Many of us love a glass of wine or beer every night, or maybe we workout on a Friday or Saturday and have plans to go out and drink socially after.
How does this affect our performance in the gym? Can we still get great results and drink?
Strength-N-U’s expert personal trainer Leticia explains the effects of alcohol when working out.
Key Take-Aways
1. Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning your kidney works twice as hard to get rid of it out of your body and while exercising this can also lead to dehydration.
2. Alcohol interferes with your body’s ability to produce energy. In other words, your body contains something called glucose, that’s what gives you the energy to perform during a workout. But instead of your body breaking that down and providing energy to you, it’s too busy flushing the toxins from the alcohol you drank. Which leads to low performance during training.
3. Alcohol is high in sugar and calories. Think of it this way. We can always drink more than we eat. For example, 1 cup of orange juice is roughly 3 oranges. You’d never sit there and eat 3 oranges in less than a minute…but in liquid form, we can take in more. Alcohol is no different. Because we can drink it, we tend to consume more and take in more calories. Also as a bonus, often when we drink, it leads to poor food choices, so we tend to add extra unhealthy calories as well.
