Does Alcohol Effect Your Fitness?
If you have a goal of gaining muscle, getting fitter, losing weight, or improving your overall health and fitness, then we hate to be the ones to break this to you:
Alcohol is not conducive to any of those goals.
This can often be a tough pill to swallow if you enjoy having a few drinks before bed. While this might not seem like a big deal, this can be derailing your progress without you even realizing it.
How does alcohol affect my body when it comes to my fitness?
1. It dehydrates you and increases fatigue.
When you’re hitting workouts, most likely you are working up a sweat. This is part of the reason why hydration is key for workouts. Drinking alcohol consistently can leave you dehydrated, sluggish, and enhances your dehydration.
2. It slows down your reaction time and overall workout performance.
According to the Alcohol Rehab Guide, “Drinking alcohol as a regular pattern can negatively affect your performance in the gym, when you play sports, and in everyday life. Alcohol is a sedative that slows down functioning. It weakens hand-eye coordination, impairs judgment, and slows down reaction time.” All of these factors can make for some pretty crappy workouts.
3. Empty calories from alcohol can stunt your weight loss goals.
If your goal is to lose weight, consistently drinking alcohol will throw a major wrench in your progress. Alcohol contains empty calories, aka calories that provide NO nutritional value. Those calories add up quickly. And more often than not, alcohol is mixed with sugary drinks and other high calorie beverages to improve the taste. If you’re already putting in the work to eat clean, don’t let the booze be the problem.
4. Alcohol ruins your gains.
When you lift weights, you are constantly tearing your muscles and then letting them repair with the release of human growth hormone, which is the process for muscle growth. If you add booze into the equation, according to the Alcohol Rehab Guide, “Drinking alcohol after a workout prevents efficient healing of the muscles by decreasing the secretion of the hormone. As a result, you will feel sore longer and have to wait a longer time period for your muscles to fully heal.”
Does this mean I can’t ever drink alcohol?
Absolutely not!
You’ve probably heard the phrase “everything in moderation”? Well that’s especially true for alcohol. If you are drinking upwards of 5 drinks per week, this will probably affect your workouts.
If you have 1-2 drinks per week, this is a much more reasonable number that will allow you to still work towards your goals. Finding a reasonable number of drinks per week that allows you to feel unrestricted, but also keep you accountable to all of your goals in the gym.