Believe it or not, there are those who wonder if alcohol has an effect on their muscle building activities. The answer is a resounding yes alcohol will adversely affect your work out.

Protein is vital for building muscles, and therefore should not be interfered with. Unfortunately, alcohol impairs protein synthesis. Alcohol consumptions has been shown to slow down the protein synthesis by which amino acids are joined together to create complete proteins by 20%.

The level of testosterone in the body is another factor in muscle building. If you are a woman and you are looking to build muscle mass, you will notice that woman develop lees muscle mass than men. Because of the low levels of testosterone, woman have 15 to 20 times less than men do. What does that have to do with alcohol? Alcohol not only decreases testosterone, it also increases estrogen.

When you drink alcohol, the kidneys must use massive amounts of water to process the toxin. Yes, the body recognizes alcohol as a toxin. When this happens, the body can quickly become dehydrated.

Nerves control muscles and nerves produce the stimuli to contract muscles from electrolyte minerals dissolved in water. Further more water lubricates the joints and protects them from injury during workouts.

Drinking alcohol robs your body of key vitamins. Vitamins like B, C and A, plus calcium and phosphorous are all depleted through the use of alcohol. When you consider that the most important vitamins to healthy muscle development are vitamins B and C, you can see this is just one more reason that drinking alcohol while muscle building is such a big deal.

Building muscle is done by depleting fat and increasing muscle mass. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol works against this effort. Alcohol contains empty calories, which means that they have no nutritional value. It also has twice as many calories as carbohydrates and protein.

While we are on the subject of calorie it is important to note that the calories taken in while drinking are the first ones burnt. This means that all other fat stores will remain and not be used for energy until alcohol calories are all burned. Not a good combination for a person wanting to build muscle mass and lose fat.

You can however have to consider the other affects of alcohol on the body since we have examined most of the major points on alcohol and bodybuilding. If you use this for a prolonged amount of time it may lead to liver damage, diabetes or other medical problems. If you suffer from any one of these, you will have a hard time building muscle. At the end of the day, is it really worth the cost?