The legality of cannabis in all states creates an inherent problem with regard to the legality of cannabis use among the people who participated in the present study. However, it may also be related to regular drug testing in some professional sports, which would discourage professional athletes from using cannabis (for more information on the prohibition of cannabis in sports, see Huestis et al. This study found that people consume cannabis in conjunction with exercise to obtain a wide variety of perceived benefits from a remarkably diverse set of physical activities. It is necessary to study healthy subjects with different levels of physical fitness and habituation to cannabis, taking more into account the methods of cannabis consumption and the pharmacokinetics that determine the time when the maximum effects occur.
Understanding these effects is not only necessary to determine how cannabis affects performance in all sports disciplines, but also to inform decisions about the safety and regulation of cannabis use in athletic and non-athletic populations. Future research and educational outreach should consider reducing harm and maximizing benefits for those who decide to combine cannabis use with exercise. What's not yet clear is whether these perceived benefits of using cannabis before exercise actually lead to measurable changes in physical performance. In addition, chronic use of cannabis for sleep can inherently increase dependence on cannabis, so that once you become used to THC, more THC is needed, which alters consumption patterns and ultimately you sleep less (Babson et al.
Participants were also asked if they used cannabis as a recovery modality and if they felt that cannabis helped with recovery. It should be noted that this phenomenon may not be exclusive to cannabis use, since in these same studies, the consumption of placebos and traditional cigarettes induced an attenuated, but still significant, reduction in the time of onset of angina compared to cannabis, probably because all smoking involves the inhalation of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, but does not produce the specific tachycardic effect of cannabis. While studies examining the combination of cardiovascular stress caused by exercise and cannabis use in people with identified CVD offer a select view of the human capacity to perform aerobic work, their widespread acceptance as concrete evidence of the effects of cannabis or THC on general or high-level human performance is probably misplaced. Consequently, there is substantial overlap between the mechanical benefits of cannabis for recovery and those of the above-mentioned modalities and supplements.
Even in original laboratory research on the effects of cannabis on physical performance, the cannabis potencies used do not reflect what is currently commercially available, making their findings difficult to extrapolate to today (Gillman et al. Future research should be based on the results of surveys such as this one to investigate how cannabis use before exercise actually modulates participation in physical activity and physical performance, in order to accurately inform the general public about risks and specific benefits.
