Thursday, November 27, 2008

Bodybuilding Diets, How Alcohol Affects Your Muscle Gains

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%.

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 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 and contract muscles by producing stimuli from electrolyte minerals dissolved in water. Water is very beneficial to you and your body during work outs and exercise. Not only will it keep you hydrated, but you will find that water will help lubricate your joints and reduce the risk of injury during your exercise 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.

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? - 16650

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