Adults tend to drink alcohol in social settings. Having a drink or two once a week with friends is completely normal behavior. Will those drinks have an effect on your muscle gains? Will it prevent you from building new muscles and hurt your overall diet and exercise plans?
While the answers to these questions tend to be mixed, one thing is for certain: if you plan on spending some serious time in the gym, training for a marathon, or any other event, you should avoid alcohol altogether, according to the experts.
The Issues With Alcohol
Alcohol does more to your body than just making you feel drunk. When it's ingested, your liver begins processing the drink, turning it into ethanol. If this sounds scary, it’s because ethanol is a toxin. Naturally, your body wants to do something with the toxin, so it starts to process the ethanol, breaking it down and turning it into other things that are either used by the body or flushed out of it.
In addition to now having to process this ethanol, your body also needs to do something with any healthy foods that you ate along with the drinks. Normally, those foods are broken down into their macros, such as carbs and fats, and processed accordingly.
However, since your system is busy with the alcohol, it simply stops processing those foods, leaving them for later. This means that the calories that they contain just sit in your digestive system or pass right through it, and you won’t benefit from the nutrients that they contain.
Muscle Protein Synthesis
In order to build up muscle mass, you need to encourage the process of muscle protein synthesis to take place. This means that for you to see the gains that you want, you need to eat a diet that’s high in protein to fuel the muscles and give them the protein that they need to recover from a workout and build themselves up at the same time.
Drinking alcohol interferes with this. Studies have shown that one single drink can prevent the muscles from properly synthesizing proteins. In this study, a muscle biopsy was taken after working out, drinking whey protein, an alcoholic drink, and then, later on, a meal with plenty of carbs. The results showed that drinking alcohol prevented muscle protein synthesis by up to 24%. Even worse, adding carbs to the mix slowed it by 37%.
In this manner, alcohol has a direct effect on how quickly your muscles will grow. One single drink once a week can prevent muscle growth by interfering with protein synthesis. This is why professional athletes don’t drink and non-professional, yet dedicated athletes, avoid the bar altogether.
Building Muscle vs. Fat
Alcohol can do you harm in other ways, like decreasing your ability to burn fat. You’ve probably heard of the ubiquitous “beer belly.” The term comes from the fact that people, usually men, who drink a lot of alcohol tend to have a lot of fat in their abdominal region. However, you don’t need to be a heavy drinker in order to have alcohol interfere with your metabolism. One drink is all that it takes to have an effect.
Your metabolism refers to how many calories you burn when you’re at rest. Part of this is genetic, as some people simply are born with a faster metabolism than others. However, other factors, like exercise, healthy eating (or conversely, poor eating habits), and overall lifestyle play a role in how fast your metabolism moves.
How does alcohol mess up this process? Since it takes more energy and time for the body to process it, alcohol will slow down your metabolism. The effort that would normally be used to digest and process foods instead goes to the drinks. As a result, you’ll absorb more calories from the foods that you eat, as your slower metabolism will cling to them. If you drink too many alcoholic beverages, you’ll end up gaining weight in the form of fat, which is the last thing that athletes want.
Increased Calorie Consumption
Alcohol isn’t free from those pesky calories. The drinks that you choose can play a large role in helping you gain fat instead of muscle. Look at it this way:
- The average beer contains 150 calories
- The average shot contains 100 calories
- The average glass of wine contains 100 calories
That’s not even counting the number of calories included in mixed drinks like margaritas and daiquiris. While one beer along with a meal won’t add a lot to your calorie total, it can add up quickly over time.
Have a few with dinner and you’re boosting your calorie intake by 300 to 450 calories, which is a lot. If you do this more than once a week, then you’re drinking quite a few additional calories. This can affect your athletic performance, form fat instead of muscle, and start to cover the muscles that you do have, making them tough to see.
Alcohol Harms Your Sleep Patterns
Sleep is another crucial part of fitness. In order to gain muscle mass, you need to get a decent amount of restful sleep every single night. Your body repairs itself while you’re sleeping, allowing your muscles to create new proteins through synthesis. However, if you don’t get enough sleep, the opposite occurs and all of that time spent in the gym will be for nothing.
You’re probably wondering how this works since alcohol makes you sleepy. The problem isn’t that it prevents you from falling asleep, but that it prevents you from sleeping deeply. Deep sleep, known as REM sleep (short for Rapid Eye Movements) is crucial as this is the period where your body repairs itself. Alcohol can prevent you from entering REM sleep, thus harming the entire process.
What About the Benefits of Alcohol?
Of course, you might argue that a drink or two now and then, such as once a week with friends, can have some positive health benefits. This is true, since some beverages, like wine, contain antioxidants, and a drink here and there can help your cardiovascular health, among other things. While this makes drinking in moderation once a week something that you can do without too much harm, you do need to be aware that those beverages can make any time spent in the gym a moot point.
Can a Drink or Two Wipe Out Your Gains?
What should you do? Do you go to the gym and then enjoy dinner and a glass of wine with friends? Or spend your time as a teetotaler, avoiding alcohol altogether? The answer to those questions is up to you, and whether or not you’re willing to forego the gains that you’ll receive from a workout. The choice really is yours.
If you have any questions on this or anything, feel free to contact us!
Sources:
Can Alcohol Impair Muscle Growth and Fitness Levels? | Very Well Fit
Alcohol And Muscle Growth: How It Affects Muscular Development | NASM
How to Drink Socially Without Sabotaging Your Fitness Goals | Observer
About Author: Mario Mendias
