What do you know about CBD?
This post is designed to help you understand the CBD market. Buy with confidence and understanding.
Unfortunately aren’t currently able to sell our own CBD products due to a supply issue. But we hope this information is still useful.
But first, back to basics
**Some background, please skip if you feel you know what CBD is**
CBD (or Cannabidiol) is from a family of cannabinoids extracted from the hemp plant Cannabis sativa. This family also includes THC, CBC CBA and over 30 known others. THC is the illegal aspect as it is psychoactive substance.
CBD has been the focus of the media around the world and is becoming more popular in a number of areas of clinical research. It has no intoxicating and psychoactive effects, and studies are emerging the show its many positive benefits for your body.
**that’s of the boring stuff, now let’s get our hands dirty!**
Why CBD?
CBD offers a number of benefits to the body when it is in ill health, under attack or under intense duress like athletes experience. Thinking sideways now - that is exercise, particularly intense fitness workout such as CrossFit.
Another good synergy is CBD offers a natural way to reduce anxiety and stress impacting the body and mind - Another key aspect to intense and regular training regimes.
Therefore the step is actually a fairly obvious one. Prioritising recovery and life outside of training is an area that pays off double - inside and outside the gym.
As well as potent anti-inflammatory and pain reducing properties (and we all know inflammation & pain is caused by exercise!) The receptors within the body that CBD keys too, CB1 and CB2, many are located in pain-regulating parts of the nervous system ( Whilst there are others prevalent in almost every organ in our body.
Simply put,
To be better when we are “on”, we must get better at being “off”... CBD assists this process for athletes.
Snake oil CBD? - understanding the naysayers
What puts most people off CBD is the connection to Cannabis (or THC) and the quantity of naysayers online suggesting there is no research behind CBD benefits as it did nothing for them when they tested a product.
First off, the “getting high” concern and /or drug test failings isn’t an issue with Hence’s CBD++ 0% THC. Literally no THC; no compromise - proven with test results.
Second, the lack of research and unscientific research of n=1, or them trialing a one off pot, can be put down to a number of common factors that we can blame the brands selling it for, rather than a sensationalising Vlogger. (I’m Being polite to the Vlogger really.)
There are two parts to understanding this misleading sensationalisation:
CBD oil is not just CBD. it's an extracted oil from a plant that contains *hopefully* high quantities of CBD. But as there is no real regulation, there is no minimum requirement of CBD in each pot of Oil. What’s on the label of the tincture you bought from the local health shop has a mg value, this is the amount of CBD oil in the carrier oil within the tincture. Not the amount of CBD. Therefore you are completely reliant on trusting that the brand’s source of CBD is good and high in CBD and other synergistic cannabinoids, with trace or no THC - WITH NO PROOF.
Usage & dosage mislead. Many oil tinctures suggest “2+ drops under your tongue”. In a container with 500mg total of Oil, hopefully containing 60% CBD...
Before we even get to the dosage which I’m sure from the info above you have gathered in part is suspect the method of use. How many people understand dropping oil under the tongue and how to make this effective?
Did you know, if you swallow the oil, you will reduce the impact?
But the dosage - 2 drops in a 500mg tincture, saying the CBD is good quality, would get to somewhere near 5-10 mg, hopefully. For the purposes of pain reduction, anti-inflammation and anxiety reduction/calming 70mg+ is the minimum effective dose for average sized adult men and 50mg+ for women. Why do they instruct such a low dosage? To give the fallacy of value and to play it very safe!. More servings means better value and without a test cert. how much THC is in the tincture?
This means that the cost per mg of *hopefully* quality oil with CBD is the normaliser, not the servings per pack.
Back to that poor Vlogger, no wonder they couldn’t see any positive effects on their training! It’s a lottery what you buy (unless there is a test certificate with the batch) and if you do get quality CBD, the dosage recommended is far too low!
Therefore we share our testing certificate and have a recovery day total serving of 100mg (per pod).
How Am I Going to Use CBD?
This was big for us at Hence, the usability of oil under the tongue, vape or capsules are all highly compromised in their own ways.
Finding a decent solution to this took us a while, but improved understanding led to what was feasible, which led to availability.
Our solution, in its most basic view is not much different from the most common available… but the devil is in the details.
Solid-state coconut butter as the carrier oil - A carrier oil is very necessary and helps absorption. Being Fat-soluble and in the raw form an oil, CBD has a challenge to many water based mixing solutions.
We preferred coconut oil over MCT oil (most common carrier) for a number of simple reasons.
It’s more versatile - solid and liquid
It’s more natural - Organic extra virgin
It tastes better
It’s got greater spectrum of potential benefits in synergy to a common western diet for an athlete.
Then there is packaging and dosage 100mg CBD oil Eco-pods...
Packaging - Biodegradable plastic pods. Each single serving pod for your weekly recovery day. No one (it seems) is looking at it from this view of large single serving, lower frequency in an athlete’s application. Most likely because many of the usage cases come from illness treatment and dosages are simply imported across in the white labelling process (let’s not get caught up in this for now).
Dosage - High enough to be noticeably effective, using once per week as it’s less effective around exercise or stressors and no resistance can be built by the body at this frequency of use. (it’s also expensive, particularly if you use an effective dosage every day!)
To answer the question - How are you going to use the CBD++??
Six 100mg pods over Six-Plus weeks...
100mg per pod is a large dose, split it at least in half initially to get a feel for it and either eat it off a spoon or add it to a cup of coffee on Sunday morning (recovery day), as an example. Something fairly direct to allow for noticeable impact.
Feeling this impact is knowing it’s effective.
Then play around with it!
Trial it in a number of ways and splits. Try the whole pod in one go and over multiple days for a wide spectrum of uses.
It would be wasteful to have it over 7 days around a normal five or six day split training schedule as it would be wasteful to nail all 6pods in a week!
Personally I would use it as I need, so if I feel like I overtrained, I’d use it. Perhaps in an evening with a decent meal and a good night’s sleep.
Where You Should Notice the Difference
In chronological order (post consumption or application)
Slightly calming feel, less anxious or on edge.
A truly good night’s sleep.
A reduction in pain/inflammation (depending on severity, dose and delivery system).
A faster bounce back into training schedule.
Long term, with other life habits a noticeably calm more balanced approach overall.
All of the above are impacts of CBD as expected from this approach and dosage, but like everything it is highly dependent upon many other life factors and so you are responsible for getting the most out of CBD.
For example, if you are highly changed on caffeine on your rest day, how can you expect to be calmer and relaxing well? If you use it just before bed and “notice” no impact, most of the time spend feeling the impact would be whilst you were asleep (not to say it’s not having an impact however).
Personally I prefer to feel the impact as I believe this has an added placebo impact that adds to the impact!
Outstanding Points to Note
I’m not a doctor - and don’t play one on the internet… this is all from research and common sense, no more.
The NFL has started researching the use of CBD for its players in correlation to pain management and concussion protocols.
Several studies have shown that CBD plays an enormous role in suppressing cytokine, and chemo kine production, while increasing our body’s T-regulatory cell production in turn helping our body’s anti-inflammatory mechanism.
The cost per mg of *hopefully* quality oil with CBD is the normalising factor when buying CBD, not servings per pack. And make sure there is proof of what’s in the Oil!!
Reference material if you want to have a dig yourself, starting points...