When most of us think of psychedelics, the last thing that comes to mind is increased energy, focus and range of motion while working out or competing in sports. But in microdoses that are as little as one-twentieth of a full “tripping” dose (around 3 grams of mushrooms or 120 micrograms of LSD), athletes are taking psilocybin mushrooms and LSD out of the woods and into the gym to enhance athletic performance and take their training to the next level.

In 2018, strength and conditioning coaches D.J. Murakami and Tom Mountjoy began pairing their daily movement practices with microdoses of psilocybin mushrooms. They were blown away by the results they experienced: more energy, confidence and flexibility in their workouts, plus the sensation of getting lost in time while working out. After sharing their personal experiences with each other and their tens of thousands of Instagram followers, Murakami and Mountjoy formed The Emptiness Lab, an online community for athletes around the globe to share their microdose-and-training experiences. The group quickly evolved into an amateur research study of nearly 20 athletes who microdosed to enhance their workouts. The eclectic group of yogis, endurance runners, weightlifters and personal trainers provided weekly self-reports on their performance, mood, sociability, libido and other more traditional athletic metrics such as strength and flexibility.

One of their main findings was a decreased fear response on microdose days, which led to advancements in their movement practices. Murakami says that when our bodies approach their limits, we feel pain—our nervous system is threatened and needs to tell us to stop.

“What the microdose does is allow us to explore around the fringes of that [threatening] range of motion,” says Mountjoy. A tiny dose of mushrooms can give these athletes more freedom to go further. Then on non-microdose days, they can continue to use the muscle memory of that new range. “From an athletic perspective, it could be huge for athletes that are looking to push those last few centimeters or milliseconds or whatever it is in their sport,” Mountjoy says.

Lifting this fear response during training has other benefits as well, especially when it comes to skill acquisition. Mountjoy says athletes already have a high level of body awareness when it comes to their own sense of balance and coordination, but many get stuck in their heads when trying to learn the mechanics of a new skill. Microdosing can put them more in tune with their bodies, allowing them to access a “flow state” where things come together more naturally than a step-by-step process. “So [a new skill] doesn’t really have to be learned or trained in a regimented, theoretical, mechanical way. It can be presented to someone based upon what intuitively makes sense. They are given an opportunity to play with it themselves in that flow state,” says Mountjoy.

Pursuing a flow state is a popular reason people microdose, whether they’re athletes, artists or programmers. The concept of a flow state, where mental chatter quiets down and you can become absorbed in a task for hours without noticing the time go by, was first recognized by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975. While the mechanism is still quite mysterious to researchers, high doses of psilocybin and other psychedelics have been shown to reduce activity in the “default mode network”—the brain’s future planning and self-referential thinking center. Scientists aren’t certain about whether microdosing has the same default mode network effect, but a 2019 study on microdosing found participants experienced “significant reductions in mind wandering,” which the authors wrote could “reduce distractibility and increase capacity to focus on the task at hand”—two of the most important components of flow.

Yet finding a flow state via microdosing remains extremely dose-specific. While the optimal “subperceptual” microdose for boosting athletic performance varies among individuals, the effect is meant to be extremely subtle. McCall and Murakami both describe microdosing around 0.1 to 0.25 grams of psilocybin mushrooms for their workouts, sometimes slightly more depending on the activity. (An average recreational dose is closer to two or three full grams.) Mountjoy recommends starting low, around 0.115 grams, and working up from there. Doses higher than 0.25 grams or so can throw training goals out the window, especially when it comes to routine tasks like repetitive workouts. This is the main reported negative side effect from athletes when they accidentally take more than a microdose: Their concentration and coordination can quickly go from optimized to impaired. But for some, beginning to trip slightly is a small price to pay for athletic gains.

“You have an uptick in all your senses and you can see better, hear better and smell better,” says UFC fighter Ian McCall, who has microdosed psychedelics to improve performance. “You feel like the world slows down.” While some of this could be due to the placebo effect, a 2019 study found microdoses of LSD affected individuals’ perception of time, perhaps contributing to microdosers’ ability to lose themselves in flow more easily.

McCall says microdoses allow him to tune into his mixed-martial-arts opponents on a higher level.

“When you’re in that flow, absorbing information, analyzing things and studying your opponent, you see microaggressions in their facial expressions, body, movements, breath, the sound of their feet. You can just be there and absorb all of it—and react to it properly, or before it’s even happening.” Interestingly, this increased awareness is in line with findings from a 2018 study that found that microdosers score higher on tests of “wisdom,” which the researchers defined as the ability to “consider multiple perspectives when facing a situation, be in tune with one’s own emotions and the emotions of others, and feeling a sense of connection and unity.” This begs the question: Could microdoses give athletes all these advantages in the split seconds needed to win a competition?

Since retiring, McCall has developed—with the help of his partner Irena Marin and other mentors—the “McCall method,” a holistic approach to life-coaching designed for high-level athletes and performers. It combines microdosing, meditation, breathwork and “psychedelic integration” so athletes can be the best versions of themselves in and out of competition. To McCall, it is much more than just microdosing to enhance athletic performance. Many athletes in the UFC and beyond struggle with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and the possible symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), McCall says. They also must juggle the confusion and difficulties of being young, famous and paid to not only beat people up on a world stage but also to cause off-stage drama to boost ticket sales. The McCall method focuses on the athlete’s emotional, spiritual and physical healing, so when it’s time to compete, they don’t crumble under the pressure.

Similarly, since NHL star Riley Cote retired in 2010, he’s been researching, advocating for and experimenting with treatments for the “collateral damage” he says his professional sports career inflicted on his brain and mental health. Cote tells Playboy he began microdosing psilocybin about four years ago, as both a performance optimizer and a tool to help with TBI in the long term.

“Microdosing has really helped me with increased focus, sustained energy and awareness. I just feel more present,” Cote says. “Overall, it’s been an amazing tool to help optimize my mental health.”

This goes far beyond a cool-sounding workout fad. When it comes to psilocybin for TBI, advocates like McCall and Cote are willing to risk their reputations to grow more awareness around the issue, and scientists are now looking to confirm anecdotal experiences with empirical evidence. Unlimited Sciences, a nonprofit psychedelic research organization, aims to collect data on this subset to try to improve the quality of life for those struggling with the symptoms of traumatic brain injuries, including suicidal ideation, depression, rage and memory loss.

Unlimited Sciences recently teamed up with Johns Hopkins University (one of the leading U.S. institutions looking into psychedelics’ safety and clinical potential) to survey folks in the “real world” who are using psilocybin outside a clinical context. Del Jolly, co-founder and director of Unlimited Sciences, explains they hope to expand their survey collection to focus on specific groups of users, especially athletes and others with TBI. Since a 2018 study found that psychedelics can help promote neural plasticity in rat models, there’s been a lot of interest in psychedelics for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and now TBI and CTE. Plus, with recent findings that microdoses of LSD promote levels of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor plasma—a crucial component of neuroplasticity—both Jolly and McCall say there are already a lot of athletes who microdose, hoping to improve their brain health.

Many athletes and other microdosers stick to a regular microdose regime, usually either the Fadiman protocol, which is to microdose every third day for about six weeks, or the Stamets protocol, which calls for five days of microdosing (in combination with supplements) and then two days off. However, the long-term safety of these protocols has yet to be determined.

Matthew Johnson, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and one of the most widely published psychedelic researchers, says more research needs to be done on chronic administration of psychedelics before claims can be made about microdosing’s safety or efficacy. He explains that psilocybin, LSD and even MDMA have agonist activity effects on the serotonin 2B receptor, which is the same type of activity that got a drug called fen-phen pulled from the market in 1997 because people were dying from heart-valve problems. Johnson also says that at certain doses psychedelics can increase pulse and blood pressure, which could theoretically prompt a cardiovascular event when folks are working out hard.

“We don’t know that [these side effects] are happening at [micro] doses,” says Johnson, “but that’s part of the point. We don’t know the dose effect curve, no one has worked this out.”

McCall, Murakami and Mountjoy are aware of these potential risks, and Murakami and Mountjoy say they microdose for about six weeks then intuitively take a few months off before starting another cycle to try and mitigate any negative side effects.

Of course, there is also the issue of psychedelics’ legality: No matter what the dose, psilocybin, LSD and other entheogens are still classified as Schedule I substances in the U.S., meaning the federal government considers them to have high abuse potential and to lack any medical value.
Despite this, psychedelic decriminalization initiatives are becoming more common, with Oregon and Washington, D.C. voting to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms and other plant medicines just this week. With the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and other anti-doping agencies declining to test for psilocybin or LSD (and athletes concerned about the effects of TBI with few other options), the reasons to expand clinical research into psychedelics at all dose levels continue to mount.