Is Alcohol Holding You Back?
Is it the calories from the booze you’re choosing…or is it the food decisions you make when you’re buzzed?
Alcohol isn’t the most nutritious or health promoting thing. Anyone saying otherwise is trying to sell you something or rationalize their own decisions.
Though there may be a potential health benefit here and there, the most significant benefit from consuming alcohol is likely to be social.
If enjoying a glass of wine with a meal with your partner or a refreshing beer in the sun with your friends helps you relax and maintain relationships, then great. It pays however to know the tradeoffs and where the most likely pitfalls are.
Impaired food decisions
This is likely to be the biggest impact to your physique efforts. A questionable hotdog from a roadside food truck has never looked more appetizing than when you’ve had a few drinks. Alcohol inhibits our decision making skills, and we’re more likely to over consume food. In addition, these foods tend to be hyper palatable, salty, fast food options that are high in calories and low in most things considered healthy.
Perhaps you know your limits. It pays to recognize when you reach the critical mass of alcohol consumption whereby your food decisions aren’t overtly impacted. For most, that's 1 drink. Once that is passed however, it's all but impossible to salvage, and poor food decisions become part of the package.
The hangover
Hangovers are nature's red flag and as we get older those flags get bigger and redder. The hangover is your body's response to essentially being poisoned. It just can’t function properly until that poison has cleared your system. Think of it like getting man flu. You feel horrendous for a day or 2. Sniffles, headaches, chills, sweats, sneezing, the occasional diarrhea and desire to vomit despite not eating anything for 2 days, and then you wake up on day 3 and feel human again. This is the virus clearing your system after your body has dedicated 110% of its resources to getting you back to health. And that's similar to what happens when you drink alcohol. Your body diverts resources otherwise allocated to improved or high function, to processing and discarding the booze consumed the night before. If you want to feel good, perform well, look awesome, and generally not feel like a walking sack of sick covered spare machine parts, then consider skipping alcohol altogether.
Dehydration
Approximately 60% of your body as an adult man is water. That water is used to do countless things like lubricate joints, make digestion happen, make muscles supple, all brain function, circulate blood, and pump the essential organs for clearing the alcohol consumed.
Alcohol dehydrates us. When we remove water from our system, we don’t function as well as we can across the board.
Loss of momentum
What's the last thing you want to do when you feel like shit from the night before? Yeh. Move. Be it back squats, a cycling class, or walking to the bathroom. The hangover effects last a few days and in that time, you’re likely to lower your training effort by skipping the gym and being less active in general. This loss of momentum contributes to a week of stagnation on the scale, meh performance in the gym, and a general build up of frustration. Loss of momentum is a key contributor to failed health, fitness, and physique efforts and it pays to minimize alcohol's role in this equation to avoid these roadblocks.
Poor performance
Muscle is 75% water and a drop below this optimal composition can lead to significant degradation in performance. Alcohol and the subsequent salty foods consumed when drunk and recovering contribute to this. Even when you drag yourself from your couch and make it to the gym, the likelihood of you performing at the top of your game and continuing to push the progress bar farther along is slim to none. This isn’t an issue providing you modify your expectations. If however, you go to the gym and load up the bar with the same weight you used last week when you didn’t have a tequila induced headache and expect to PR or even match last week's performance, this can create some mental frustrations.
If you’re carrying a hangover, consider skimming 20% off the planned numbers on your program and use the session as a “return to play” workout.
In summary
If you don't drink alcohol, don't start because of potential health benefits because there really aren’t any.
When it comes to performance, alcohol is a handicap. If your goal is to look and perform to the best of your abilities then we advise skipping alcohol altogether.
However, if you drink a light amount and you're healthy, you can probably continue as is as long as you drink responsibly.
Be sure to check with your doctor about what's right for your health and safety.
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