Alcohol: Training and Drinking.
If your serious about your training alcohol can be detrimental to your training and sporting performance. What are the effects though? What does the science say?
It is no secret that athletes generally avoid alcohol when training, but there are not many studies that have investigated it’s effects on performance. Thinking about it, why would there be many studies investigating it's effects. Any studies investigating alcohol are mainly interested in the health implications or benefits. Most of the studies that have investigated alcohol consumption and athletic performace use intakes of 1 gram of alcohol per kilogram of bodyweight, which correlates to 3.5 pints of beer for an 80kg male or a bottle of wine. Hands up if you’ve drank more following competition or on a night out? A bottle of wine or 3-4 pints is a standard drinking sessions
for a lot of people.
Here is what we do know about the affects of alcohol consumption and athletic performance:
Glycogen Synthesis: Alcohol impairs glycogen synthesis and uptake and therefore consumption in the hours post training is thought to impair recovery. This will affect subsequent sessions of training because glycogen stores may not be replenished. Restoring muscle glycogen can take 24-48 hours after depleation from high intensity training sessions or long training sessions. This means you could be negatively impairing training adaptions from two days post session or two days prior to the session.
Protein Synthesis: Alcohol reduces protein synthesis. It is also thought that alcohol can inhibit the anabolic response in muscle cells, impairing recovery, adaptions to training and ultimately performance improvements. The process of catabolising protein from food and synthesising amino acids into proteins is vital to the process of adapting to training stimulus. Impairing this makes the previous session almost a waste of time.
Sleep: Alcohol consumption reduces sleep quality, specifically REM/dream sleep and total sleeping hours. Studies have shown a decrease in lower body power output, cognitive function, and aerobic power the following day after drinking 1 gram of alcohol per kilogram of bodyweight. Most importantly the majority of recovery is during times of sleeping, so impairing sleep quality will compromise future training sessions and impair adaptions to past sessions.
Conclusion
Alcohol negatively impacts performance so it is worth considering whether to drink or to abstain If your training for an event. If you are going to drink when you are training, consider limiting consumption.
