Effects on cardio from oral cannabis, hydrocodone and benzos

[LucidSDreamr]

MoDS I want sure this was better suited for the fitness drug crowd of PED or the biochemical crowd of neuro and pharm. Feel free to move after a week if not much responses here.

My use involves edible only cannabis daily (smoked for 20 years tho previously). 1 or 2 mg of alprazolam maybe 2 or 3 days out of the week and maybe 2 40 mg doses of hydrocodone in the week amd 2 to 5 mg maintenance dose daily during non high dose days (yes I'm dependent of 2 to 5 mg a day)

About a year ago I began lap swimming for about 45 min to an hour per day 6 days a week.

Aside from the obvious negstive effects of being hungover from these drugs while training..and the few positives (weed put me in a motivational mindfrsme where I tend to push the work out much harder.

The benzos are the only ones that really make the next day of training lethargic and harder. The opiate to a much smaller extent gives a hangover. But feel I perform better while high on pot than off it.



To conclude/ I'm putting in a lot of work over the past year and seen some gains in conditioning and 15 lb weight loss. However I'm wondering up much these drugs I do are really holding me back and progressing in my training.



Cannabis raises heart rates ..opis lower T levels. Benzos I have no idea. But to what extent at my use are levels in these drug use hurting my ability to progress as a swimmer because I want to get into competitive clubs.

I'm looking for input mostly from mechanistic biochemical standput of how the drug impedes performance

 

[Vastness]

Interesting question, I guess it's obvious that the effect is not insignificant, but the difficult thing to answer is exactly to what extent these are having a negative effect.

I did a little searching but there does not seem to be too much research in this area. I would say that out of all the drugs you are taking, cannabis is probably the most benign and the opiates are probably the most damaging.

Opioids and endocrine dysfunction

I would venture to say that the bulk of the harmful effects from long term opioid use, with respect to exercise performance, will come from cumulative endocrine dysregulation and all the knock-on undesirable effects that result from that, ie, impaired recovery, impaired muscle growth, and impaired cardiovascular endurance.

On that basis I'd suggest the best way to get some idea into exactly how much this is affecting you would be to get a blood hormone panel done, and compare your results to healthy averages in your age, weight and fitness demographic. Obviously this isn't going to give you an exact answer without having a control measure of yourself at the exact same level of fitness but in an alternate reality where you did not use any opiates - but it will still give you some idea, especially if any values are way off where you'd expect.

As far as I'm aware, benzodiazepines do not have nearly as much direct influence on the endocrine system, and as such their impact on your overall sports performance will be significantly less - the bulk of the negative effects will come from impaired performance in the aftermath of dosing. I didn't really find any studies that provided any more specific or useful information in this regard, but I will link a few that you may find of interest.

Performance and metabolic effects of benzodiazepine during submaximal exercise.
Effects of benzodiazepine during a Wingate test: interaction with caffeine.
Effects of benzodiazepines on psychomotor performance