Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Alcohol and Muscle Building, Don't Mix Them Please

By Ricardo d Argence

There actually are people who wonder whether alcohol negatively affects their muscle building activities. Yes, alcohol definitely affects your work out in a negative way.

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%.

The level of testosterone in the body is another factor in muscle building. If you are a woman and you are looking to build muscle mass, you will notice that woman develop lees muscle mass than men. Because of the low levels of testosterone, woman have 15 to 20 times less than men do. What does that have to do with alcohol? Alcohol not only decreases testosterone, it also increases estrogen.

When yo drink alcohol your kidneys retain large amounts of water so they can process the toxin. Yes, the body recognizes alcohol as a toxin. The body can become dehydrated when this happens.

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. 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.

In order to build muscle, you must breakdown fat deposits while increasing muscle mass. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol contains empty calories, that is a calorie with no nutritional benefit. It also has twice as many calories as carbohydrates and protein.

Calories that you are drinking are the first ones burnt. This means that all the fat stores you have that remain in your body that is not used for energy until all of the alcohol calories are burned off. This is a bad idea for someone who wants to build muscle and lose fat.

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? - 16003

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