 What effect does alcohol have on your cycling performance in recovery? Today I'll be jumping into the science to answer this question as well as addressing how alcohol affects your sleep, whether or not it leads to weight gain, and how much is too much. Basically, will a drink or two every now and then really slow you down? Welcome to another video. My name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS. And for weekly science-based training, racing, and gear-related videos, be sure to subscribe. And if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video, be sure to leave it down in the comments section below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. For many cyclists, the post-ride beer is a tradition, or half the reason they ride in the first place. Here where I live in Brevard, North Carolina, one of the most successful bike shops is also a bar, and it's not hard to see why. The place is packed on weekends with mountain bikers grabbing a drink after their ride. And it seems like the phrase, ride bikes, drink beer, is in about half the Instagram bios of the dudes who live here. There have been countless articles written about how beer is actually great for post-ride recovery. Of course, these articles rarely cite any science, and they read more like a person who's trying to justify a habit that they enjoy that they desperately don't want to admit is probably not helping their performance. Yeah, dude, beer is definitely good for recovery. I mean, it's got carbs and, you know, other stuff. I mean, I read it online, okay? Even if you don't drink right after a ride, perhaps you indulge in a drink or two later that night with dinner, or you drink a couple times a week. Is that really going to hurt your cycling performance? I will go over how much alcohol is too much, but first, let's get into the science on how alcohol affects your cycling performance. This study on alcohol's effects on sprint and middle-distance running. Okay, hold up, guys. We're going to play a little drinking game here. Every time this nerd cites a study, you got to take a drink. Okay, here we go. In middle-distance running, tested runner performance with different blood alcohol levels in a variety of track events from the 100 meter to the 1500 meter. Unsurprisingly, the more intoxicated subjects were the worse they performed. The only distance for which this was not the case was the 100 meter. So perhaps alcohol won't affect your sprint, but anything longer than that and don't expect to be hitting peak numbers on your ride home from the bar. Pre-exercise drinking has also been tested in cyclists. This study on the effect of small doses of alcohol on endurance performance in trained cyclists tested 60-minute time trial performance after consuming a mixed drink that had one shot of Smirnoff vodka or a placebo. What they found was a decrease in power output and an increase in perceived exertion when subjects drink the alcohol. This may be partially due to the fact that glucose-oxidation rates were significantly lower in the alcohol group. The study concluded that even at low doses, athletes should avoid drinking before training and competition, and these findings have been confirmed in the literature. This really shouldn't be too much of a surprise. We probably all expected that drinking before your ride isn't the best idea if you want to perform it your best or even make it through the ride in one piece for that matter. But the real question is, how does post-exercise drinking affect your recovery? Could it even benefit recovery? This study on muscle glycogen intake after prolonged exercise had subjects consume a carb meal and a carb plus alcohol meal after a glycogen-depleting ride. What they found was that glycogen storage was decreased when subjects consumed alcohol. The reason for this is unclear, but the main effect may be indirect by displacing carbs from optimal recovery nutrition practices. So why is impaired glycogen resynthesis detrimental to recovery? Because glycogen, or stored carbohydrates, is your body's fuel source for exercise, and if you fail to replenish it, it probably means that you won't feel as good on your ride the next day. On top of this, there's evidence to show that protein synthesis, which is the process in which protein is produced to repair damage to muscles caused by exercise, is inhibited by alcohol. The effects of alcohol on your post-exercise recovery may manifest as a loss of strength after an intense workout. For example, in this study on alcohol consumption following strenuous eccentric exercise, subjects performed 300 maximal eccentric contractions followed by either consuming 1 gram per kilogram body weight of alcohol or a placebo. They found that strength loss 36 and 60 hours after exercise was made worse by consuming alcohol. They concluded that alcohol magnifies the severity of skeletal muscle injury and therefore delays recovery of strength over the following 24-hour period. The study suggests that participants in sports containing intense eccentric muscular work should be encouraged to avoid alcohol intake in the post-event period if optimal recovery is required. And let's not forget the effect that alcohol has on sleep, which is one of the most important components of recovery. This review on alcohol on sleep found that at all doses, alcohol causes a reduction in sleep onset latency, a more consolidated first half sleep, and an increase in sleep disruption in the second half of sleep. Total night REM sleep percentage is decreased in the majority of studies at moderate and high doses with no clear trend apparent at low doses. The onset of the first REM sleep period is significantly delayed at all doses and appears to be the most recognizable effect of alcohol on REM sleep followed by the reduction in total night REM sleep. So it appears that from pretty much any angle you look at it, other than the fact that you're getting some carbohydrates, a post-ride beer is not the optimal recovery beverage. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Wow, man, you must be super fun at parties. What do you put everyone to sleep when you start talking about a cross-sectional analysis of how many watts you can gain by drinking non-alcoholic organic kombucha? Now let's discuss the effect that alcohol consumption has on your weight. Many of us are constantly trying to lose weight to improve our power-to-weight ratio or at the very least get fitter and healthier. And this is no easy feat. Most people actively trying to lose weight fail to do so. That's a topic for another video, but more relevant here is how does alcohol play a role? Could that late night drink be undermining your weight loss goals? The research on this is actually somewhat mixed. For example, this perspective study on 49,000 women over eight years found that light and moderate drinkers showed a small but significant decrease in odds of weight gain compared with non-drinkers. They stated that there is no evidence that light to moderate drinking is associated with weight gain in women except possibly African American women. Although there is no need to completely abstain from alcohol to reduce or maintain body weight, heavier drinking may promote weight gain. This is in contradiction to this study on alcohol and body weight that took over 7,000 men over a five-year follow-up period which found that alcohol consumption was associated with weight gain regardless of what kind of alcohol was consumed. The problem with these types of studies though is that they're looking at correlation and correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation. One thing that can't be denied though is that alcohol has calories. In fact, alcohol has seven calories per gram which is in between the nine calories per gram for fat and four calories per gram for carbs and protein. A typical beer could be 150 to 200 calories. Drink three beers with your buddies after a ride and that's almost like eating a whole extra meal that day. From this article on whether or not alcohol is a risk factor for weight gain, they stated that every component of the energy balance equation is affected by the ingestion of alcohol. Moderate amounts of alcohol enhance energy intake due to the caloric content of the alcohol as well as its appetite enhancing effects. Alcohol has a high caloric level, no regulation of intake and a high potential to interact with different aspects of body weight regulation. Whenever moderate amounts of alcohol are consumed, the intake of other energy substrates, especially fat, should be reduced and physical activity increased to counterbalance some of the adverse effects of alcohol on energy balance. Basically, if you're trying to lose weight, a drinking habit isn't doing you any favors and if you are a regular drinker, then cutting back could be a huge step in the right direction because you'll be cutting out a sizable amount of calories from your diet. Long term weight loss is about making sustainable lifestyle changes and drinking is probably one of the first changes you should consider. All right, so far it's not looking very good for alcohol, but there's a couple drinks here and there really going to affect your performance. How much drinking can you get away with and still be fast? Let's take a closer look at some of these studies and see what kind of dosages are required to produce these effects. Going back to the eight year weight gain study, they found no evidence that light to moderate drinking was associated with weight gain in women and they classified moderate drinking as less than 30 grams of alcohol per day. For reference, a typical drink has between 11 and 14 grams of alcohol. In the review on alcohol and sleep, they found that total night REM sleep percentage was decreased in the majority of studies at moderate and high doses with no clear trend apparent at low doses. They defined low doses as one to two standard drinks. It should also be noted that in the studies where they found declines in muscle performance after heavy exercise, they used one gram of alcohol per kilogram of body weight. For the average person, that could be five to seven drinks. So we're not talking about light drinking here. Five to seven drinks. You clearly don't write a single speed, do you? The study that showed impaired glycogen storage following drinking used an even larger amount at 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight. So clearly some of these studies use a large amount of alcohol to try to find an effect and it shouldn't be much of a surprise that if you get wasted off of 10 drinks, you probably won't be performing optimally the next day. All right, so what exactly is the recommendation here? Well, drinking completely destroy any attempts at raising your FTP and it should be stopped immediately or can you still have a social life when you go out with your friends on the weekend? The answer really comes down to what you're trying to get out of cycling. And this goes for a lot of aspects of your life from your day-to-day diet to how much time you carve out of your busy schedule to train. Cycling is a sport that rewards sacrifice, whether that be time, mental energy, certain foods, money and even alcohol. If you just ride to get fit or enjoy riding with your friends or just do the occasional race, then one to three drinks per night probably isn't making or breaking your performance. On the other end of the scale, if you'll do anything to win, put in hours and hours of training every week, count every gram and make sure every detail of your preparation is absolutely perfect or you're a pro who's getting paid to ride at the highest level, then for God's sakes, put the drink down. What you need to do is decide where you fall in this spectrum and make those sacrifices accordingly. This may even change throughout the season. Many indulge in warm booze in the off season and then cut back as that big race approaches. At the end of the day, you gotta do what keeps you sane. Your cycling hobby shouldn't become a burden on your life. Whatever, man, I just crushed like 15 bush lights. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna wake up, pound a monster and another bush light to cure the hangover and then go steal your KOM on the bike path. So much for your science, bro. Thanks for watching. I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you did, be sure to give it a like, share with a friend and subscribe and be sure to hit the bell notification if you wanna be notified every time I put out a video. I've got training plans available and if you're interested in getting a coach, if you sign up through CTS, be sure to use my code CTSDJ to save $40 when you sign up. Details for both are down in the description.