Can psychedelics enhance your workout?

Last summer, 25-year-old Joe Collinson munched on some mushroom chocolates before going on a hike with a friend. A seasoned raver, he was no stranger to psychedelics, but it was his first time mixing them with physical activity. “We realised how fast and effortless it made us move up the mountain and also how good it made us feel,” Joe tells Dazed. “We made it a regular thing every couple of months.” In January this year, Joe decided to sign up for an ultramarathon to raise money for charity. When the gruelling, long-distance runs started to become boring, he had a lightbulb moment.

“The first time I ate mushrooms and ran, I planned on running 21 kilometres [a half marathon] and ended up running a full marathon instead – and with ease,” he says. “A week or two later, I ran 30 kilometres while on mushrooms and got personal bests in my 5k, 10k, half marathon and 30k times, all in one run.” After that, taking mushrooms in place of a pre-workout supplement became a weekly thing. “I was running on them near enough every long-distance run in the build-up to my ultramarathon.” He even took mushrooms during the actual race, taking 0.5g (a bit more than the standard microdose) every 10k.

Now, Joe takes mushrooms before his long runs around every two weeks. Depending on the distance, he’ll take anything from 0.5g to 3.5g – the average dose for a proper trip – either all at once or throughout the run. And now, he shares his experience of running on shrooms with his 30,000 Instagram followers. “Running on them just feels so effortless,” he says. “It’s as if you have someone pushing you along.”

No longer the preserve of hedonistic hippies and New Age psychonauts, psychedelics like psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and LSD have leaked into the mainstream. Hallucinogens are increasingly popular among Gen Z, who have learned about the proven benefits of psychedelics, from increased productivity to decreased anxiety. That said, combining psychedelics with exercise is still a pretty niche pastime. Dr Rayyan Zafar, a leading neuropsychopharmacologist at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, sees it as an extension of the broader cultural shift “toward experimenting with non-traditional methods of well-being and self-optimisation”.

Pairing psychedelics with exercise, Zafar tells Dazed, “sits between two modern trends: a desire for flow states and a fascination with biohacking and performance optimisation.” There’s also a social element. “Online communities share personal experiments, and once a behaviour enters these, it can spread rapidly, sometimes faster than science can keep up, leading to illusions of efficacy, acceptability and safety,” adds Zafar. Indeed, Joe’s Instagram is one such example, as are the numerous Reddit threads where people share similar experiences.

Now is a good time to say that there is absolutely no reliable evidence to suggest that combining psychedelics with exercise is useful, let alone safe. Although, says Zafar, “some people describe feeling more connected to their bodies, more motivated, or less aware of discomfort during exercise,” this is purely anecdotal, “and while those reports are interesting, they’re not a substitute for controlled research.”

Still, Joe isn’t alone. Kieran Wilkinson, a 27-year-old Muay Thai fighter from London, regularly uses psychedelics to enhance his workouts. “Probably every couple of weeks, I’ll take a gram of shrooms and run 10k, do some shadow boxing and stretch,” he tells Dazed. “I do it because it makes it fun and enables me to enter a flow state effortlessly. For shadowboxing, I feel more connected to mind and body and can feel the movements. I feel like I can practice with perfect technique and flow.”

Around every six months, he’ll take a quarter of a tab of acid and shadow boxes “for hours on end” without needing to stop. “I can feel a primal flow,” he says. “It feels spiritual.” Like Joe, he also finds it a good way to combat the boredom of “doing the same shit every day”.

For David, 34, also from London, gym gains were simply a byproduct of running regular microdosing cycles. “When I’m microdosing, I feel more focused in my workouts, which are usually weight lifting sessions in the gym or HIIT [high-intensity interval training] at home,” he tells Dazed. “Once I get going, I have extra motivation, so I generally perform better.” He adds that in the days after doing ayahuasca, his performance is even better. “I’m so locked in,” he says.

Again, there is no research underpinning why some people experience improved physical performance after taking psychedelics. However, says Zafar, we can “cautiously speculate” about what might be happening in the brain. “Psychedelics act primarily on the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor which influences sensory processing, attention, perception and the way the brain integrates internal and external cues,” he says. “In theory, this modulation could change how effort feels, perhaps making sensations seem less threatening or allowing people to sustain a rhythm more comfortably.”

He adds that there’s also a potential effect on interoception – how the brain interprets signals from the body. “Psychedelics might change the emotional tone attached to sensations like breathlessness or muscle fatigue,” he says. “That doesn’t mean those sensations go away; rather, they may be interpreted differently.” On top of that, he says, “psychedelics can temporarily alter the default mode network, a set of brain regions involved in self-referential thinking. When activity in this network decreases, people sometimes report feeling ‘less in their head’ and more present in physical sensations.”

This could explain why David, for instance, felt less distracted while doing home workouts, or why Becky, 25, from Manchester, was able to tackle “bigger and harder climbs” after taking 0.25g of mushrooms before a bouldering session. “We wanted to see if it would shift anything mentally for us, and it completely removed the fear barrier,” she tells Dazed. However, Becky’s experiment wasn’t completely successful. “My limbs just didn’t really want to try hard, like I was too zen to want to try.” David also had this experience after attempting a long run on 3g of mushrooms. “I found it really challenging, time felt a lot slower and I didn’t manage to run as far as I normally would.”

This is the thing about psychedelics: they’re unpredictable, and it’s vital to take other people’s experiences with a pinch of salt. As Zafar notes, there are plenty of potential negative consequences of combining psychedelics with exercise, and without proper research, safety concerns should outweigh any hypothetical performance benefits.

For one, there’s impaired coordination or judgement, which could increase the risk of injury. Plus, psychedelics cause cardiovascular effects such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, which, says Zafar, are “important considerations when already stressing the body through exercise”. And finally, there’s the potential for a bad trip: “set and setting strongly influence psychedelic experiences, and exercise environments can sometimes bring added mental exertion,” he adds.

Ivan Ezquerra-Romano, a harm reductionist who works at Substancy, agrees that combining psychedelics with sport is not recommended. However, if you do try it, he says, “it’s important to start with a very low dose and see how your body reacts, as well as staying hydrated and ensuring you have an optimal diet.”

As Zafar notes, “psychedelics are showing promise across several clinical domains, but applying them to exercise performance is uncharted territory”. But this is clearly an area that deserves proper investigation, and hopefully, the science will catch up soon.