When you start on any bodybuilding program, you of course will want to pay close attention to all the foods you are feeding your body. This also includes alcohol as well; many people like a drink or two or even three to help them unwind and relax. But when you are a bodybuilder, alcohol can have a BIG effect on your progress.

Alcohol contains nothing but: Empty Calories

Alcohol has no nutritional value but, it does contain high caloric content. In fact, just one shot of vodka contains 100 calories! Not only will drinking increase your caloric intake, it also will slow down your metabolism thus hindering your body’s ability to process foods.

Alcohol consumption will also hurt muscle growth. Not only will having a hangover lower your workout intensity, but drinking actually lowers protein synthesis by twenty percent. There are several reasons why alcohol does this.

1. It dehydrates your muscle cells. As many know, hydrated and even over hydrated muscles allows for a much higher anabolic environment. Because your cells aren’t holding as much water, it becomes much harder to build muscle.




2. Alcohol can severely hurt muscle growth because it blocks the absorption of many important nutrients that are key to muscle contraction, relaxation and growth including calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, iron and potassium.




3. Alcohol also lowers the amount of testosterone in your body and actually increases estrogen. Having higher levels of testosterone can help with your workouts by making you more aggressive, so when those levels are down, you will not be as intense in your lifting and weight training.