Monday, November 24, 2008

Bodybuilding Diets, How Alcohol Affects Your Muscle Gains

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.

A key ingredient in you diet when you exercise if protein, you should not interfere with this. Unfortunately, alcohol impairs protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the process where amino acids are joined together to create complete proteins, consumption of alcohol 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.

Contracted muscles are a result of stimuli produced by nerves, in addition nerves control muscles through the electrolyte minerals dissolved in water. More water will lubricate the joints and protect them from injury during a workout.

Drinking alcohol robs your body of key vitamins. Vitamins like B, C and A, plus calcium and phosphorous are all depleted through the use of alcohol. When you consider that the most important vitamins to healthy muscle development are vitamins B and C, you can see this is just one more reason that drinking alcohol while muscle building 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.

We have examined most of the major points on alcohol and bodybuilding, however, you have to consider the other affects of alcohol on the body. Prolonged use can lead to liver damage, diabetes and a host of other medically related problems. It will be increasingly difficult to build muscle if you suffer any one of these. At the end of the day, is it really worth the cost? - 15995

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