We men sure love to drink alcohol. And unfortunately, we have little regard for the damage that we are doing to our bodies by getting drunk all the time. But those are issues for the common man to worry about. We bodybuilders are above that, right? Well, it turns out that we aren’t.
Is Alcohol Affecting Your Testosterone Levels?
Alcohol disrupts so much of our body’s functions that includes the body’s ability to produce testosterone. And since we often take bodybuilding supplements along with the alcohol, it is a deadly combination. Most of these supplements and other drugs have warnings to not be taken with alcohol that often go ignored. We can’t afford to ignore them anymore, as they may be having a profound effect on our body’s levels of testosterone.
You don’t have to quit drinking altogether
Having a drink every few days won’t do much to disrupt your testosterone levels. But do not go overboard and do not try drinking until you are shitfaced drunk. If you suffer from alcoholism, you should seek help as soon as possible to get your condition treated, as reading this article won’t be enough to kick your habit and get your testosterone levels back on track.
Alcohol decreases your testosterone levels and this is how
The influence that alcohol consumption has on your body’s testosterone levels has to do with how much you drink and what kind of alcohol you drink. If you are a heavy beer drinker, you should probably kick that habit as soon as possible. Beer consumption has a tremendously negative effect on your body’s testosterone levels. This is because the barley and hops in beer contain phytoestrogen and prolactin. As you can probably tell from the name of the first chemical, these chemicals release more estrogen into your body, which does not bode well for your testosterone levels.
Other alcoholic beverages such as wine and bourbon liquor also contain the chemical phytoestrogen and will reduce your body’s testosterone levels by releasing more estrogen.
And looking beyond just that, alcoholic beverages like the aforementioned beer contain a lot of empty calories – calories that provide the body with no nutritional benefit and are just stored as fat. Drinking a lot of beer will make you gain a lot of weight, and having a lot of fat will make your body release a buttload of estrogen. This further serves to lower your testosterone levels.
And unfortunately, there is more. Ethanol, the main kind of alcohol that you find in alcoholic beverage, is detrimental to your testicles. It has plenty of negative effects on your testes, including killing sperm cells, suppressing your testosterone, and even can cause you to become infertile in the worst case scenario. Did you know that alcohol consumption is one of the leading causes of male infertility?
Something I find quite funny is that alcohol consumption is really good for the testosterone levels of women. Ever notice that the women who drink every night until they are blue in the face often have more male characteristics? This is because alcohol consumption causes a woman’s testosterone levels to skyrocket, which is not a good thing for them. If only that could happen to us men, though…
Basically, what you need to get from this section is that consuming alcohol messes with the sex hormones of both sexes. It causes men to release way more estrogen into their bodies and drop their testosterone levels, while it causes women to release way more testosterone into their bodies and drop their estrogen levels.
The effect that alcohol consumption has on our muscles
We are bodybuilders. Muscle growth is everything to us and if your muscle growth is disrupted, we can’t build our bodies. And alcohol consumption seriously complicates this because of its disruptive effects on our testosterone levels. And it gets even worse than what I described in the above section. The body being forced to metabolize all of the alcohol often causes hormone therapy supplements to be inhibited because they are not being metabolized because of the alcohol. Thus, your body won’t be able to release more of the hormones needed to promote muscle growth.
The deadly effects that taking testosterone supplements and alcohol together have
The warnings on all kinds of supplements and drugs that say “DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL” are there for a reason. You should not by any means take any kind of drug with a glass of alcohol or even drink alcohol in the same time frame that you took a drug. You could face a wide range of harmful side effects such as:
- rapid heartbeat
- hike in blood pressure level
- cloudy eyesight
- pain in your chest
- pain in your eyes
- chronic migraines
- pancreatitis
- spitting up blood
Whether these effects are caused by the testosterone supplements or the alcohol is not known. What is known is that they are caused by taking the two substances together, so you should not by any means do it. Consuming alcohol on its own has a handful of potentially harmful side effects, as does taking the testosterone supplements. Combining the two increases the amount of side effects that you put yourself at risk for and also increases your risk of developing those side effects. There are some other side effects of mixing the two that are not quite as life-threatening as the ones listed above:
- your body’s ability to heal itself will be disrupted
- mood swings
- weight gain
- feeling dizzy
- sleep problems
And never EVER take alcohol with any drug that a doctor prescribes you.
In closing
If drinking alcohol is something that you do a lot, you should make an effort to phase it out of your life. Especially if you are a bodybuilder. I am not even quite sure how you are able to body build if you are drinking a lot of alcohol anyways. Phase it out of your life and don’t ever take your bodybuilding supplements with a swig of alcohol. It is a horrible idea.
