This is How Alcohol Impacts Your Training

Last Updated on January 7, 2021

Here’s what you need to know before gulping your next alcoholic drink.

Alcohol is the very last thing any bodybuilder needs. If you tend to enjoy one or two drinks after, or even a couple of days before, working out, then you’ll be familiar with not getting the gains you want. Alcohol and bodybuilding is just a terrible combination!

This might surprise you, but alcohol is one of the biggest fat accumulators out there. When consumed on a regular basis, alcohol kills the good bacteria that break down food in your gut and severely interrupt your digestion.

This results in continuous pressure on your stomach, dizziness, bloating, and satiety even if you’ve only eaten a small meal. Your previous meals are actually still stuck in your stomach, not able to move or break down. Thus, things get worse.

This is How Alcohol Impacts Your Training

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Continue reading through the next pages to know more about other dangerous effects of alcohol on your training.

#1 – Acid Reflux

When you drink alcohol (even if it’s a decent quantity,) you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up with acid reflux. If it gets bad enough, don’t get the answers from those terrible drug commercials on TV.

Also, a prescribed acid reducer, or worse, a proton pump inhibitor like Prilosec, can cause the essential acids that help in breaking down food to decrease. Dangerously, when food isn’t moving, the waste and toxins also won’t move out of your body.

You probably already know that the liver can be drastically affected by alcohol. Amazingly, the liver can perform more than four hundred functions, including processing proteins and fats from digested food and burning fat.

Another crucial liver function is storing glycogen, which is the primary way the body stores glucose for later use and produces energy. Your liver breaks sugar down into glucose, which then travels into the bloodstream to reach your muscles for energy. Your liver is amazingly important, make sure to keep it clean!

#2 – Difficulty Building and Repairing Muscles

Alcohol alters your body’s ability to repair injuries and heal properly. Typically, the body naturally releases white blood cells to the injury site to help it heal. But when alcohol is involved, the body’s natural ability to command white blood cells towards the injured area decreases drastically while the building and repairing of muscles significantly slow down, according to research.