How Is Drinking Alcohol Affecting My Workout Routine?

There are few worse feelings in a pickup basketball game than blowing a layup, which is doubly true when the punishment for the blown layup is to sprint to the other side of the court and take a swig of a 40 while everyone else is still playing. This tough (but fair) set of rules was strictly enforced at a recent GQ charity pickup game, and I would be lying if I said I did not have to pull from the 40. The faintest sensation of unwelcome liquids sloshing around my stomach—even sans any actual impairment to my motor skills—was more than enough of a warning, ahem, shot that alcohol is not a performance-enhancer during athletic activities.

Avoid drinking before cardio

Separate and apart from dealing with a hangover, which I’ll get to shortly, there is concrete evidence that imbibing in the hours leading up to any sort of endurance training—namely, cardio—will hamper your workout. You’ll fatigue quicker, and take longer to hit your usual goals. As sports dietitian Claire Siekaniec notes in a 2015 research paper examining the interactions between alcohol and athletic performance, the extra fatigue that accompanies drinking is the result of the citric acid cycle slowing down—the pathway known as gluconeogenesis is inhibited, which effectively means less glucose (less energy) for the body to use.

 

Avoid drinking after resistance training

Alcohol and weightlifting actually interact in a very different way than alcohol and cardio exercise, says. Dr. Jakob Vingren, a professor of exercise physiology and biological sciences at the University of North Texas.
When we spoke, he wanted to first make clear he absolutely does not endorse drinking before pumping iron. That said, “alcohol ingested before a workout does not appear to affect strength and maximum power,” he explained. Of course, being wasted affects motor performance, and studies have mostly examined alcohol’s effect on maximal strength, so it’s not known if it impedes one’s ability to do a high-reps, low-weight routine. Vingren’s gut feeling is that too wouldn’t be greatly affected by drinking. (Perhaps this is how former Yankees pitcher David Wells allegedly managed to throw a perfect game while simultaneously buzzed and hungover from a bender.)

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