Amy Diiullo has been playing sports and working out since high school…and she’s been smoking marijuana about that long, as well. She studied exercise science in college, and as she learned the technical aspects of working out and being healthy, she realized that cannabis could help her achieve her fitness goals.
Now she’s running the Fit for 420 program in Denver. We recently sat down with her to learn more about how to work out with marijuana.
Westword: How did you first start using cannabis in your workouts?
Amy Diiullo: I’ve always been very active. I was an athlete in high school and ran track, cross-country and did tennis and a whole bunch of other sports, and I also used cannabis recreationally. I don’t think when you’re younger that there might be some synergistic effects there — that you might be using cannabis because you’re sore or having trouble sleeping, or that it could be related to activity. I got more involved with it in college on the science side — a very physiology-based practicum of learning how exercise affects your body, which then translates to how cannabis can affect your body. So when we talk about cannabis or THC being a bronchodilator, what that means is it opens up the blood vessels in your lungs to receive potentially more oxygen. So there’s a direct correlation between understanding some of the physiological effects of exercise and the physiological effects of cannabis in the body and the different receptors.
For me, it just became a natural marriage. If you’re sore, using topicals or a hash bath is a really easy solution, but it also translated to asking: How can this affect my workout itself?