How to Use CBD Muscle Cream

Fitness isn’t just a fad. A record 242 million Americans six and older—nearly 80% of everyone in that age group—took part in at least one sports or fitness activity in 2023, across 124 different sports, fitness and outdoor activities. The list runs from skiing to golf to hiking, not to mention swimming, jogging, soccer and pickleball, which on the count CNBC reported in early 2023 had more than 36 million American players in a single twelve-month stretch.

That’s a lot of muscular movement, and a lot of muscle fatigue. Enter CBD muscle cream.

CBD has been part of the workout-recovery conversation for years. Writing in Forbes in 2019, Margaux Lushing noted that national gyms including 24 Hour Fitness had started selling cannabinoid products at the front desk. Consumer interest has held up since: a Forbes Health survey of 2,000 US adults found that 60% of respondents had tried a CBD product and “believe it offers some medicinal benefits.”

Topicals are especially popular as a way to target one specific area after a workout. Instead of taking a gummy or a tincture and waiting for it to work through the digestive system, many active adults and athletes prefer to put the product directly on the part of the body that feels most tense or tired.

Despite that popularity, plenty of people still have basic questions about how to use CBD muscle cream well. Advice on dosage, application and frequency varies widely. Here is what we recommend at Entourus.

How to Use CBD Muscle Cream: What’s the Right Dosage?

Working out how much product to use is difficult with topicals generally, not just CBD. Sunscreen is the familiar example: the recommended quantity is a teaspoon for the face and neck and about an ounce—roughly a shot glass—for the exposed areas of the body. That is a specific number, and one worth knowing rather than guessing at.

Part of the difficulty is that topicals—a category that includes creams, lotions, salves, balms and ointments—vary so widely in formulation. Those terms refer to different ratios of oil, water and wax, and those proportions affect how spreadable and how absorptive a product is.

We suggest starting with a nickel-sized portion of Entourus CBD salve, adjusted for the size of the area. The lower back is a broader area than the back of the neck and will take more. Skin varies too: the face, or the skin around the adductors, behaves differently from the drier skin of an elbow or a foot.

How to Apply CBD Muscle Cream

Often the best CBD muscle cream isn’t a cream at all. Our salves are semi-solid, with a high proportion of oils and waxes chosen to help the active ingredients penetrate the skin. Cannabinoids and terpenes are both fat soluble, so an oil-rich base is the more natural carrier for them.

Carrier oils do exactly what the name suggests—they carry the active ingredients where they need to go. The aim is to help CBD travel beyond the outer layers of the epidermis, toward the endocannabinoid receptors in the skin.

Those oils and waxes also sit on the surface, which slows moisture loss and keeps the product where you put it. That occlusive quality is part of why a salve suits someone who has just finished sweating through a workout, or whose skin is drier after a shower.

To apply Entourus as a muscle cream, take that nickel-sized amount and massage it into the area that took the load, extending into the surrounding area as well. Keep working it in until it has absorbed—roughly 60 to 90 seconds, depending on your skin type and the size of the area. Oilier skin tends to take longer than drier skin.

How Frequently to Use CBD Muscle Cream

Every body metabolises CBD, terpenes and other bioactive ingredients a little differently. How often you apply comes down to your skin, the size of the area, and how much load your body is carrying. Being newly aware of your quadriceps after leg day or a morning of cross-country skiing is a different thing from a persistent injury—and anything that isn’t settling on its own is a conversation for a clinician rather than a blog.

The published research is thin on dosing schedules. A 2022 review of topical cannabidiol in skin pathology describes only two topical studies that state an application frequency at all—a cannabis seed extract cream and an endocannabinoid cream, both applied twice a day—and neither of those used purified CBD. The review’s own conclusion notes that appropriate dosages and frequency of application are still being worked out in trials. In practice, there is nothing to stop you applying more often than twice daily. When the last application feels like it has worn off, or the nickel-sized amount clearly wasn’t enough for the area, massage in more.

How often you reapply also depends on the ratio of CBD to carrier oils in a given product. Entourus Synergy Salve carries 40 MG of CBD per ML (2,000 MG per jar), while Soothe Salve carries 20 MG per ML (1,000 MG per jar). The higher-concentration jar puts more CBD into the same nickel-sized amount, which is the practical difference between the strengths.

Terpenes are the other variable. Full-spectrum, broad-spectrum and CBD isolate are not interchangeable. Full-spectrum extract carries the minor cannabinoids and terpenes that came with the plant, and the idea that those compounds behave differently in company than in isolation—the entourage effect—is why our CBD + Terpenes line is formulated the way it is.

Building It Into a Routine

So how often should you apply CBD muscle cream? There is no single answer, and no need to force one. Start with the nickel-sized amount, see how the area feels, and adjust from there over a few sessions.

What matters more than the exact interval is the rest of the routine around it—hydration, stretching and actual rest. Our active recovery guide puts that sequence in order, and we have written separately about CBD and working out if you want the wider picture.

Every Entourus salve uses full-spectrum CBD from non-GMO hemp grown in Central Oregon. Our CBD + Terpenes line adds a proprietary blend of more than fifty botanically derived terpenes, including limonene and humulene. Both lines come in 1000, 1500 and 2000 MG per 50 ML jar.

Learn more about cannabis topicals on our FAQ.