Cannabis and Athletic Performance Jamie Burr PhD | Koopcast Episode 104

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast i can guarantee there are a lot of people tuning in today simply from the fact that the word cannabis is in the title there are few areas in today's sports world that generate more interest and more controversy than the use of cannabis in sport and so i wanted to tackle this topic a little bit with somebody who i feel is really starting to be at the leading edge of a lot of the research which is very nascent right now he's at the leading edge of a lot of this research and that is professor jamie burr at the university of guelph up in canada and one of his review papers recently caught my eye and that is cannabis and athletic performance which is in this uh which is in the journal sports medicine and it recently came out i will link that up in the show notes i feel that is an article that just about anybody can read so if you are interested in further understanding this topic i encourage everybody to check that article out and what you will find throughout that article and is a theme

that is prevalent throughout the course of this podcast is we really don't know a whole heck of a lot and the reason i think that jamie is on the cutting edge of this research is his research department is starting to tackle some of these very hard questions and we talk a lot about about his research design and what they are going through and what they are taking their uh their subjects through throughout the course of this podcast in an effort of full disclosure i am not a cannabis user but i'm also not a hater and i realize that there are a lot of listeners out in the audience that either use cannabis recreationally uh or they want to use it in some way to improve their athletic performance and i think that regardless of what group you fall into you're well served from the information that is contained in this podcast and that was and has also started to come out of jamie's research group we also talk a little bit about the potential ergogenic effects of cbd which is one of the hottest nutrition supplement categories that you can find out there it seems like every athlete on the face of the planet endurance athlete or outside the endurance realm is taking some form of cbd and we start to talk about a little bit about what evidence actually exists with this particular supplement and how athletes can potentially use it and what they need to watch out for i love this conversation jamie's brilliant it was a really fun one we tried to keep it as colloquial as possible it did get a little bit silly at times i hope you guys enjoy the

banter i'm gonna get right out of the way here is my conversation with jamie burr but it's always a fun topic right i mean it seems to come up more and more and more and if anything during the here in the united states you know there's this big controversy at the u.s olympic trials um where they had an athlete uh test positive for marijuana in competition and you know it got kind of the ire of you know aoc and some people you know in congress and that always turns the attention back to you know what should the water protocols be or what you know should it actually ban should it not be banned are we infringing on people's rights and things like that so it puts research like it puts research like this and reviews like this kind of more more in the spotlight and more and more pertinent yeah i gotta be honest when that happened like we were watching from the sidelines and and we already had this article um written and i actually reached out to the editor chief i was like you gotta get this out there like jump on this take advantage of all the irons hot right you're going for all those uh all those use metrics right yeah so it was a little bit late coming but um it'll be an interesting landscape for sure we well we can talk about some of the stuff today i guess but um we've got some interesting work coming up that i think is going to address some of those questions so that's cool i want to i want to talk about this because that's the nature of having a review paper versus things that are coming up where you can talk about like individual things but i didn't realize

that you had an ultra marathon tie to kind of the inspiration behind doing this review so why don't you go through and explain and explain that first because i do think that there's like some cultural significance there that trail and ultra runners have to be aware of uh more so than a lot of other sports well i guess i'll start off by saying i mean i didn't until somewhat recently consider myself a cannabis researcher um my background is actually cardiovascular physiology and if you look at um my work dating all the way back to my postdoc uh when i was on the west coast of canada uh we really were looking at ultra um type stuff so we did a bunch of work in ultra running um and just trying to understand what what is the body's response to these stresses so to tie it into today's conversation i mean what occurred to us back then it was illegal in canada to be using cannabis but it's uh widespread in vancouver and in the area um we had a bunch of runners that would come back and say to us um oh yeah the run was great but um you know i was high from whatever time to whatever time and we kind of look at each other and go huh i wonder what that does to our measures um which were you know echocardiography and vascular measures it wasn't something that was being controlled for is what you're saying no i mean they didn't tell us they were going to do it i mean obviously there's nothing we could do to stop them either um and i mean there's so many layers to those questions as well right like if you're out smoking a joint is that different from taking some uh edibles um i suspect that

it probably is but quite honestly we didn't then and we still don't really now know what those differences would be um and so imagine that you're out at ultra marathon unbeknownst to you there's a bunch of people smoking pot on the trail that just happened to be involved in your research so literally that was the inspiration for this this this paper that we're going to discuss yeah so i think that's part of it um in fairness uh the other part and i should give credit to him um i have a PhD student christian chung a really bright young guy and he came to me when he was a fourth year student um and this was before cannabis was legalized in canada and he said i think we need to get ahead of this i think we should look at you know the effects of cannabis and exercise and i remember saying to him quite clearly at the time i was like is that is that who you want to be in grad school and you want to be the pot pie so he he dragged me kicking and screaming into this area uh but here we are three or four years later um and and he's he's really pushing it forward on a world stage of like what we can uh what we can research and what we need to understand um whether it applies to prolonged exercise or you know even olympic level you know you know what's funny is like there's this old uh there's this old joke uh amongst the the research crowd where they just say it's easy to get college students to participate in studies about caffeine and beer right because they'll you know just kind of like pour pour in all pun intended but because of some of like the legal issues surrounding cannabis use i'm sure you would get the same enthusiasm amongst recruiting college age students to

participate in that type of research like hey let's go get high and go exercise or something like that but it's it's problematic to do the research it's to do the research itself because of the restrictions around it in in in certain areas 100 so i think um for those who who don't know the area or maybe haven't thought about it um obviously prohibition has been a huge thing and so there's been very little work done there was a there was some work done in exercise specifically in the 70s and 80s um we look back at some of that i mean some of it was very well done particularly for the time uh some of it we laugh about now because they have lines in their in their scientific papers that say things like um participants toked until visibly high that was the measure yeah um i don't know how you get away with that was the control right visibly yeah that's hilarious so to your point i mean we kind of laugh at like hey we should have gone and got a doritos sponsorship for the work we're getting into but um there are still very real barriers so um in the u.s i know it's extremely difficult there are some groups in colorado that have found some clever ways to get around some of the existing laws um in canada it is legalized uh we can actually buy cannabis from our government and it'll just show up at your door yet in a research setting um it's still classed with very hard drugs so um it's actually in the same category as like heroin so you can imagine the restrictions that go on having that in a research lab administering it to people the safety um concerns that come with it so um that

actually that took us about three years uh in our lab to sort of get through that but we're now at the point where we've started giving people cannabis in the lab and we're we're starting to understand what are the effects at rest and during exercise yeah as you alluded to there's there's similar restrictions here in the u.s where legally it might be available i live in colorado i can go down the street and purchase cannabis recreationally or medically if i wanted to but to incorporate into a research setting you can cleverly jump through some hoops which i don't think we should discuss that on this podcast otherwise it might have somebody knocking at my door and that's that's that's trouble that i don't want um so we're on caveats right um the and i think one of them is the research is limited uh in large part just due to a lot of the restrictions and prohibition that exists but in addition to that i think before we go before we dive into this any further because we are going to talk about the effects of cannabis and cbd on athletic performance and and we'll probably dribble into health as well there there's some water caveats that we go that we have to go through as well and this is a really interesting landscape because it's changed over the course of the last five years and i'd say actually changed changed quite dramatically i i just haven't been fortunate enough i live a couple of miles away from usada and you know i run into those folks over there and our small athletic circles and getting their perspective on things is always very interesting because they have the you know insider knowledge on some of the motivations and what really kind of goes on behind the scenes but suffice it to say that it's banned in competition per water rules they

have gradually upped the threshold every few years to the amount of thc that is in you that can be found in your blood or urine and i can't remember which test they prefer on that but that's neither here nor there but they've gradually gradually ratcheted up the threshold uh more and more every year specifically because they don't want to catch habitual users that are using it recreationally outside of competition but then are not using it in competition because there's this decay factor in terms of how long it will show up in your system yeah yeah so um a few pieces in there i mean for those who don't know um one of the interesting things about cannabis and cannabis use is that because it's fat soluble it stays in our system a long time so um you know three months later it could show up that like you've used it so um very valid point of what does water care about and what do they want to test for do they want to test for people that are using it in competition or out of competition and um and that gets it gets pretty uh thick pretty quick um i think the other piece that we need to recognize is you know water has um specific things that they look at when they decide if something is okay or not to be used in competition um and one of the big ones or the two big ones i would say that we really need to consider with cannabis is um is it safe and quite honestly we can dig into that um i don't know if that's totally well known yet um does it give you an advantage and we can talk about the existing literature and that really comes uh from this review that i think we're going to talk about today um and

then the other one is the spirit of the sport and that one's a little bit more uh of a gray area um but you know just just taking something go against the spirit of sport and fair competition yeah it's it's i think it's a that's very good context because it's important to recognize and most people even people who are involved in sport don't understand that water does have this three point test test is the wrong word for it but they have this three point kind of checklist of which they go through to determine if a if a substance or method should be banned or not does it give the athlete advantage does it have the potential to cause the athlete harm and is it within the spirit of the sport and those are really you know a few of those especially the spirit of the sport thing is a really fuzzy area and as you mentioned the health piece on a lot of these substances and methods we don't quite know but it's important to understand that it is a three-point test and it always and it doesn't always come down to does it give an athlete an unfair advantage which is the typical mindset that people have once they hear oh it's banned in competition or it's a banned drug or something like that there is more to it and it has to cross the threshold on two of those three areas not just one for water to consider it a banned substance yes and i think um i mean they need to consider that in a larger context too so if we go with that spirit of the sport let's say that we decide it's okay for use we as water for yeah i don't want that job yeah um but i mean we need to think about the context of use and so if it remains illegal in many countries around the world um is that within

the spirit of the sport if you decide it's okay to use for some people but others wouldn't have access and so uh as i said it does get very complicated um i don't want to name names here at all but i have spoken with people from the ioc and wada who have heard about the research we're getting into and they're very interested because at least some of them would also like to see this problem go away i mean they spend a lot of time and money and energy testing for something and you know if it doesn't hit all those tenets of something that should be banned man it'd be nice if that headache went away for them as well so yeah yeah well the the policy side of it that's not going to be our area of expertise we'll let the policy eggheads over at wada kind of figure that out and you can contribute to that by via your research and maybe i can contribute to that just via the spirit of the sport side of things but so let's talk a little bit about cannabis use and specifically its effects in the athletic realm and keeping in mind that you know you're in you're partially inspired uh to to take a look at this through an ultra running avenue and the audience that we're speaking to are a bunch of ultra runners so we're already putting ourselves through a tremendous amount of physical stress during the course of training and racing um i'm gonna link up the paper in the show notes so people can can go and read it and i i find it easy to read i think this is somebody without a huge science background is something for them to easy to read and to grasp some of the major points on it but to but to summarize it and you can

you can really take the paper as an outline to do this what are like the major key takeaways when you started to dive into this in terms of how cannabis affects athletic performance sure i mean i think there's a few things we need to consider about cannabis use um amongst them like why do people use it is is one thing and there has been a fair bit of work um that we do summarize in there about um patterns of use and prevalence of use um i'll very quickly say that probably more people are interested or have used it recreationally or with sport than many would expect um i think uh and i don't want to date us here jason but our generation probably looks at these things different from others and certainly there's regional differences as well um so the acceptability of use is part of that as well but we do see patterns in terms of like what types of sports use it um i'm going to stereotype here from the research done in france but you know it's the uh free-spirited sports and sliding sports as they call them like snowboarding skiing um speaking to the current audience right it is fairly prevalent in ultra endurance because i think the motivations that people get into those sports may um may have some cultural links to that as well yeah mixed martial arts as well they've got a pretty good foothold or they have a really good uh like not good but their culture is kind of immersed in cannabis and in cbd use yeah exactly and then i think as we sort of move into more um i don't want to say mainstream but for lack of a better word institutionalized sports if you will um hard to say if it's all about

less acceptance or just less admitting but um we don't see we don't see the rates being as high so i think there's that side that's certainly important um but from the angle i approach it which is as a physiologist it's understanding what affects um does cannabis or the constituent products meaning you know those that cause um changes in the way we feel and think and um thc based primarily or like cbd or other constituents as well so what are the physiological effects of that um and how do they interact with normal physiology how the body tries to maintain homeostasis and then when you add exercise on top of that what changes so that's kind of how we try to sort of go through that one of the big areas of focus that you brought out in the paper is the specific effects on the cardiopulmonary system and i want to spend a lot of time talking about that because that's one of the things that we're the most concerned about in an endurance sport it doesn't matter whether you're cyclist triathlete runner ultra runner whatever it's cardiovascular endeavor and if athletes are ingesting substances either recreationally or as an ergogenic aid that potentially have an effect on the cardiopulmonary system we need we need to take note for it right i mean that's a that's a that's a big big deal because the system is under enough stress already and so i want to i want to i want you to walk through this and one of the things that i want to pay particular attention to that was brought to my attention um when i mentioned this on one of my social media channels that i was going to bring you on board

is how the route of administration plays an effect and potentially what those effects are whether somebody is smoking or they're taking or they're taking an edible or they're taking drops or whatever and what we actually know about that but start at a fundamental level of how cannabis and thc actually affects the cardiopulmonary system sure so when we say cardiopulmonary we need we need heart and lungs so let's start with heart um a lot of the work that has been done to date has been done in animal models for probably obvious reasons right it's it's a whole lot easier to test rats or bigger mammals um for safety and to get it through your ethics forward um there has been some done in humans a lot of it as i alluded to before was done in the 70s 80s um and we can we can take some stuff from the literature that's out there but we need to recognize there are major limitations as well so um i want to start with that just so we can put that in context some of those limitations are the fact that cannabis has changed a lot since the 70s uh scientists that work on growing it and you know at home scientists as well they've they've made it stronger and uh they've targeted there's all sorts of different strains so it used to be cannabis uh in the the research that we found is about one to two percent thc um you can get a whole lot stronger than that now so we need to be aware of that when we think about dose effects um the other thing that really jumped out to me from digging into the literature is in the actual exercise world there's maybe four or five papers that really tested that

and i think that's a shocking revelation uh yeah yeah so i mean i i don't envy wada that they had to make these decisions on very limited data so um of those four or five papers one of the things that we stress is that um though there is insight to be gained a lot of it like the papers are well done for what they intended to do and that was not actually looked at exercise performance so if you dig into them they're typically done in older populations um and they often had disease like heart disease so um when we think about how that might affect the heart we need to keep that context in mind but here's what i will say about um cardiac effects it appears that there is a direct effect on the way that the heart is going to function um there's some evidence that suggests it may be sympathetically mediated so when we we talk about sympathetic system we mean like that's your fight or flight system so um when we start to exercise i don't try not to make this too much of a science lesson but when we start to exercise there's two things that happens the rest or digest system our parasympathetic is withdrawn that makes heart rate go up and then sympathetic comes in and it says hey let's rev up that engine obviously when the heart's beating that's how we get oxygenated blood to where we need it in the literature that exists um it appears one of the major effects of whole cannabis so that which has thc in it is to actually rev up the heart pretty quickly so um the prevailing understanding is that we probably are not going to see a performance increase as a result of that because

the heart is kind of revving in the red zone already and so our ability to increase that further is limited because we've hit the top and we may start to limit things like cardiac output because you can only pump so much once it's going so fast you got to get the blood in to pump it back in so so let me try to summarize a little bit potentially it could be a performance negative from a cardiopulmonary perspective but i know this is where you're going so i'll i'll lead in with the but but and now you can continue but um first of all i'd say uh as i kind of alluded to there are some limitations the way that that was done so um i guess i'll set up what we'll probably talk about later we're going to revisit that and we're going to look at it more specifically with exercise performance as an outcome and that's actually never been done um there was exercise testing and they took them up to vo2 max which tells us something but it was never actually about performance so we're going to look at that the other thing that we need to consider is i mean if if we're using a psychotropic drug um yes we need to consider what it does to the heart for example or the way the muscles contract but we also need to consider what it does to the brain is anybody that's raced before knows that a lot of that race happens between your ears so um i'm not a sports psychologist but i am quite certain that if if you feel different about something whether it makes the pain feel more or less um your motivation to keep pushing into that dark place may be different and one of the things related to that and i know this is not your area of expertise but i just want to kind of mention is that

in a trail running application there's a certain amount of eye foot skill that goes into not only the performance but the safety aspect of the sport and i kind of look at that proposition of well if you're compromising that intentionally by ingesting a substance maybe some people think it's better i think this is where it comes down to like i look i'm not a cannabis user so i have no idea personally right but when i look at it intellectually i look at it look at that as a barrier and potentially a safety issue but the people that i talk to that are cannabis users they're like no no no i'm way better on technical trails after i've after i've smoked a joint than i am you know just kind of normally running and to me that just intellectually doesn't make sense yeah i um i can't really comment on that either but i think that is absolutely something we need to think about right is the safety of it i think um when we take it to the ultra running crew as well there are differences here that we need to consider because i as i said like the heart does have a limit it can only beat so fast um but that probably only applies to work being done up around vo2 max right and that may um have a real applicability in marathon running where you're going all out for two and a half hours but in ultra marathon running um i don't need to tell your audience i mean that's not really what it is i mean some people are running at a very high intensity but most of us are going to be kind of plodding along and so maybe that limitation um is not the same so okay we're going to skip forward a little bit to like what you want to study about it and to summarize right you've got a there's a little bit of what i

would call mechanistic speculation that thc use can be a performance limiter specifically through the cardiopulmonary system that hasn't been explored it specifically in a athletic population very in a very robust fashion how do you tend to to analyze that problem sure i'll say i'm going to come right around to that jason okay i'm just going to address um because you'd asked me before too and i'd sort of i apologize i sort of skipped over about the pulmonary side as well and about roots of administration and that plays into how we're going to look at this so on the pulmonary side i think many of us certainly my brain goes to what we know from smoking research because there's there's an analogy to be drawn there for sure and we know that smoking is not really good for the respiratory side of things um i will say that perhaps surprisingly um the literature outside of the exercise world on cannabis use doesn't tend to show that the the effects on the lungs are as bad as smoking and there could be a multitude of reasons of why that is um amongst them that you know you have pack a day smokers who it's a thing that you do throughout the day for example you know you go on a break and it's totally acceptable to have a cigarette i imagine most workplaces are not as open to having uh cannabis at lunch so um i think the the amount that people use is probably less but there there doesn't seem to be the same effects on on the way the lung and the the tubes that supply the lungs are affected so that's an interesting thing that i think we need to consider bring it to your point

though about like how we take in cannabis um i do expect that there are still differences between for example smoking it where you are in you know you're inhaling hydrocarbons and it causes inflammation which will affect the cardiovascular system as well versus vaporization um which would be superheating it without you know um actually lighting it on fire um or ingestion um and that's going to change a few things from um you know the irritation it may cause to the airways to the inflammation that may happen in the blood um also to the timing of those effects that's what i was so yeah um so when you uh when you inhale something it goes through the mucous membranes quite quickly and it will affect the person and they may also take a different dose because they will have feedback about how that is quite quickly whereas it can be quite delayed when it's ingested and has to clear the gut and get into the system that way so sorry a bit of a long-winded answer but to get to your question um well first of all say while i think edibles are they appear to becoming a bigger and bigger thing and i think there's probably reasons because you avoid all those smoking things that people would be into that we our research is starting off avoiding that um and one of the big reasons is just because the pharmacokinetics are slower and harder to to nail down right so we will be starting off looking at um two different modes of ingestion which will be smoking or vaporizing um to understand what is the effect um of that in terms of timing in terms of the way it affects the

body and we're also going to look at um high thc versus high cbd and how do you dose control between those two different methods right because the amount of thc that's actually getting into the system between those two i imagine is going to be different even if the concentration per gram or however you're going to measure it there is is the same between those two routes yeah it's not perfect because it is very hard to do right there's also the reality of and we learned this the hard way um we've actually built a hot box for lack of a better term in the laboratory boss almost fainted uh when they saw that what is this plexiglass it does have a plexiglass door um it actually looks like a it almost looks like an iron lung jason with a big stack at the top so um we had to come up with a dosing protocol which was okay you're going to you know you're going to light it you're going to inhale you're going to hold it for this long and almost to a metronome this is how you're going to do it the hard part there was realizing um it hits different people quicker than others so um long story short we do our best uh we we use very um tightly controlled and chemically analyzed dried flour um and otherwise we try to keep all those things the same for how long they keep it in but i mean there are physiological differences that will affect uptake so are you going to i take it you're going to measure downstream thc at some point too just to see like how much it affected them or how much chemicals in them i guess is the better way to put it yeah so we're not going to do full pharmacokinetics in the first trials that we're doing um and a lot of that is actually to

mimic what's been done already with a little bit more scientific control of okay here's how much we gave them we won't know exactly how much got in and how much that affected but quite frankly we're starting with fairly low doses um and part of that is just because uh it's a health care i get it i get it um okay i'm gonna i'm gonna ask a few more questions on this and at the end if people can sign up i can link it up in the show notes because i'm going to get a zillion questions if especially for people in that area that want to participate in the study but um do you know what the exercise protocol is going to be yet i do so um for our early work um despite me coming from an ultra running background uh we specifically targeted cycling exercise um and the reason that we did that is because it's it's a whole lot easier to quantify work output because uh we can measure it in watts um without getting into running power and all those fun things uh it's just a little bit cleaner for us so um we we have a few questions we want to answer in here uh the first is actually without looking at exercise at all um since the 70s and 80s techniques scientific techniques have become a lot more advanced so we want to repeat some of those things using ultrasound echocardiography um we just have better fancier tools so we want to re-ask some of those questions just what happened when you were resting so looking at cardiac function pulmonary function those kind of things um then we're actually going to ask people to um to get on a bike and we're doing a 20 minute all-out test brutal yeah um the better

part is you actually get to have to do it four different times on different days under different conditions and so that's how we're going to start to address these questions of like what what is the effect is it the way that you took it so whether you smoked it or vaped it um is it about the amount of thc is about the amount of cbd because we have different strains of that as well um and then what we think is cool as nerdy scientists uh we're also doing neat things like we're actually tapping into the sympathetic nervous system uh the colleague who can put a microelectro right into a nerve and we can take recordings of that never been done before but we're actually we're getting people high while we're recording those those outputs um and the early data is um super exciting so so your four conditions are sober smoke vape and then a low dose high dose is that right so we do have a control just so we can understand where they're at and then we will have um basically the two variables we change is how you took it so vaping versus smoking and then high thc or high cb oh got it okay huh wow super fascinating and so when is this research going to start well it's underway now um so you don't need any more subjects yeah we're actually not hurting for subjects time is the big challenge for us um i guess the real challenge though is when we do these types of performance studies um one of the things we need is somebody that is um highly they can replicate their effort um and i'm sure the endurance crowd can appreciate this uh we have some local pot smokers that are

interested but a 20 minute effort in doing the same thing um and letting the condition change that as opposed to an extraneous factor like you're just tired or you don't want to motivate yourself um that's where we actually need a fairly high level of athlete if we could find it so are you going to placebo control it as well or just to just to control yeah great question in this study we're not um because that would be interesting too right like just to like put no thc or cbd in it 100 um in this study we decided not to because some of the the main variables that we're interested in um it's unlikely that somebody could control their physiological response to those like you can't say like oh let's just make you know my vascular stiffness change um but to your point i mean that's an extremely important consideration when we start thinking about performance and stuff so um i think we're we're opening pandora's box to be honest this is the first of probably many studies wow uh it's going to be fascinating i'm going to bring you back on when it comes out and we can talk about the results sure i could see you're psyched about it that's cool so you're in the middle of it when you expect to wrap up um well quite honestly quicker than we expected um we are the first we're the first people we know of in canada and maybe honestly in the world to be able to do uh precisely what we're doing now um one of the challenges with being the first is that you don't know what you don't know when you start and cannabis comes with in canada it comes with an expiry date so um we're gonna be done in a couple months you gotta push the envelope on it then okay so we we've been talking about

performance and i want to bridge this a little bit to recovery as well um because this is recovery is always a hot topic it doesn't matter whether it's a modality or a uh or a supplement or you know the amount of protein that you're taking in in your shake or whatever it's always a really big deal and one of the purported one of the purported benefits of thc and cbd uses is that it enhances recovery through all of these different mechanisms and you looked at that in uh in this in this review article as well what what did what did you find on the recovery element of it specifically that we can keep in mind when athletes are trying to are trying to navigate this space sure i'm actually going to start i'll preface this answer but just by saying two things um one despite me being excited as you point out um i actually feel like i'm a bit of a convert here that i was a real skeptic of a lot of this stuff and i remain skeptical of some things as well i think as a scientist it's important um to follow the evidence as opposed to the hype um so i will say that um although i'm coming around on some of these things already the other i will say is that uh we published this with a group from the uk and um we sort of split the paper into whole cannabis including thc which was the part that we really handled because that's where our research is going and graham close dr graham close in the uk um did the part on cbd and so when you ask that question about recovery i think a lot of it does um really focus on cbd because we know that cbd in particular is it's anti-inflammatory it has anti-inflammatory properties and so when we think about recovery

whether we're talking about cannabis or any other supplement a lot of people sort of focus in on that and you know if it knocks down inflammation it must be good so i'll start with the skeptical side of saying um i think the research has shown us on a number of these things whether it be curcumin or or any other powerful antioxidant anti-inflammatory yes these things can be effective i think sometimes when we look at um quote-unquote natural products there's a there's a desire to say it must be better it's natural yeah cannabis is natural and it may it does have some anti-inflammatory antioxidant properties that i think are important however um i remain a little bit skeptical on some of these things because we now know that um just because something happens in a disease state so chronic inflammation is bad um knocking that down is good but that doesn't mean that's true of um the same for exercising athletes i want you to say that again say that again because that is really important for athletes yeah so um just because it implies in one situation doesn't mean it applies to another i'll give a very specific example outside of the cannabis world here um years ago i don't think we ever actually published this data but i was approached by a supplement company to look at their product we'll just say that powerful antioxidant anti-inflammatory and they were certain it was going to make athletes better and it was a double blind meaning i didn't know who had been given what they didn't know what they had and so you run the study and i was quite certain in looking at the data that i knew what it was so in

this study what we did is we beat them up really badly we your group will be able to appreciate this we put them on a downhill treadmill and we ran them it was only about 60 percent of vo2 max we ran them for i think about an hour and that really breaks down muscle you hurt and uh and then for seven days after that they either got a placebo or they got this supplement and then we did the same thing to them again we ran them downhill see if we could cause that anybody that's worked out too hard you know as a new year's resolution knows that uh you can hurt a lot you get a lot of doms but then you're unlikely to cause that sort of effect again because your body goes like oh that that sucked we should get better at that uh we call that the repeated doubt effect so here we are at the end of this i've got two groups i don't know who's what and uh when we did it the second time one group had all sorts of muscle soreness and inflammation and creatine kinase release again and the other group didn't and i went oh isn't that cool i had it all figured out long story short i break the blind and it was exactly the opposite of what you would expect yeah the group who had taken this anti-inflammatory their body essentially had said oh it's okay like i don't need to get better it solved itself right and so um long story short that would suggest that taking this powerful anti-oxidant inflammatory actually did the exact opposite of what people would want you might have felt better so maybe if you had to race in those seven days that would make sense but if you want to become a better athlete through training which is what most of us are trying to do that doesn't make a

lot of sense yeah you're blunting the adaptive response and you could look at any of the anti-inflammatory mechanisms whether it's ice or a cold bath or whatever and there's always evidence that will point to and yeah there's greater degrees of magnitude depending upon the type of exercise but anytime you're blunting that inflammatory response in an athletic situation that literally what you're doing is you're blunting the adaptive response it's pretty simple you took the words right out of my and i think um when i came to i'm at the university of guelph and we have a uh a history a very good cross-country program that's one of the first things i wanted to change when i got here was to say hey maybe we shouldn't be getting the ice bath after every workout yeah simple stuff right yeah so uh let's take that and apply it to cannabis i think we need to be aware of the fact that um we don't have to just look at cvd or cannabis as a potentially an inflammatory to say maybe we should be wary of some of these things um other than that though i will say there are other things we need to think about with cvd um there is definitely hype that goes with it um there's potential so much yeah um and so i think that raises a bit of a red flag for me but um some of the things that have been proposed is you know it might help with this delayed onset muscle soreness may knock down inflammation there is i'll say weak evidence of those things at present we need more we need more data on those um some people will use it for um sleep as well and there is some evidence from particularly disease populations um where there may be a benefit of that i would say my read of the

literature and when i take some doctors close is that in athletes the effects we see may well be placebo um so we need to be very careful with that if somebody believes something is going to work there's a reasonable chance it will to some degree um and then there's also some some information for contact sport athletes that there may be some effects on the brain and in pain as well um i guess the last thing i'll say in that that i think is really important for the athletes listening to this is particularly if you're in a sport that gets tested you need to be very careful with cvd because cvd is one of many cannabinoids contained in cannabis so if you are after a cvd product you need to make sure that it's not going to get you flagged for using a banned substance cvd is legal in some of these places but um the tolerance for a cannabinoid not just thc uh they can be quite low so whenever they've done research on specifically the anti-inflammatory properties of it one of the things that i always keep coming back to is is the dosage because you see a big discrepancy between what the literature is trying to tease out on the dose and the commercially available products and even within the commercially available products you'll get you know as low as five milligrams of a dose to something that might be you know maybe up to 200 milligrams what can you say about that because that's a really interesting area and we're always i mean you you just went through this elaborate

explanation of how you're trying to control the dose in your cannabis study on exercise here's one where even in the commercial space you see these wildly different doses and when you compare it to the literature it's hard to people it's hard for people to really make heads nor tails of it yeah um i think there's a lot there to be honest a few things i'd say um a lot of the work that we'll see as i noted before comes from animal studies and sometimes that's not even living mammals right that's muscle tissue so um i guess one of the big things we need to be aware of and to think about is like are we talking about a physiological dose is this something that can even occur in the living human body like bioavailability um that would be one thing i'd say sometimes in the literature we will see extremely high and extremely low doses um for very practical scientific reasons but for the applicability to the everyday athlete we need to consider what that is so sometimes when we run a study in my lab we'll take what we call the sledgehammer approach it costs us so much time and money to run a study we don't want to be faced with the fact that afterwards we're like oh maybe we should have given a little more that's a very real consideration for us um so sometimes you'll see very high doses selected and maybe you don't realize but that might be the reason on the flip side and i guess our work is a good example of this you may see a very low dose um i suspect the cannabis that we are using is lower than what most typical users might actually use um and we're doing that because health canada and our research ethics board you know

they want us to be cautious and i understand that um so another consideration there as well and then i guess the last thing i'd say and i'll be careful about what i comment on the way things are done through the fda but i can tell you in canada um supplements in general are they're a weirdly controlled area they're not controlled at all in the u.s you can say whatever you want there's no consequence i mean i can say that i mean it's i could you know i could put out you know ground rubber and put it in a pill and call it a supplement i mean it's just so freaking ridiculous anyway yeah we seem to share a similar opinion on this but i think that's where um as a consumer we need to be very careful about um what's the burden of proof because for a drug there needs to be safety and efficacy demonstrated for supplements not so much and beyond that oftentimes when a company um finds some scientific proof of something that could be advantageous they will take that and run with it so to your point you know they may have a very low dose of whatever it is anti-inflammatory um but the the claim will be you know this contains a product that does xyz so speaking to your sledgehammer approach is are there any negatives to a high dose approach because we have there has been a lot of research on very high doses of cbd in in different populations and people who have epileptic seizures especially children and things like that when we're looking at it from not from that population but from a normal person hey i want to sleep better i want to recover better

or whatever and i'm personally going to take the sledgehammer approach and take 10 you know we're ultra marathoners we do 10x of whatever is prescribed what are the potential negatives to it um i'll be careful what i say because i don't i don't know what we don't know to be honest but um i suspect i mean from a pure cbd point of view i suspect like any other anti-inflammatory um it probably relates to that idea of like are we just completely ablating the natural response i would be thinking about that for sure i think when we think about cbd in particular though um my point about you know it's one of many cannabinoids there are over a hundred um different cannabinoids and we tend when we talk about cannabis to talk about two right it's as if there's only cbd or thc um i think there's a lot we don't know about those other cannabinoids and what effects they might have and which ones come with it so maybe concern right now is about is it going to make you test positive is it thc maybe we do need to think about what are the effects of those because if cbd can do what it does and thc can do what it does it's highly likely that those other ones do things that we they're not on our radar yet yeah so i i think that's that's a reasonable way to approach it and maybe i'm just being you know an overly cautious scientist in that response too but the other thing i think i'll say is if we look at whole cannabis um when we consider the effects on things like blood pressure um dose matters for sure yeah so um we know that you know in most people we are

going to see this slight increase in blood pressure we also know in people that use cannabis a lot um that effect actually changes and we can think of many things in physiology where the dose directly changes the response so that's a bit of a wishy-washy answer but um i would probably end for moderation well i i'm remembering back to one of my very first podcast episodes a couple of years ago with joanna zeiger who uh is national class endurance athlete and she had a really bad accident on the bike and had chronic pain for years and the the gradual use of of thc and cbd is it's she feels is one of the ways that she was able to eventually overcome that and and to live a healthy lifestyle and get back running and riding and things like that and one of the things she she impressed upon me during the course of that podcast is is that you always need to start low and titrate up right and we use titrate in the chemistry world right that's my background is about with a biochemistry degree it it speaking to just that you don't know what the you don't know what you don't know but if you start low and then gradually very slowly titrate things up then you can find something that that kind of works for you in in a in a very n of one experimental experimental fashion she told this hilarious story of how she started out with a patch and just left it on all night and it would just it just turned out bad so listeners can go and tune back to that story to to hear it but it's actually a funny anecdote of like you can't always take the sledgehammer to these things because you don't know what the

individual response is going to be absolutely and i think you know this idea of hormesis if that means anything to people it's all about the dose before it becomes toxic yeah right and i think when we relate back even to our own training you know um little bits of consistent training are absolutely important and good for us that's how we get better because the body has these little insults and responds but if you maybe this isn't great for an ultramarathon group but when you go and absolutely smash yourself it can be too much that's when breakdown irreparable breakdown happens in injury and those kinds of things i'm kind of coming away and when i read the paper i came away with the sentiment as well is that there's just a lot that we don't know and right now a lot of the i'm going to use the word practice right the practice of using cannabis and cbd products in the field is being derived by the practice of the people that are currently doing it and just them passing hey this is what i'm doing just like joanna right i just titrated up i started i made a mistake i went all the way down to the bottom and i titrated up versus you know you're going to a pharmacy and they've already got the doses kind of figured out for you if you're getting any other type of drug is that really is that a fair synopsis of the state of of what we know about this in the athletic space right now to be honest jason yeah i think it is i think one of the things that struck me most when i got into this world was uh how little we actually knew i just assumed that we knew more than we do because all these decisions had been made and uh yeah i think that's i hate to admit this but i think that's

actually a reality of um being a sports scientist things that i i've seen in a few different worlds where oftentimes the the athlete is ahead of the scientist because they're they're able to try things that we can't right end of one and this anecdote keeps building and then we kind of go like well wait a minute why did that work and then we're playing catch up to figure that out i had a friend i had a friend to ask me uh going back to i told him i was going to bring you on the podcast he's like i'll make sure you ask him what this strain versus that strain does and i'm like well hold on we know we can't even like say fundamentally you know which way's up and which way's down in this so like let's let's like let's wait like five years and get some of the initial research done and then we can start if we could get into the different strains and how those different strains affect you but let's like crawl before we can walk here yeah i think that's exactly it um i mean you'd asked earlier about like are we doing placebos and this and that and i think quite honestly we're at that point where we gotta get like we gotta get the big picture things down like what do we really believe is the main effect in most people and already i mean we've tested a few people in the lab and uh we've seen very different responses inter-individually so that's where we'll go next is like trying to understand what what's the nuance to all these things that's what i was going to ask you so you think the intra-individual into inter-individual thing is going to be the next that the next piece that comes out i think that'll be a huge part um yeah and dosing and um all those kind of things i'll give you one um anecdote here uh i'll be i'll be very honest about the way we do this i mean we

were a little bit nervous starting into this research as well and uh you don't want to mess things up with uh particularly in this kind of world with people you don't know so we started with some of the PhD students in the lab and um so hey you know you're very familiar with the exercise and with the people around so let's try this um maybe i'll share two quick anecdotes here the first was we were worried because we were only using you know one to two percent thc and we'd never tried our dosing cortical so i said to christian who's leading this study i was like hey how did it go like was it uh was it too weak did did people notice anything quite the opposite he said no he was high way before we expected his eyes turns red he started giggling he you know had trouble getting him on the bike um which was kind of funny to me but i asked one of the students um hey what was your perception of the exercise because there's a lot of things you know as a cardio vascular physiologist we can we can quantify them we can measure those things i can tell you what happened but i was quite curious about their perception and uh he admitted to me he said i was really nervous about this i i was dreading doing this because i i was sure it was going to hurt so bad when i'd use thc and they don't know what condition they're in but um he was pretty sure he knew i mean it's hard to blind on that one and uh anyways he said to me once i once i got on for the warm-up i knew it was going to be a good day and i killed it and uh hopefully he doesn't hear this until after the study's done but uh then i went to the research and how did he do he said he was absolutely terrible he thought he was

great this is what i was getting to with the anecdotes it's like you think you're really good but you're really not that's what i keep coming back to and i've run with people who are high before and they tell me the same thing i'm like i'm running really good right now and i'm like no you're not like we're way slower than we normally are like your sense of reality is completely warped yeah and so coming back to this idea of nuance and inter-individual um i mean i don't know where that's going to go because you know over 20 minutes his wattage was down he didn't have that but like if i put on my athlete hat like if i thought i was doing really well you know and i just kept that going later on the race yeah maybe maybe i saved some for later and i'm just like i'm doing great i i can dig deep i don't know well there's this there's always there's this also element of those things are easy to control for in the lab right i mean you can go and you can go to certain power output you can do a graded exercise test a volitional exhaustion time trial like what you guys are doing and things like that ultra marathon gets more complicated and one of the reasons we're going to end on this note because it's going to be totally theoretical just like the rest of it is going to be but one of the one of the theories and one of the use cases in ultra marathon uh running is specifically to help out with the nausea that occurs during a race and you know this athletes will do anything to cure us i mean they will do anything that they'll do things that they've never even conceived of trying and training to try to alleviate a sour stomach in the middle of race so they can take

in calories and they're not puking all over the course and things like that and a lot of the cannabis users that are trail runners that i talk to have a have that as the ones that aren't doing it more recreationally i just like to run when i'm high and they like that experience the ones that are using it from a performance standpoint are saying this is this is the use case i'm using it specifically to stave off nausea and i mean what's your your paper doesn't even really kind of really even touch on that yeah i mean that that's a great point and i i'm going to avoid i don't really know to be honest so i'm going to avoid making a specific comment on nausea in particular but i can see the case that you're making um i will address though the point which i think is very valid um lab testing does not always equal the real world because um particularly being an altered state of mind in you know a super hygienic environment where people are watching you you got wires coming off your chest and you're breathing through tubes it's not the same experience i'm certain as running through the woods um i'll be careful what i say here but we do have in the works a uh a grant which is under review right now with a company based on the west coast um where they have a real interest in taking it to the real world and and we recognize that but that's a different thing um maybe i'll leave it somewhat vague but we we do have some plans to get it to bc to work with some ultra runners who may just be using cannabis on their own and we might just say hey can we watch um and sort of observe what happens to you or maybe

track heart rate in this real world setting quite honestly i will not be allowed to give people cannabis and say like hey go run through the woods um but i'll give you one more teaser there's there's really this is fascinating to me there's some interesting work coming from animal models that shows it might also not be all about th when we think about how the brain responds and how the body feels as a result um for years we thought that uh the runner's high was was an opioid effect right this is an endogenous opioid release and i'm sure most of your listeners know what i'm talking about the runner's high there's convincing evidence now that it's probably endocannabinoid so here come these intersecting worlds of what happens naturally and what's becoming increasingly more popular so i think the link between um thc use and this high feeling of running is pretty obvious there's some really cool work though this shows there may be a link between cbd as well and so while cbd does not have psychotropic effects through a a series of reactions in the body extra cbd could enhance the natural high from the endocannabinoid system and that to me is fascinating so that's where we're probably going to take that work out in the real world of we'll take blood from people and we can use some fancy analysis of that blood and we'll ship it back across country and analyze it over here and see if if there are differences in the way the body responded as a result that's cool as shit and i can't wait till that comes out so will you come back on the podcast

whenever you get some initial results from it sounds like a plan putting you on the spot here all right i'll have links to the show notes on how you can find jamie but i really appreciate your time man this is super super fun for me i'm sure it's going to generate a lot of interest and you're at the leading edge man i mean like you said nothing like this has ever been done before and i think we're going to look back 10 years at some of this initial work that you're doing and we're going to be in a whole lot of a whole lot better position to answer all these questions that we can't answer right now well i appreciate you saying that it's been a pleasure talking and i do just want to make sure that i give credit to as i said christian chung PhD student he's really the driving force he dragged me into this um and so maybe we can get him on to to kind of give you the the insight when he gets that worked up and this is going to be y'all's bag now you know you started the area now you're gonna have to live with it we're gonna have to paint the lab green and change our logo or something oh my god all right man i appreciate your time thanks all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to jamie for coming on the podcast today and having a really good time with this particular topic i don't know why we got so giggly during the entire time it was it was really fun and extremely insightful even though there's not a lot of research on this more importantly jamie thank you for what you do i think you are answering a lot of questions that people like me and athletes around the world that are curious about this topic you are helping us to understand the landscape a whole lot better and i realize that that research is incredibly

problematic to do so 10 years down from the 10 years down the line from now we're going to be indebted to whatever you and your research group up there start to find out appreciate the heck out of everybody tuning in today as always this podcast has no sponsors no endorsers i don't take any money from anybody including the cbd companies so i can talk about them during the course of this podcast like we did today you can help the podcast out by sharing it with your friends family and your running partners that helps podcast out a lot you can give me a kudos or thanks on social media i really appreciate hearing from the audience either through instagram or when they hit me up through my website you can leave a rating or review on apple podcast that always means a lot to me and helps the podcast out a lot but most importantly i just hope that everybody enjoys the content contained within this we try to tackle topics that are pertinent for all trail and ultra runners topical and also sometimes a little bit fun as you guys found out today appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails you