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Athletes face constant pressure to deliver excellent performance, being more robust and faster than ever before. The improvement in athletic performance is due to technological advancements in sports gear development and sophisticated training techniques. However, keeping up with such intensive training and stellar performances is tasking, making athletes turn to strength-boosting remedies.
Kratom, an herb from Southeast Asia, is emerging as a potent herbal supplement providing athletes with numerous benefits. Moreover, it does not cause undesirable side effects associated with performance enhancement drugs.
Find out why kratom is a must-try for athletes below.
Improves Motivation and Focus
In Southeast Asia, where kratom originates, the locals chewed on its leaves to garner enough strength to perform manual labor throughout the day. Their plant wisdom served them well because research shows kratom has a stimulant-like effect, warding off lethargy. A wide variety of kratom products are available from trustworthy vendors like Kratom Krush, allowing you to enjoy more palatable kratom forms like powder and capsules. You can also read Advantages of Using a Kratom Tincture at kratomkrush.
When it comes to athletics, your mental state is as important as your physical state. While in the field, the need for mental acuity explains why “get your head in the game” features prominently among the most cliché sports references ever.
Kratom’s stimulant-like effect begins when the herb’s major alkaloid, mitragynine, attaches to the endogenous opioid system and causes neural excitation. The neural excitation signals and increases activity in the dopaminergic pathway or the brain section that regulates motivation and reward.
Once the motivation pathway defines something as a reward, boosting strength, it produces the hormone dopamine. Dopamine channels a significant portion of your brainpower towards a single stimulus or activity for extended periods, facilitating motivation and focus. Therefore, kratom’s reason boosting ability helps build stamina, grit, discipline, and other positive characteristics that help build strength.
Kratom’s stimulant-like effect does not include the jitteriness associated with coffee and other typical stimulants. It’s not included in the 2018 World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) list of banned substances. Therefore, you can take kratom without fear of jeopardizing your athletic career.
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Mood Elevation
A literature review on the role of emotion in sport revealed that emotional competence among coaches and their athletes constitutes a significant part of sports performance. Negative emotions like nervousness, fear, and anger thwart an athlete’s ability to perform drills effectively and make instantaneous decisions.
Sports are all about drills and on-the-fly decisions, so any factor inhibiting your capacity to deliver on the two prevents you from building strength. Negative moods not only affect an individual but also disrupt the entire team’s performance.
Besides its motivation effect, kratom also delivers a euphoric effect that causes one to be in good spirits. Kratom’s dominant alkaloids partially bind to mu-receptors present in the endogenous opioid system, causing mood elevation.
The partial binding action means that kratom does not trigger the same level of euphoria as opioids that bind fully; hence, the herb does not cause dependency issues. Therefore, taking kratom makes some things roll off you, allowing you to spare your energy for training to boost strength.
Pain Relief
The intensive specialized training athletes undergo results in pain and the muscle-skeletal system, as with delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). DOMS refers to the hours or days of muscle soreness you experience after engaging in rigorous physical activity. While DOMS’s exact cause remains unknown, the dominant theory is that microscopic muscle tears occur during intense physical exercise, like athletic training.
Therefore, the pain is part of the body’s inflammatory response as it repairs the worn muscles and utilizes protein to build new muscle tissue. While pain is essential for new muscle formation, vital to boosting strength, it can be debilitating.
However, kratom, particularly red kratom strains, are potent analgesics and deliver timely and effective pain relief. The herb works by blocking pain signals, thus reducing activity in the brain’s pain perception pathway. Kratom also features anti-inflammatory effects that expedite healing, helping build leaner and stronger muscle tissue.
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It Is An Immunostimulant
While habitual exercise promotes good health, intensive practice compromises the immune system. One research study shows a link between intense training among athletes and post-exercise-resistant depression. Consequently, athletes are more vulnerable to bacterial infections, especially upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) like flu before and during competitions, when they train hardest.
As explained above, pain resulting from intense exercise triggers immune responses like inflammation. However, such frequent reactions overexert the cells that produce immune cells, causing a dip in immunity.
A study on three alkaloids present in kratom isomitraphylline, isopteropodine, and mitraphylline revealed immunostimulants. The alkaloids caused a significant increase in immunity markers in test subjects with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Therefore, kratom prevents opportunistic microbe infections from weakening athletes at inopportune moments.
Relaxation Effect
Rest is a vital component in athletes’ strength-boosting pursuits because resting facilitates muscle formation. It also promotes healing by allowing the body to recover from brutal exercise sessions and leaves you feeling rejuvenated.
Kratom is popular for its deep relaxation effect induced by mitragynine and a second alkaloid called 7-hydroxy mitragynine. Green and red kratom strains are best for athletes seeking physical and mental relaxation and restful sleep.
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Conclusion
Kratom holds immense promise for athletes seeking to boost their strength and overall performance naturally. However, ensure you understand how different kratom strains work to reap maximum benefits, and always buy your kratom from trustworthy vendors.
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