According to a paper to be published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, it is found that the activity of chemical signals in men who drink alcohol after strength training is lower than that in men who don't drink alcohol, and these chemical signals can stimulate muscle growth and repair.
Jakob Vingren, a professor of biology and human kinesiology at the University of North Texas in Denton, is a co-author of this paper. A small amount of alcohol won't have any effect. But if you do a lot of strength training and get drunk with lonely friends, your health will be worse the next day than not going to the gym. ?
Alcohol and athletes
Wenngren said that many studies show that people who love sports drink more. According to substance abuse &; According to a study in Misuse magazine in 2007, college athletes drink more than their non-athletes peers, whether they are in the season or not. A survey of NCAA 2065 438+02 shows that most athletes don't think that drinking will have a negative impact on sports performance.
The relationship between exercise intensity and alcohol consumption seems not so clear: perhaps it is because the reward center in the brain is activated by both exercise and drinking, perhaps it is because social norms think that drinking after exercise is normal, or because people supplement the calories consumed during exercise by drinking.
Wenngren said that in the past, it was found that drunkenness could weaken the chemical signals in muscles and could not stimulate muscle growth and repair. But strength training will increase this chemical signal, and it is not clear which of these two effects is stronger.
Exercise and alcohol
In order to find out the relationship between these two effects, Vingren invited 10 men and 9 women who exercised regularly and asked them to do six groups 10 squat weight training at least twice a week.
After the exercise, the researchers gave the athletes water or diluted vodka to drink (a little alcohol on the edge of the glass will make people feel like drinking. According to Vingren, participants in the drinking group drank 4 to 8 glasses of wine in 10 minutes, depending on their weight.
The researchers biopsied the muscles at three time points: before exercise, 3 hours after exercise and 5 hours after exercise.
The results show that drinking alcohol can reduce the activity of a chemical signal pathway called mTORC 1 in men, which can stimulate muscle growth and recovery, but this result does not appear in women.
It is not clear why the decrease of signal pathway activity occurs in men rather than women. One explanation is that for men, the muscle growth path needs to be stimulated by a lot of testosterone after exercise. In contrast, although women contain a small amount of testosterone, they don't experience a surge of testosterone after exercise, Wingren said. He added that alcohol also reduces the testosterone response to exercise.
Wenngren said? Testosterone is usually the primary suspect when there is a huge difference between men and women. Although the idea of drinking alcohol immediately after exercise is a bit far-fetched, it seems quite common. I'll open a bottle of beer as soon as I enter the dressing room after the game. ?
More importantly, some luxury gyms are equipped with bars, which means people can indulge in vodka immediately after exercise.