurt them by blunting their ability to listen to their bodies. “You don’t see how hard you’re working,” Edwards says. While athletes may feel like exercise isn’t as hard after they’ve taken a hit of marijuana, his forthcoming research suggests their bodies actually have to work 50 percent harder to run at the same intensity as nonusers.
In many cases, that lack of bodily awareness can lead to injuries. Edwards’ unpublished research, for instance, has found that athletes who claim to regularly use marijuana before working out are 40 percent more likely to injure themselves during exercise. In other cases, feeling high instead of fatigued can prevent athletes from stopping and refueling appropriately when they’ve hit a wall. As a result, their bodies may begin burning muscle for fuel.
[Read: Fuel for Performance: Eat and Drink Like an Athlete.]
But it’s not just endurance athletes who need to exercise caution. Athletes who play precision sports like gymnastics, golf or baseball may be at particular risk for serious injury after using marijuana, experts say. “There’s definitely the possibility that it could be dangerous because cannabis can negatively affect motor control,” Gillman says. For Megroz, mountain biking was a less-than-ideal sport to take on high. “You lose a little something there,” he says, “You’re not as quick and your depth perception is off.”
Edwards also cautions that smoking marijuana — as opposed to taking an edible, for instance — is particularly troubling when mixed with exercise, although that’s the most popular way athletes use it. “Anytime [you use an inhalant], you’re limiting the amount of oxygen that ultimately goes to the muscles, so you don’t have complete contractions,” he says. Again, that can set athletes up for injury. For Megroz, it meant wheezing and coughing on the mountain bike trail. “I definitely didn’t like that,” he says.
Anyone seeking an artificial runner’s high should also keep in mind that different strains can produce different results. For instance, some varieties of pot are marketed for their anti-inflammatory effects and lack of psychoactive effects, but there’s no good research on how they influence exercisers, Gillman says. Plus, what consumers see isn’t always what they get.
Dose matters too. Megroz found that out the hard way. “I went into the gym and I had to turn right back around because I was too high,” he remembers. “The sweet spot for me was one hit, and if I took any more than that, I was luggage.” One problem? Finding that sweet spot consistently. “If you can’t quantify the exact amount that you’re putting in your body and how that relates to the saturation of your cells, you shouldn’t do it,” Edwards says.
In fact, you probably shouldn’t do it at all, Megroz concludes. “I’d never recommend that somebody take a drug and then go do exercise — that just seems really irresponsible,” he says. Exercise — pure and clean — really is the best medicine. “I really like the feeling you get from exercise — from hard exercise,” he says. “And if you’re on another drug, it’s just not the same.”
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Can Pot Boost Your Workout? originally appeared on usnews.com
