Saturday, November 29, 2008

Bodybuilding Tips, Avoid Alcohol While Building Muscle

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.

A key ingredient in you diet when you exercise if protein, you should not interfere with this. Unfortunately, alcohol impairs protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the process where amino acids are joined together to create complete proteins, consumption of alcohol 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 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.

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. Alcohol depletes Vitamins B, C and A; in addition to calcium and phosphorous. If you consider the most important vitamins to develop healthy muscles are B and C, that is just one more reason that drinking alcohol while building muscle is such a big deal.

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.

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.

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? - 15275

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