Saturday, November 29, 2008

Alcohol and Muscle Building, Don't Mix Them Please

By Ricardo d Argence

Believe it or not, there are those who wonder if alcohol has an effect on their muscle building activities. The answer is a resounding yes alcohol will adversely affect your work out.

Protein is a key ingredient in muscle building and as such should not be interfered with. Unfortunately, alcohol impairs protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the process by which amino acids are joined together to create complete proteins, alcohol consumption has been shown to slow this process by 20%.

There are another factors that affect your muscle gains like the level of testosterone in the body.Have you noticed that women do not have the same amount of muscle as men? The women have 15-20 times less testosterone than men do since this is because of low levels of tetosterone. What does that have to do with alcohol? In the body alcohol decreases the amount of testosterone and increases levels of estrogen.

When you drink alcohol, the kidneys must use massive amounts of water to process the toxin. Yes, the body recognizes alcohol as a toxin. When this happens, the body can quickly become dehydrated.

Nerves control muscles and nerves produce the stimuli to contract muscles from electrolyte minerals dissolved in water. Further more water lubricates the joints and protects them from injury during workouts.

Drinking alcohol robs your body of key vitamins. Alcohol depletes Vitamins B, C and A; in addition to calcium and phosphorous. If you consider the most important vitamins to develop healthy muscles are B and C, that is just one more reason that drinking alcohol while building muscle is such a big deal.

When you build muscle, you are looking to deplete stores of fat and increase muscle mass. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol contains what nutritionist call empty calorie, which is calories with no nutritional benefit. It also has twice as many calories as carbohydrates and protein.

While we are on this subject, it should be noted that calories consumed while drinking are the first ones to be burned. Alcohol calories are burned first, then fat stores are a energy backup. You will find that there are things that don't work and do work when exercising. You need to know which exercises will help you meet your goals and what will work against you.

You can however have to consider the other affects of alcohol on the body since we have examined most of the major points on alcohol and bodybuilding. If you use this for a prolonged amount of time it may lead to liver damage, diabeties or other medical problems. If you suffer from any one of these, you will have a hard time building muscle. At the end of the day, is it really worth the cost?

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