It's new years day. A lot of you are probably hung over from last nights party. heres a thread talking about how badly alcohol effects your body building goals. Lets hear all the negatives you know about, rumor or science based.
feel free to throw in any benefits that alcohol provides you as well. there are power lifters that will shoot vodka or whiskey about 20 mins prior to a lift (even though alcohol is on the banned PED list, but none of us here care about that).
some rumored negative things that alcohol effects body building.
- the liver is too busy trying to metabolize alcohol that no other nutrients are absorbed, and fat burning is also hindered. so you can't make muscle gains without absorption of nutrients and you can't burn fat.
- dehydration. alcohol dehydrates you. your muscles are 70% water. you need h20 to grow and function.
- alcohol consists of 'dead calories'. alcohol consists of calories that are 'dead' not able to be absorbed as 'nutrition', yet alcohol is calorie dense. you can easily consume over 1000 calories drinking shots of whiskey, but there is NO nutritional value to those calories. your body has to take time and energy to process these dead calories. not what we want for building muscle
- alcohol raises inflammation in the body. this will lead to catabolism and muscle wasting.
- alcohol stops the process of anabolism and proteins and amino's are not properly absorbed, thus your body will begin catabolizing its own muscle cells as protein. your muscles will shrink
etc. etc.. what else ?
