Luke Douglas is a fitness and health blogger at Ripped.me and a great fan of the gym and a healthy diet. He follows the trends in fitness, gym and healthy life and loves to share his knowledge through useful and informative articles.

The traditional image of a “stoner” has changed over the past few years significantly. If you take a look at the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ricky Williams, and Ronda Rousey, you likely think “fierce”, not “high”. However, it’s precisely these and many other pro athletes who have redefined the meaning of marijuana usage and its place in the modern lifestyle of any health-focused enthusiast. They prove that with smart consumption and balance, as well as other accompanying factors such as your choice of nutrition and sports gear, you can indeed utilize cannabis to benefit your workouts.

Before you randomly start consuming marijuana no matter your training, sleeping, and eating schedule, let’s take a closer look at all the ways this plant can make a difference in your routine.

Improving sleep quality

As one of those key pillars of fitness success, sleep is often neglected by exercise enthusiasts, as most of us still put too much emphasis on what we do in the gym in order to achieve our goals. While your workout plan indeed is important in achieving your goals, how you treat all the surrounding lifestyle habits will heavily impact the success of your routine. Sleep, for example, is vital for muscle regeneration and muscle protein synthesis, hence the need for ample quality sleep.

Since most of us use phones and watch TVs copiously before bedtime, we tend to have disrupted sleeping patterns, thus wreaking havoc on our health goals. This is where cannabis steps in to save the night, as moderate use of marijuana can help you fall asleep faster and enjoy the perks of deep sleep for longer, giving your body more time to recuperate.

Soothing inflammation

We all know how excruciating your muscle soreness can get after an entire cycle of progressive overload in your training, with your muscles desperately yearning for some rest. To make it easier for us to lead our lives normally without abandoning our workouts, we’ve started using compression tights and similar gear to help our muscles recover faster and soothe the painful inflammatory post-workout processes.

However, why rely on a single technique if you can add another as reinforcement that will provide your body with just enough anti-inflammatory properties? Once again, medicinal, healing effects of marijuana can help stave off inflammation and thus speed up your recovery.

Helping with the bulk

As many lifters know all too well, it’s not easy at all to maintain a steady diet that is in the range of 4,000 or 5,000 calories, aiming to pack on more muscle over time. Suddenly, the already time-consuming process of eating that many calories becomes a burden and a stressful chore, not to mention a strain on your appetite.

Marijuana has always been known to help increase those much-needed munchies, and if you’re looking to make your diet easier on yourself and reach those weight goals faster, and still in a healthy manner, then cannabis can truly be of service. Just make sure that you don’t go overboard with your THC intake – while it is the main agent that helps with improving appetite, it also has a slew of other potential negative effects. It’s all about balance and monitoring your own reactions.

Serving as a stress-detox

Exercise alone is often more than enough to get rid of all that pent up stress and negativity we haul around for days on end. No one can dispute the relaxing effect of going at a punching bag with no mercy, but sometimes, your body cannot produce the energy you’d need for such a feat. So, when stress hits us hard, we often tend to skip our normal exercise plans and stay at home, brooding.

The bottom line is, we cannot escape stressful situations or avoid triggers at all times. What we can do is have coping mechanisms that help us stay calmer in the face of stress, which is why marijuana is a perfect tool that balances your hormones and helps you “keep calm”.

Better healing after injuries

Finally, athletes have also used cannabis to heal their sports-related injuries, not just to make their workouts more productive and their recovery faster in terms of soreness and better sleep. Of course, severe injuries still need regular medical monitoring as well as physical therapy and other vital aspects of healing, but marijuana has shown great potential in healing broken bones, help reduce muscle spasms, and reduce pain associated with injuries.

Although there’s still so much we don’t know and have yet to learn about marijuana in the fitness world, we are slowly changing the global mindset towards this healing plant, and this shows great promise in conducting further studies to discover more of its effects. Until then, we can rely on the experience of the pros, and make sure that we strike that fine balance we need to make the most of this healing plant.