Man has been using herbs for health and healing for a long time. Greeks and Romans used them. Egyptians used them. The ancient Chinese and Sumarians used them and they probably learned how to use them from their prehistoric forebearers. But how did it all BEGIN? Trial and error? Watching sick or wounded animals instinctively eat a particular shrub? Mere happenstance? Extraterrestrial visitors? Regardless, much in the way of archeological evidence clearly proves that they did use them.
It is not our intent to talk about the use of herbs for curing or preventing disease. To do so would be a foolish replication of the work hundreds of brilliant herbalists have done so very well already. We want to talk sports, and in the harsh world of the caveman, where only the strong survived, EVERYONE was an athlete, both by natural selection and by the normal exignecies of their physically demanding lifestyle.
By all accounts, the era of cave dwellers is when herbalism took root. If you will allow us to press the point that these early humans were ALL athletes in a broad sense of the term, it follows that their use of herbs was probably inspired by their critical need to perform at peak efficiency in order to survive.
We believe that one's need to perform optimally as a critical element of one's survival skills remained throughout history. Hard-working humans bent on surviving were conditioned to a similar extent as modern day athletes. They ran, they jumped, they fought, they pulled and pushed against rocks, brush, and game for food, clothes and shelter.
Only recently has man had little use for physical prowess as a survival skill. In other words, an important difference between cave dwellers of yore and athletes of today is that the old timers were conditioned by their survivalist lifestyles. Today's athletes must actually make a POINT of getting into shape because their lifestyles are utterly sedentary by comparison !
If you buy into this way of thinking, you will realize that many of the herbs used for centuries by our predecessors went far beyond providing mere health or prophylaxis against disease. If you got sick back then, you would either die or get better FAST! Your life depended on you being in optimal health, and it's not unreasonable to assume that the cavemen were painfully aware of this need.
Healing or recovering quickly was critical for survival far more then than now. So was endurance. So was strength. And so was speed. Indeed, many of the organized sports practiced today mimic the physical skills needed for survival by our forebearers. Running, jumping, shooting, fighting, equestrian. The list goes on. These are the same physical attributes sedentary folks of today have chosen to eschew and ascribe instead to our athletes.
So, in the remainder of this book, several herbs and combinations of herbs will be discussed in light of their potential use by athletes. You may wonder whether an athlete who doesn't use performance enhancing drugs and only uses herbs would never be able to run with the "big dogs".
We think so. In fact we think that using drugs instead of herbs for athletic performance may even be an inferior (or worse, dangerous) practice. The notion that herbs are useless compared to drugs is also nonsense since over half of the drugs used to heal your body come from herbs. Cases In Point:
Helpful Herbs
Quinine :
Used to treat malaria, comes from the bark of the cinchona tree;
Aspirin :
(Today chemically imitated) comes from the bark of a white willow tree;
Ephedrine :
Used in many cold remedies, comes from the ephedra plant;
Penicillin :
Perhaps the most famous and widely used antibiotic, is produced by fungus;
Morphine :
Derived from opium poppy.
Whether you know it or not, and whether the drug companies like to admit it, herbs have always been (and still are) a vital part of your health and nutrition. More to the point, they are also quite relevant to the needs of athletes seeking peak performance capabilities.
They just need to be rediscovered for their ergogenic properties as they are beginning to for their medicinal ones. While there is quite a bit of solid scientific evidence documenting the use of herbs for good health and longevity, not a lot has been written about the use of herbs specifically for the purpose of improving or maximizing athletic performance. And this is rather strange.
Almost all ancient societies had their athletes and athletic competitions. They were revered as strongly then as they are today (remember, the Greeks gave quite a social status to their "Olympian" athletes). However, none has documented their training methods to any significant degree.
From what we do know, sporting competition was a reflection of their society ; skills in sport were similar to those used in battle and hunting. It is easy to see how wrestling, running, archery, the biatholon, the javelin and the martial arts all became competitive sports in ancient society. These sports contained the very skills of survival that the athletes used in their daily lives! In modern times, we have separated athletic performance and survival.
To see how athletes in history have used nature's sports pharmacy to enhance their athletic performance (whether it was meaning to improve overall health or specifically to win the olive wreath) we should look at the herbs they used to develop skills. What made them run faster ? What improved endurance? How did they increase strength through herbs ? What made them tough enough to face a raging bull in an enclosed arena ? Whatever it was, citius, altius, fortius was as much a slogan then as now among sportsmen.
By : ISSA
