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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello hello, good morning everyone. So question I've had in, does alcohol impact, muscle gain and weight loss? Know in the research I've seen that there was one study where they had one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men. There was no impact in fat loss and performance. However, it is dose dependent on the individual.
Speaker 1:You know, two drinks for some people might feel it and, you know, it might cause adverse effects, so you can't just go off that as a flat line. But it doesn't overpower calories. First of all, cover the calorie stuff. If you're in a deficit and you're drinking alcohol, you're still gonna lose weight, like 100%. The alcohol doesn't overpower the deficit.
Speaker 1:Now when it comes to alcohol, it's technically the fourth macronutrient. So there's protein, carbs, fat, and alcohol. We get our energy from these nutrients. So we got protein, carbs, fat, alcohol. Those are the four macronutrients we can derive energy from and we call our energy, we measure it with calories.
Speaker 1:So alcohol gives us protein is four calories a gram, carbs are four calories a gram, alcohol is seven calories a gram, and fat is nine calories a gram. So alcohol gram for gram is nearly up there with fat so it's energy dense. The body once it metabolizes it get rid of it quickly as a priority because it is a toxin essentially. You know the energy, some people who drink a few points get a lot of energy right. So in our sense it gives you energy, but it doesn't have any nutritional value.
Speaker 1:So there's no micronutrients or whatever to it. So I mean you can argue, some people argue with goodness and all that or whatever, but in general we say alcohol is empty calories kind of because it's not like a nutritious food but it does provide energy. So just because the calories, the energy we derive from it doesn't necessarily come with all of the good micronutrient stuff, it still impacts our energy balance so you can still gain weight. So if you were eating a maintenance and you started to drink 500 calories of alcohol the chances are you're going to be gaining fat, over time. Right?
Speaker 1:So definitely the alcohol calories count, it's just how many calories are you drinking from alcohol, know? So a pint is about 200 to two fifty calories. Some cocktails range from like 150 to 600, pina coladas, and some of them are 650 calories. So you gotta really be, like, on on on on the lookout for the calorie smart call. Now does it impact performance?
Speaker 1:Now interestingly, right, years ago, I did a a mini study or a survey with 3,975 rugby players. So amateur, semi pro and professional rugby players. And one of the sections was on injury and alcohol because rugby and drinking go hand in hand. I mean, they're freaks. They're weird guys.
Speaker 1:Come on. Why they they drink to oblivion. They do things that are unspeakable in initiations before you join the team. This is disgusting. Anyway, drinking after the game on a Saturday is a big part of why people play rugby.
Speaker 1:They play it for the sport, they play it for the boys after the game. Right? So when it comes to injuring alcohol, here's what my data shows and what kind of the gist of it is. So alcohol can disrupt your sleep if you drink too much for sure. So that's going to impact your performance, impact your muscle gain obviously.
Speaker 1:It also like doesn't improve your recovery time, it makes it worse. So if you're playing on a Saturday and you drink heavily on a Saturday you're not going to recover well on Sunday, Monday so there's a longer delay and higher doses actually increase cortisol levels or stress hormone and decrease testosterone levels so your testosterone goes down, cortisol levels go up, it's not ideal. So this is not going to be doing you any favors for your long term resistance training. But here's what I found. Beers consumed per week versus injuries is what I looked at.
Speaker 1:So if a player consumed zero to two beers a week, which is basically not much at all, their injury rate was just flatlined, you know, the the base. Once people started drinking four to 10 beers a week, it goes up 20 odd percent, 25% from the two. So from two to four to 10 beers a week, you go in 25% increase. This kind of flat line from four to 10. But once you start reaching 12 to 14 plus beers, it goes up another 25% impact on injuries.
Speaker 1:So your your chance of being injured goes up quite clearly, with alcohol usage for rugby players. That's a good little, data set to look at as well, you know, because, obviously, these people are playing on Saturdays. They're drinking, they're kind of, you know, they've got this, like, history, and there's clear evidence that injuries are heightened from putting your body essentially in a a position where the recovery is hampered, know it's not good. So if you are serious, mean you want to optimize your performance, you obviously shouldn't be drinking alcohol, know. So from an athletic standpoint, it's gonna impact your motor skills, your hydration, your aerobic performance, recovery process, and this impact everything, right.
Speaker 1:So once if it impacts your recovery process, I mean, that's where you got to look at how many drinks you can have that actually don't take you to the hampered state. So you have to ask yourself, do I have one drink, two drinks, three drinks? And after three drinks, you know, does that start feeling do I start feeling drunk? Do I does my sleep? Or is it two drinks?
Speaker 1:Am I carrying two drinks? You know, some of you might be one or two, and that's it. And that's the that's the fact of it. But again, I wouldn't again, these are details. I'm I am assuming you're not binge drinking.
Speaker 1:If you're binge drinking, it's a completely different thing. Right? If you're binge drinking, then, yeah, you need to sort it out because it's gonna really impact your performance. But if you're having one or two glasses of wine a night, I would say just focus on consistent training to start with, focus on getting that progressive overloading, which means, you know, every week or two you're putting the weight up for the same reps, so you're doing more reps of the same weight and you start progressing. You know that's really the gist of training you know.
Speaker 1:Some people will be like is this plan best, is that plan the best? The best plan for weightlifting is one you do consistently where you can track your progress and you're increasing the intensity of it whether it's more weight or reps or sets. This is very, it's that simple. People want to over complicate it. You know you can follow programmes and that's why we did programmes before where it was the basic movements over twelve weeks and people's results were amazing.
Speaker 1:You know, people's results were amazing. So I think it's just about the consistency of training. If you feel you're drinking too much, obviously drop it, you know. It's the thing with optimizing performance. We often overlook the big blocks.
Speaker 1:The big blocks, obviously, sleep is one of the big ones. You know? We can we can speak about, should I have one or two drinks? But are you having seven to eight hours of sleep a night? Is your sleep hygiene good?
Speaker 1:Like, you got black or blind? Is the room cool? Are you awake? How many times are you waking up in the night? You know?
Speaker 1:Are you drinking too much water close to bedtime? Are you waking up all the time? Are you having only one or two sleeps a night that are weaker that are good? Or you having some serious good days in a row. You start there.
Speaker 1:What's your caffeine intake like? Are you drinking caffeine too late in the day that it's actually impacting your sleep? And then you wake up tired and you think the the answer is more caffeine, but actually caffeine is the problem cause it's impacting your sleep because a half life is so long. You shouldn't be drinking caffeine after twelve really. You know, that's the thing.
Speaker 1:Are you active enough in the day that you're going to bed tired? Because if you're not going to bed tired you're gonna just be staying up awake. Know, these are basics like okay well what do mean go to bed tired? Yeah, that's what I mean. Like if you if you go out in the middle of the day, you go for your walk and you do some exercise and you do, you know, you're working or whatever and you go home at the end of the day, you're gonna start feeling tired, ready for bed by nine nine or ten.
Speaker 1:You know, what's if you wanna take this seriously, you wanna make sure you're going to bed at a reasonable time. And people are always thinking, oh, should I go to bed? I can't go to bed. I go to bed till, like, twelve. Well, you need to sort that out.
Speaker 1:Why are you staying up so late? Obviously, sometimes you do. Sometimes I do. You think you you get into the flow with work or something and it goes it goes on. But really, you gotta prompt yourself as well.
Speaker 1:Remember this. Your your behavior happens when you get prompted. So you need a prompt. So you either have an alarm go off at 9PM to remind you, hey, get off your phone, get off the couch and bugger off to bed, you know, and don't go on your phone when you're in bedroom. Maybe you want to read a book to go to sleep to Some the shit the while she's doing something.
Speaker 1:You know? So if you wanna take this stuff seriously, I would say a coach won't take anything seriously from you. I'm not saying this as an individual, as in general, unless you've the basics in place. Okay? So the coach will just tell you to do the basics.
Speaker 1:If you go to a strength and conditioning coach or whatever, they give you a plan, sleep, your protein, your energy intake, that's it. And that's really the rule for everything. Get the basics down first before we start running for other optimization stuff. Because you can go in-depth with other optimization stuff. I mean, you know, you can go into, like, cardio, fat loss protocols, and you can go into, like, complicated training processes and programs.
Speaker 1:You can go into, like, all sorts of, like, peak week stuff. You know, it gets really complex when you get to the upper echelons. Because and the reason is this, guys. Because, like, these athletes who are competing, they've maxed out their, like, natural talent and training volume and stuff. So they've like, they're turning up, and they are at the peak of their ability.
Speaker 1:And the difference between them winning gold and winning silver is sometimes less than 1% or is like half a millisecond or you know what I mean, it's like an inch. So they will do pretty much anything to get that inch on someone. And that means they turn to some supplements. They turn to certain peak week stuff and manipulations. But that's for those people.
Speaker 1:It's not for us. We don't need to focus on those things. If we just do the basics, was fine. They just look in in case, you know, in case there's that extra. You know, creatines are something that people should take if they wanna, you know, be getting stronger and optimizing for that for sure because there's so much research on it.
Speaker 1:But the other thing that's got research is is beetroot extract, you know, for, a bit more endurance. And, you know, it can give you a 10% edge, you know. But how are you how are you to know if it's gonna give you this edge if you if you're not training frequently anyway? If you don't have loads of data to look on? If you haven't been training for months?
Speaker 1:You know what I mean? You haven't trained for months. You haven't trained consistently. I'm take gonna this to improve my strength. But how do know it's improving your strength?
Speaker 1:I will just feel it. Well, we can't go off feeling. We need data, right? So if you're gonna bother taking any of these supplements, need to start looking at yourself like an experiment and say, okay, for the next four weeks I'm not going to start creatine yet, I'm going to train specifically, I'm going to do consistent training, I'm going to put down how much weight I'm using in my reps and my sets, I'm going to do that for four weeks. Then I'm going to load on creatine and it's going to take thirty days for saturate my muscle cells.
Speaker 1:I need at least thirty days, so you track that as well but don't expect much improvement maybe a bit. And then the following month you will then do the same and you will see have I gained any strength. Well I started on five kgs now I'm on 10, so clearly. Okay, but in month three versus month one big difference, but month three versus month two is a bit of a difference. You actually have this data in front of you, it's objective, it's like this is true.
Speaker 1:But if you're just going to take things on a whim and just hope it makes you better because as someone said, you don't really need to because you're not really optimising for it anyway. Do you mean you're just adding more stress to your life, you know? But I think we fall into this trap a lot these minor details, minor details. And I like reminding you guys to focus on the big stuff because that's what matters, the fundamentals. But yeah, if you are thinking of, like, you know, creatine beetroot extract, you know, taking any kind of performance enhancing supplement, beta alanine as well, it's got some evidence, and you really are into your training and you've got data to look back on and to compare it, for sure do it, but please experiment it because I'm really I love this data stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, I've been doing it for years. I love it. Like, on my rugby study now, you know, I've got I've even got here performance enhancing drugs, part. Forty percent of rugby players consider taking steroids, I would say more of them. But here's the thing, people who took steroids at higher injury rates on all levels, know, that's an interesting find, these data points.
Speaker 1:Creatine, oh here we go, Is creatine yes or no? Okay, creatine is a natural supplement with countless studies prove it's effective for increasing strength. Despite its benefits though only thirty percent of professionals consume creatine. But what does our data show? So what it shows to me on creatine users, the bench press average of a, non creatine user was like looks here at like ninety kgs and the bench press of creatine users a 100.
Speaker 1:So every so bench press squat deadlift, there is a clear increase in strength for creatine users versus non creatine users in my data year rugby players. Okay. Other supplements they used was whey protein, creatine, multivitamins, and omega fish oils. Let's have a look now. So, yeah, players definitely as you go from an amateur semi pro to professional consume more protein, per day, obviously nutritionists are helping them.
Speaker 1:Professional level rugby players train on average 3.5x a week, workout don't burn out. Amateurs train 2.7x a week, but semi pros train 3.25x a week. So even professional rugby players hit in the gym three times a week because they're doing more specific rugby stuff, right? Two days a week is fine. If you're looking to optimize you go to three.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's kind of a thing to think about. I go to two to maintain and if I want to start progressing maybe I need three. What else finds you? 39% of professionals think players are getting too big.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They they are monsters. Over 75% of players believe that weightlifting is crucial for effectively playing rugby. It's important. It's it's interesting.
Speaker 1:What else have I got here for you guys? I think that's it. Is it injury alcohol recovery? Yeah. So that's it.
Speaker 1:I hope I was useful, but maybe we can create our own little study with everyone doing these things and see if it does improve your training, but we need you to have your pre creating training and your post creating training and the tracking. So hope this was useful. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals, sleep, calorie intake, protein steps, water, those things. Focus on the rest once you've got those in check for a good few months, and then we can go crack on and try other stuff. But have a good day everyone.
Speaker 1:Remember to live one day at a time, and I'll speak to you all soon.