Will drinking alcohol after lifting weights help you build muscle faster?
That’s the question sent in by one Muscle Evo reader, who wants my opinion about a recent study showing that a post-exercise alcoholic drink led to a large rise in testosterone.
Given that alcohol is thought to lower testosterone, that’s pretty much the exact opposite of what you’d expect to happen.
What’s going on? Will drinking a few pints of beer after a workout really raise your testosterone levels? And if so, will doing so help you build muscle faster?
For the study, a group of eight resistance-trained men completed two bouts of resistance exercise (six sets of 10 repetitions of Smith machine squats) separated by one week [4].
Ten minutes after completing their last set, the men were given either a placebo or an alcoholic drink. The amount of alcohol in the drink was based on the men’s bodyweight, and averaged just over 80 grams. That’s roughly what you’ll get from a bottle of wine (13.5% alcohol) or 3-5 pints (depending on the strength) of beer.
The figure below shows you what happened to free testosterone levels before (PRE), immediately after (IP), as well as 20–40, 60–120 and 140–300 minutes after exercise.
As you can see, free testosterone levels shot up when the men were given alcohol (white bars) rather than a placebo (grey bars) after training.
It’s easy to get excited when you come across research showing that something, be it a particular type of exercise, change in diet or exotic herbal extract, leads to a rise in testosterone.
Most assume that higher levels of testosterone in the blood are a “good thing” because it means that more of the hormone is being produced, which in turn will mean faster gains in size and strength.
But it’s an assumption that’s wrong on a couple of counts.
Firstly, there are actually two reasons that testosterone levels in the blood can rise – an increase in the rate of production or a decrease in the rate at which it leaves the blood pool.
A change in testosterone levels after exercise, be it up or down, doesn’t tell you that more or less of the hormone is being produced. All it tells you is that the difference between the rate of production and the rate of clearance has changed.
Although your liver is responsible for clearing much of the testosterone from your system, your muscles also have an important role to play. In fact, there’s a direct link between the amount of muscle you have and the rate at which the metabolic clearance of testosterone takes place [1].
For testosterone to do all the things we know and love as far as muscle growth is concerned, it needs to be “taken up” by muscle tissue.
The fact that drinking alcohol after exercise raises testosterone levels isn’t necessarily a good thing, as it could indicate some kind of reduction in muscle uptake. Animal research shows that six weeks of alcohol consumption reduces the ability of muscle tissue to take up testosterone [5].
“Thus, the primary finding of this study, that total and bioavailable testosterone concentrations were elevated write after postresistance exercise ethanol ingestion, should be interpreted with care,” write the researchers.
“If testosterone release is increased, this could be beneficial; however, if muscle uptake is reduced, this could be detrimental to the desired adaptations.”
You also need to ask yourself just how important a short-term change in testosterone levels after exercise really is.
For example, some people are surprised to learn that a protein supplement taken before and after a workout can actually lower testosterone [2].
If this post-exercise hormonal dip had any kind of negative impact on muscular gains, you’d expect such a finding to have shown up in the research by now. But it hasn’t.
While the data on pre- and post-exercise supplements is a bit of a mixed bag(some studies show they help while others show they make no difference), there’s no convincing evidence to suggest that they actually put the brakes on muscle growth.
There’s also surprisingly little research to show that the short-term change in blood testosterone levels after exercise has any great consequence as far as muscle growth is concerned.
In one of the most recent studies on the subject, researchers found no link between the post-exercise change in free testosterone levels and the amount of muscle growth following 16 weeks of resistance training [3].
Testosterone does have an impact on the speed at which your muscles grow. But it does so only when it’s taken above or below its normal physiological range for an extended period of time.
Finally, this study measured hormone levels for up to 300 minutes after a workout. For all we know, the post-exercise rise in testosterone could have been offset by a much greater drop over the subsequent 24 hours.
In fact, one study found that a very large intake of alcohol (around 120 grams) after exercise led to a significant drop in testosterone that was still apparent the following day [8].
In short, the finding that a post-exercise alcoholic drink raises testosterone levels has very little practical application for you. It’s one to file in the “interesting but largely irrelevant” drawer.
SHAMELESS PLUG: Muscle Evo wraps up all my best ideas and advice into a complete science-based training program that you can use to build muscle, burn fat and get strong. Click here for more.
0 comments:
Post a Comment