Monday, December 1, 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 vital for building muscles, and therefore should not be interfered with. Unfortunately, alcohol impairs protein synthesis. Alcohol consumptions has been shown to slow down the protein synthesis by which amino acids are joined together to create complete proteins by 20%.

Another factor in muscle building is the level of testosterone in the body. Have you ever noticed that women do not build the same amount of muscle mass as men? This is because of low levels of testosterone, women have 15-20 times less testosterone than men do. What does that have to do with alcohol? Alcohol decreases the amount of testosterone in the body 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. There are many downfalls to consuming alcohol. If you drink alcohol you could deplete your body of some very important vitamins and minerals that it needs. When you exercise the most important vitamins are B and C, this tells you why alcohol consumtion is so important.

Building muscle is done by depleting fat and increasing muscle mass. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol contains empty calories, which means that they have no nutritional value. It also has twice as many calories as carbohydrates and protein.

While we are on the subject of calorie it is important to note that the calories taken in while drinking are the first ones burnt. This means that all other fat stores will remain and not be used for energy until alcohol calories are all burned. Not a good combination for a person wanting to build muscle mass and lose fat.

Alcohol affects on bodybuilding have been examined, but you also have to consider how alcohol affects the rest of the body. If you are trying to gain muscle mass, and are considering using prducts to help you, you need to be aware of the dangers of such products. Before you buy any product you need to research the pros AND the cons of that product. If you suffer from any of these, it will prove difficult to build muscle. Is it really worth the cost? - 16089

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