Looking for some extra incentive to help you finally kick your smoking habit? You probably already know that cigarettes aren’t good for you, and have been linked to severe, long-term health issues.
However, it may surprise you the effects that smoking is having on your body right now, every time you have a cigarette. Cigarette smoke has an impressive range of devastating impacts to the body’s cells and organs, which translates to dramatic impacts on sports performance.
So if you are an athlete, or simply want to get fit, smoking cigarettes will greatly impact on your performance. Let’s take a look at exactly how smoking affects your sports performance.
What Smoking Does To The Body
When you inhale a cigarette, you are breathing carbon-monoxide (the poisonous gas found in car exhaust fumes), hydrogen cyanide, acetone and benzene, among others.
Long term, according to the US Center for Disease Control, smokers are 30-40% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, 2 to 4 times more likely to suffer a stroke, and have the same increased risk of coronary heart disease. Smoking related causes account for around 80% of deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Particular Impacts of Smoking on Sports Performance
Damage to blood vessels, lungs, bone health and inflammation have obvious impacts on physical performance. Athletes who smoke have lower endurance, increase risk of injury and poorer overall sports performance, compared to non-smokers.
Having high levels of oxygen in the blood is essential to strong athletic performance. When you smoke, the carbon monoxide found in cigarette smoke binds the red blood cells in your blood stream. This causes oxygen molecules to be displaced from the red blood cells, lowering the levels of oxygen available to you when you exercise, leading to breathlessness and harming endurance.
Combined with the reduced blood circulation also caused by smoking, this also means less oxygen is delivered to the muscles. This, in turn, harms muscle growth at the same time as contributing to lactic acid build up in the muscles, which causes muscle soreness and fatigue.
The Good News
If you’re a smoker, don’t worry – you don’t need to give up hope just yet! The good news is that once you give up smoking, your body repairs itself (and more rapidly than you probably think) allowing your sports performance to return to that of a non-smoker.
As soon as you stop smoking cigarettes, the body begins to repair itself. Once these repairs begin to take effect, sports performance will also begin to improve.
Of course, giving up cigarettes is easier said than done. Having a replacement for cigarettes can make the transition easier. Snus, a form of smokeless tobacco, comes in small, tea bag-like pouches, which are placed under the top lip, releasing almost three times as much nicotine as a cigarette. Snus can be purchased online through SnusDirect, which is one of the largest online retailers for the product.
Many athletes are fans of Snus. A Daily Mail investigation claimed it is prevalent among footballers.
“It’s big in the game. It’s come from Scandinavia and a lot of players are using it,” Stoke City midfielder Charlie Adam told BBC Radio 5 live.
Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy has previously admitted to using the nicotine pouches.
He wrote in his autobiography: “When I joined Leicester I started using snus, which are nicotine patches that you place against your gums for 10 minutes or so. I used to have the odd fag on a night out at Fleetwood, but one of the lads introduced me to snus when I signed for Leicester and I found they helped me chill out. A lot more footballers use them than people realize, and some lads even play with them during matches.”
Ashley Cole, the former Arsenal , Chelsea and England star, was seen using the smokeless tobacco product while relaxing outside a health bar in Los Angeles, with his Italian model girlfriend Sharon Canu.
Smoking cigarettes have devastating effects on health and body processes, which have equally devastating effects on sports performance. Quitting smoking, or switching to snus, will have incredible benefits for not only your body but your health performance.
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