The Impact of Alcohol on Your Fitness Goals
When do you feel most uncomfortable when seeing your doctor and why is it when they ask, “How many drinks do you have per week?” Let’s be honest, many of us like to let loose at the end of a long day or long week, but it’s important to know how much is too much?
According to the CDC, men of a legal drinking age should have no more than two drinks per day, and women of a legal drinking age should have no more than one drink per day.
So, if you’re staying within that moderate limit, can you still drink and achieve your fitness goals?
As with any question you ask me, I’m going to say, “It depends!” Broadly speaking, sticking with this recommendation may help you to both enjoy a drink and continue towards your health and fitness goals. However, if you are exceeding the recommended limit, you might be undoing all of the hard work you’re putting in both in the kitchen and in the gym. Keep reading to learn more about how alcohol can be impacting you and your fitness routine… maybe without even realizing it!
Alcohol serves no purpose for your body
In the most basic sense, alcoholic beverages can impact your weight because they are known as “empty calories,” or calories that come with no nutritional benefit. Your body can’t use the calories or the contents of your alcoholic beverage, and if you’re trying to lose weight, your calories could be better “spent” on something more nutritionally dense.
Alcohol can negatively impact your metabolism
To make this a little more complex, since your body has no use for alcohol, you body cannot store it. So, your body tries to eliminate any alcohol in your bloodstream as soon as possible. Consequently, the processing of any nutrients also consumed through the food you’re eating alongside your alcoholic beverage might be delayed or ignored altogether. In other words, when drinking, your body is so busy trying to eliminate the empty calories from your alcoholic beverage that it might not have time to process the nutritionally dense calories from your meal. As a result, the macronutrients consumed from your food while drinking might be stored for future energy, which can result in weight gain over time.
Drinking before bedtime can impact your sleep
It might seem counterintuitive as drinking can make you drowsy and can even make you fall asleep faster. However, alcohol can impact the quality of your REM sleep, which is considered to be one of the more restorative parts of your sleep cycle. So, even if you allow yourself to sleep in after some drinks with friends on Friday night, you might still feel tired from the lack of quality and restorative sleep.
If you plan to workout the day after drinking, you are less likely to perform optimally, and the choice to drink begins to have a domino effect on your overall health and fitness goals. In fact,
Alcohol can inhibit muscle growth
This is where we connect all of the dots. Your body needs three basic things in order to grow muscle: strength training, protein consumption, and rest. Alcohol may have an effect on all three of these components. So, if your goal is “to get toned,” aka: to build muscle, you might want to consider decreasing your alcohol intake.
As previously discussed, drinking can impact your exercise performance for up to 24 hours. In order for your muscles to be stimulated, they must be challenged, and exhaustion, dehydration, or a little bit of both could keep you from truly challenging your muscles during your workout.
After your workout, protein consumption is imperative to help your muscles rebuild. However, as described above, two or more post-workout drinks can keep your body from processing the protein and other macronutrients you’ve eaten. Regardless if you’re staying within a specific caloric goal or hitting a specific protein goal that day, if your body is storing your macronutrient consumption for future use, it won’t get you your desired results.
Finally, rest is one of the most important and often one of the most overlooked parts of fitness. The actual process of your muscles recovering and rebuilding happens while you sleep. If your sleep is compromised, your muscle recovery is also most likely compromised as well.
And as you may or may not know, the only way to increase your metabolism and burn more calories when at rest is to increase your muscle mass. So can you have your drinks and build muscle, too?
Perhaps, if you stick to your recommended level, always pair your drink with food, stay hydrated, and pace yourself.
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