3 reasons your fitness will always be trash if you drink alcohol

Last week, our coaching group for my son’s competitive sports team was standing around chatting about trying to get to the gym.

“Oh, I go to the gym regularly,” one of the dads said. “It’s just the Big Mac meal and 12 beers after that keep me looking like this.”

Everyone had a good laugh at his self-deprecating joke.

But he did hit on a nugget of truth there: if you drink alcohol, at best you’re going to be treading water from a fitness perspective.

I did this for years, working out hard just to stay at the same level and never actually feeling “good”.

At worst, you’ll be working out and still gaining weight and feeling worse than ever.

It’s not just the calories, either.

Last week, I happened upon an article that actually quantified just how much alcohol is impacting your fitness in ways you wouldn’t even consider.

Here are 3 reasons you’ll never feel truly fit or energized if you continue to drink alcohol.

An extra meal per day

If you’re a hard daily drinker like I was just 8–9 months ago, you’re probably ingesting 5–6 alcoholic beverages a night.

For me, a lot of the time, that meant having 5–6 tallboy cans of beer.

A typical tallboy has about 200 calories, so 200 x 6 = an extra 1,200 absolute junk calories per evening.

That’s like adding one fatty, calorie-laden restaurant meal to my diet every single day!

It’s a wonder I didn’t completely balloon, but going to the gym almost every day and having skinny guy genetics allowed me to maintain a pretty steady weight for a while.

Even that dam had started to break, however, which was one of the reasons I had more incentive than ever to stop drinking.

Now, at age 42, I need to be more cognizant of diet than ever to maintain the level of good health I want.

Adding 1,200 calories per day is something I simply can’t afford anymore.

Recovery takes a nosedive

Back to the fascinating article I mentioned up top.

It referenced biometric data research presented by fitness tracker maker Whoop that quantified just how damaging alcohol is to your fitness goals.

Whoop measures recovery in a handful of ways: heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate, sleep, and respiratory rate.

“It should come as no surprise that of all the behaviors available to record in the WHOOP Journal, drinking alcohol is the one with the single greatest negative impact on next-day recovery,” the company wrote in a blog post.

“On average, WHOOP members’ recovery is 8% lower when they log consuming alcohol the day before (again, this includes everything ranging from one drink to several).”

That’s because alcohol causes your HRV to drop and your resting heart rate to rise. Neither of those is good.

It gets worse.

In a study of college athletes in 2016, Whoop found alcohol could have a negative impact on recovery for 4–5 days.

Sleep without rest

When I was drinking every day, I spent the right number of hours in bed, but I never felt “rested”.

I spent a lot of time in the gym but never felt “healthy”.

I touched on this point in my recent article, “The 1 Paul Rudd secret for building a Marvel body”.

Here’s what I wrote then:

Here’s what he told Men’s Health when asked about the most important contributor to his superhero body, youthful appearance, and happiness:

(Rudd) holds out his hand at eye level. “Sleep.”

He progressively lowers it as he goes through the rest.

“Then diet. Then weights. Then cardio. People ask me, ‘Can you send me your meal plan? How many times a week do you work out? Do you drink? Do you eat carbs? Do you have a cheat day?’

“The most important part of training is sleep. People will set their alarm and then sleep for four hours and they’ll get up so that they can train.

They’re doing themselves a disservice. If you can somehow get eight hours of sleep …”

Without sleep, nothing else matters.

Not diet, not exercise.

Because if you don’t get enough sleep, your diet will probably be undisciplined and your exercise probably won’t happen.

Here’s what Whoop’s data said about alcohol and sleep after its team members decided to do Sober October back in 2019.

“Across the entirety of our Sober October team … we observed a number of improvements in the data. Comparing the 10-day averages prior to the month and at the end, we found each of the following increased:

• Sleep Duration: +6 minutes per night
• Sleep Performance: +1.28% (sleep achieved vs. sleep needed)
• Recovery: +1.58%”

While this may not seem like a ton of improvement, it’s over one month.

Keep the concept of compound gains in mind here.

Besides, I would argue that the degree to which sleep improves after quitting alcohol is almost unquantifiable.

To this day, it stands as the №1 physical health benefit for me since I quit back in the summer.

Alcohol had become deeply, deeply detrimental to my sleep quality.

Once you experience great sleep again, you start to actually resent alcohol for taking it away from you.

Fitness fail

We all have our reasons for wanting to quit alcohol.

My main one was that I was tired of disappointing myself and not reaching my potential.

I was also starting to feel the health effects in my 40s and knew I was on borrowed time if I kept it up.

If your goal is to bust your butt at the gym and get fit and hot as hell, you’d do well to heed the warnings in this piece.

Alcohol is a fitness assassin.

Don’t let it kill your gains.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to read! If you enjoyed this piece, please give it a clap or two so others can find it!

Get an email every time I publish so you don’t miss a story!