Are alcohol and exercise incompatible? Not at all. However, it can feel more difficult to fit alcohol into a health-conscious lifestyle as you move into your upper 30s, 40s, and beyond. There are a few reasons for this, and the good news is that by planning ahead and understanding how alcohol fits into your macros, moderate drinking can be part of a healthy lifestyle. 

While the phrase “healthy lifestyle” can mean different things to different people, generally, it means regular exercise, a balanced diet, a nourishing sleep cycle and broadly, choices that make it easy to feel good in your body. Read on to learn more about how moderate drinking can fit into this type of lifestyle and how you can balance alcohol with your fitness goals. 

Balancing Alcohol and Fitness Goals

If you’re working toward specific fitness goals like building muscle or losing weight, you’ve got to track your calories and macros. In order to do this, you need an accurate picture of alcohol’s caloric content. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the most common alcoholic beverages: 

To learn more about how many calories are in various alcoholic drinks, check out this guide from MedlinePlus.gov.

There’s so much more to fitness than counting calories, though. That’s why it’s important to understand how alcohol consumption affects muscle recovery.  Generally, drinking within the 24-hour window after a workout makes your muscle recovery less efficient. To get more specific, here’s what’s happening: 

• When you drink alcohol, acetaldehyde accumulates in your bloodstream. Acetaldehyde is a byproduct of your liver’s metabolic process. 

• When acetaldehyde is present in your bloodstream, it impairs your muscle’s mitochondrial functioning and signaling pathways. 

• Because of these impairments, less energy is available to your muscles. This limits their ability to recover after a workout, which makes the process slower and can keep you from making the gains you’d aimed to achieve. 

Learn more about the connection between acetaldehyde and muscle recovery.

As you likely know from other blog posts, impaired muscle recovery isn’t acetaldehyde’s only physiological effect. It can also make you feel dehydrated and sluggish, which can make it hard to get the workout results you want. 

Ways Alcohol Impacts How you Feel

It’s no secret that drinking alcohol can impact how you feel, physically and mentally. Beyond the direct impact acetaldehyde can have on muscle recovery, there are a few indirect ways drinking can affect how you function. 

• Alcohol can disrupt sleep. There are a few reasons for this, one of which is that as your body metabolizes alcohol, it can cause you to wake up. It can also be difficult to fall asleep again after these wake-ups, which can make you miss out on deep, restful sleep. Sleep is critical to muscle recovery and overall well being.

• Alcohol suppresses your body’s production of vasopressin, a hormone that regulates fluid retention and blood pressure. This is what causes you to feel dehydrated after drinking, which can negatively impact your stamina level in the gym. 

• Losing sleep and feeling dehydrated leave you feeling downright lousy. This can kill your motivation to work out. 

That last bullet point is a result of the first two, but when you’re skipping the gym and reaching for comfort snacks because you feel crummy after drinking, it doesn’t really matter. The result is the same: drinking kept you from keeping up with your fitness regimen. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, though. To protect your sleep quality, timing your alcohol consumption is key. This is because metabolization is what’s waking you up—starting that process earlier by having your last drink earlier can help you avoid early-morning wake-ups. 

Aim to have your last drink at least three to four hours before bedtime so “the worst” of the metabolization process is over before your head hits the pillow. Remember, alcohol metabolizes at a rate of about one standard drink per hour. The more drinks you’ve had, the more time you’ll need to metabolize them. 

You can also reduce your likelihood of dehydration by drinking one 8oz glass of water for every alcoholic beverage. This is a baseline, not the maximum—drinking more water can only help you avoid feeling alcohol’s diuretic effects as you recover the next day. 

How to Include Alcohol in a Healthy Lifestyle

Fitting alcohol into your healthy lifestyle means thinking in terms of priorities. 

If you want to maintain a consistent workout schedule, you need:

• Restful sleep every night

• Sufficient hydration

• Motivation to maintain your workout schedule

If you want to build muscle, you need: 

• A body uninhibited by alcohol’s byproducts

• A focused mind

• Drive to push yourself in the gym

For both of these goals, prioritize timing your alcohol consumption and mitigating its effects. This means planning celebrations and nights out so your workouts don’t fall within the 24-hour window after drinking. It also means taking steps to protect your sleep quality and hydration levels, the first of which is understanding how acetaldehyde, a byproduct of your liver’s metabolic process, can interfere with these. 

Pro tip: Reducing the amount of acetaldehyde that reaches your bloodstream may help you avoid dehydration.

How Long Should you Wait to Workout After Drinking Alcohol?

Generally, you should wait 24 hours to work out after drinking alcohol. This gives your body time to fully metabolize the alcohol, putting you in good shape to hit the gym.

Plan Around Alcohol and your Fitness Goals

The bottom line is, it is possible to drink alcohol and live a healthy lifestyle. The key is moderation and planning. In fact, approaching your fitness goals from a moderation mindset, rather than as an “either/or”, can help you stick to your routine and reach your goals. This is because we’re human, and enjoying life’s pleasures like good food, quality time with friends, and a delicious cocktail to go with them keeps you grounded, happy, and motivated to keep living a good life. 

BuzzClear can help you maintain a lifestyle of moderation by supporting your fitness regimen.  BuzzClear constraints both alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase which may effectively minimize acetaldehyde accumulation in the body.  If you exercise regularly and wellness is important to you, try BuzzClear when you drink. 

Interested in trying BuzzClear? Learn more now.