Acohol and the Ahtlete

“Now Hack Wilson and Babe and some of the others did a
lot of lifting, all right, but it was done a glass of beer at a time.”
- Coach Bibb Falk

It’s no secret that college aged kids enjoy consuming alcohol. We’ve all seen “Animal House” and “Old School”. Whether we’ve “been there” or not we know it goes on. So why does it matter? Who cares if these kids are binging on the weekends if their grades stay up and they stay out of trouble?

Well it definitely matters if they are athletes! An athlete is day by day trying to get better and improve. And as a strength and conditioning coach it is our job to facilitate this through proper programming and education. And if the athlete is sabotaging this how can we do our job?!?

A little while ago Eric Cressey had a post on the web page Testosterone Nation titled “What I learned in 2008”. One of the things Cressey mentions is alcohol and it’s effects on skeletal muscle. While we would all like to assume that alcohol consumption is bad, what does the research say?

There are many problems associated with chronic alcoholism and alcohol abuse including degeneration of skeletal muscle and loss of contractility (Chung and Lang 2008). While these are problems that definitely effect how an athlete performs, we hope the majority of collegiate athletes don’t have problems with sever long term alcohol abuse.

The problems that the weekend binger has are a little different. While you don’t see protein degeneration to the extent that you do with chronic alcohol abuse protein synthesis is disrupted.

In 2009 Lang et al found that, “acute alcohol (EtOH) intoxication decreases muscle protein synthesis via inhibition of mTOR-dependent translation initiation. (Lang et al. 2009)”. Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a regulatory protein that regulates cell growth and repair. When mTOR is inhibited cell growth is halted, including myocite repair which is important for athletes.

Acute alcohol consumption and intoxication also has some detrimental effect on sleep and sleep patterns. Deep sleep coincides with the release of growth hormone in children and young adults. Many of the body's cells also show increased production and reduced breakdown of proteins during deep sleep. Since proteins are the building blocks needed for cell growth and for repair of damage from factors like stress and ultraviolet rays, deep sleep is important.

Additionally, alcohol increases non-REM sleep and reduces REM sleep during the first portion of the night. We know that the majority of cell repair and protein synthesis takes place during non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep promotes physical healing and growth. Seventy percent of growth hormone secretion occurs during this type of sleep. Growth hormone stimulates protein anabolism for cell repair and influences the metabolism of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. In a sleep-deprived patient, the loss of NREM sleep causes immunosuppression, slows tissue repair, lowers pain tolerance, triggers profound fatigue, and increases susceptibility to infection (Lower et al 2003).

So who cares?! I can still get my non-REM sleep even after I consume alcohol. And since non-REM sleep is where cell repair takes place I can still get blasted and repair soft tissue no problem. Right?!

Here is the catch, alcohol is metabolized rapidly and blood concentrations are negligible by the middle of the night even for individuals who have had only a couple drinks prior to bedtime, often resulting in withdrawal symptoms thereafter. These may include shallow sleep and multiple awakenings, REM rebound associated with nightmares or vivid dreams, sweating, and general activation (Yules1967, madsen 1980). Therefore, although alcohol may be effective in sleep induction, it impairs sleep during the second half of the night and can lead to a reduction in overall sleep time.

Acute alcohol consumption also has an effect on growth factors, particularly those that are anabolic in nature. Alcohol has been seen to decrease the secretion of HGH by as much as 70 percent! Also, when alcohol is in your body, the production of a substance in your liver is triggered that is directly toxic to testosterone, a hormone essential to the development and recovery of your muscles.

So what’s the PSA here? What do I tell my athletes? How do I keep tham away from this stuff? Unfortunately I don’t have all the answers, and to be honest a beer every now and then tastes pretty darn good! But it is certainly not beneficial to growing young athletes who are trying to reach their “genetic potential”. So the take home message: Moderate drinking for of age adults is probably okay, but for athletes in intense training programs there are no upsides.

-SM