How Drinking Alcohol Affects Your Gains

This isn’t another blog to get you to quit alcohol. Ideally it’s not a bad idea but let’s get practical. The question most people want to know is how much is drinking is costing your goals. (Some people would rather know at all for obvious reasons) The answer is out does cost you something. What you can do is lessen the effects by focusing on quality and when you consume alcohol.

The sleeping issue

After you drink your sleep suffers. You usually fall asleep easy and fast because of the alcohol but that second half of your sleep cycle suffers. Your sleep turns choppy and less deep. You wake up feeling groggy and unrest.

This becomes a problem because the second half of the night your body is doing a lot of maintenance. Repairing tissue and resting your nervous system is the stuff that decides whether your knee feels normal or still paying for what you did yesterday. You still got your workout in but you lost the recovery that was supposed to follow it.

Your body’s signals become less clear

When you train, you create a small amount of damage on purpose, and your body repairs that tissue  stronger than before. That's the how strength is built. Alcohol reduces the effectiveness of that repair response. Your body is still repairing itself but takes longer and not in optimal form.

An intense workout followed by a few drinks the same night will get you less results than the same workout  followed by proper nutrition and sleep. You still did the work it’s just your body isn’t in as good  as position to fully get the benefits.

Having a joint that gives you trouble compounds the issue. It could be a sore knee, tight hip or uncomfortable shoulder that some days yell at you while other days you don’t even notice it. Alcohol pushes you more towards that joint yelling at you. Hydration plays a huge part

since fluid balance affects how tissue feels and how joints move. Another big part of it is sleep. A bad night of sleep makes everything more sensitive. Drinking several nights a week leads to keeping low level inflammation around longer than it should be.

What to actually change

Put distance between your workouts and drinks. Working out and drinking within a couple hours is worse because that's when your body’s repair window is to close together. Spread out the timing as much as possible. It’s an easy change that can reduce problems.

Don't schedule an intense workout the morning after too many drinks. Most people want to make up for the bad decisions the night before, but that’s the wrong thing to do. You're going to move worse and feel crappy. A hard session on bad sleep is where a lot of issues and injuries happen. Do your mobility work, walk, keep it light and keep the loading to 70-80% of normal. You need to say and hydrate before the gym. Being hydrated going in is a lot easier than trying to catch up the next morning.

Your optimal recovery isn't the same as anyone else's, and neither is your week. Rather if it’s a specific joint that acts up, the number of days you can actually train, and a life that includes people and weekends and dinners out, a plan that ignores all of that breaks the first time real life shows up.

That's the whole reason Find Your Fitness Inc builds programs around your injuries, your equipment, your schedule, and your goals instead of handing you a template and hoping it fits. When your training week is built around the life you actually have, a Saturday night doesn't blow it up. It just gets planned around.