For many people, it’s a Friday ritual to hit the gym, do a workout, and then meet their friends at the bar. But if you’ve made Friday a lifting day, we’ve got bad news: Research reveals that going out and partying is a bad idea if you want to encourage muscle growth.
Researchers at the University of North Texas decided to see exactly what alcohol did to people who drank after cranking out some super squats. Some of the participants (both men and women were studied) got water, while the others got enough alcohol to put them over the legal limit. The results found that both men and women experienced less activation of the mTORC1 pathway — the one more or less responsible for converting protein into muscle — although men saw more inhibition than women. So if you’re lifting to get some muscle on you, getting drunk after you’re done grunting may be a bad idea.
There’s a couple of caveats here worth mentioning. The first is that the study had a very small sample size of ten men and nine women, so while the results are interesting, they’re not solid scientific fact yet. The second is that going over the legal limit quickly isn’t really that great an idea in the first place (for reasons well beyond undoing your hard work at the gym), and the research team acknowledges that using a little moderation likely won’t hold back your efforts. So maybe you can still go out after a good sweat, just keep it to one or two drinks.
(Via The Spectator)
