How Alcohol is Disrupting Your Gains

Almost all of the information we receive about alcohol and fitness is conveyed in a caloric context, which is simply to say that most of the interest in alcohol involves the number of calories that it administers to your body. So when alcohol is only handled in this manner, all of the focus is on how alcohol can be an impediment to creating the sort of caloric deficit required to burn fat and lose undesired weight.

While this is certainly helpful, there is also a whole lot more lurking behind your nightly Long Island iced tea than simply its calories. On top of interrupting your weight loss progress with a caloric onslaught you might not be taking into account, it will also disrupt your muscle growth in ways that you would never detect.

Reduced ATP Production

As you already know if you’ve ever taken a deep dive into the ways creatine benefits your muscles, adenosine triphosphate — commonly shortened to ATP — is the primary energy source of your muscles that contributes to their power and ability to contract. Well, one of the downsides to alcohol consumption is that it compromises your ability to produce ATP. 

This means that you’re simply not going to be able to get peak productivity out of your muscles if you have a tendency to imbibe alcohol on a regular basis, which also means that you can’t trigger the same sort of adaptive response to physical training that you would have achieved if you’d been able to get a maximum effort out of your muscles.

Inefficient Muscle Recovery

Aside from getting a maximum effort out of your muscles during training, muscle growth is all about ingesting sufficient nutrients — and primarily protein — to regenerate your muscles during your recovery period. When you have alcohol in your body, the efficiency of that entire process is compromised. 

At least one study showed that when protein was ingested alongside alcohol, muscle-protein synthesis declined by 37 percent. In other words, regular consumption of alcohol may be handicapping your muscle gains by more than one-third, and that’s without factoring in the damage that alcohol is doing to your ability to power through your training on the front end.

Compromised Judgement

Hopefully you know better than to train in an inebriated state, but even if you just have a little something extra before beginning your workout, your brain is going to be in a compromised state, and your judgement may become askew. Not only is this likely to result in a loss of some of your coordination, but you may be even more likely to take risks with your training that you otherwise wouldn’t take. 

Liquid courage and a loss of coordination are a bad combination when you’re handling hundreds of pounds of weight, even if it’s your own body weight. One of the quickest ways to disrupt your muscle-building progress is to get injured, so please make sure that your alcohol use occurs nowhere near your training time.

Not Part of the Recipe for Growth

Alcohol may be an ingredient in your favorite social beverages, but it is of zero value when your objective is to build muscle and optimize your health. Alcohol will strip your muscles of their peak productivity before your workout even starts, and then inhibit your ability to recover once your workout concludes. In short, the best advice is to keep alcohol far away from your strength training workoutsia

Takeaways

1. There are multiple ways that alcohol can interfere with your fitness goals aside from their caloric content.

2. Alcohol compromises your body’s ability to produce ATP, which limits your maximum output during strength training.

3. Studies show that alcohol disrupts the efficiency of muscle protein synthesis, reducing it by nearly 40 percent.

4. Training while impaired by alcohol can hinder your judgement, resulting in unnecessary risks being taken while your body is less coordinated.

5. In order to maximize muscle growth, alcohol should not be consumed until well after strength training sessions.