Barbell Shrugged - Effects of Drinking Alcohol on Training and Recovery w/ Alcohol Scientist Dr. Jakob Vingren

Episode Date: December 27, 2017

Dr. Jakob Vingren is an associate professor of Exercise Physiology and Biological Sciences at the University of North Texas. His research focus includes resistance exercise and the effect of alcohol on hormones, muscles and athletic performance. Alcohol affects training, but turns out it’s not as bad as you might think. In this episode, you will learn about the effects of drinking alcohol in terms of quantity, frequency, timing (before, during, and after workouts), type, and more. We dive into how alcohol affects the androgen system, immune system, muscle recovery, and short and long-term gains. Enjoy! ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast and Barbell Logic. Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Find Barbell Business Here: Website: http://www.BarbellBusiness.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellbusiness Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellbusiness Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellbusinesspodcast

So a lot of people, once they get out of their 20s and their 30s and 40s, they drink three or four beers and they wake up the next day and they're like, man, I didn't used to feel like this. I'm so hungover. This never would have happened to me in college. Have you found differences with different age groups? Like younger people tend to tolerate alcohol better than older people with relative to age? We haven't looked at that. What's probably going on is also as you age, you probably don't drink as often. So just like with exercise, if you go do you know deadlifts every two weeks you're going to be sore every two weeks right but if you deadlift you know three

four times a week maybe that's a little over the top but you're not going to get a sore so it's probably the same thing that you're because part of you adapt to drinking alcohol your liver adapts to drinking alcohol you know increases alcohol dehydrogenous etc so we got so it's probably a training effect so you got to keep it going. Keep our conditioning up. Exactly. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Indy Galpin. And we're actually here in Las Vegas, Nevada, having some drinks. You've never seen us have drinks on this show before.

It's Vice Friday. Unless you watched episode one, don't go do that. Yeah, we got kicked out of the NSCA conference. Again. Again, no. The expo hall shut down, so we had to vacate, run up here to the hotel room, have some beers, and we're here with Jacob Vingren, and we're going to talk about the effect of booze on training. It seems to be a big question. It's like, should

I be drinking? Do you feel guilty when you drink? Should we, Jacob, should we feel guilty about drinking after we train? Or on the weekends? Should I get smashed? Well, maybe not get smashed, but I think the evidence shows that you can have some alcohol. It really comes down to when do you drink, how much do you drink, what do you drink, and sort of how do you drink relative to when your workout is, what's before, after, during. All those different things really matter and fit into what are the outcomes going to be. And the value also depends on what type of exercise you're doing. I want to just back up a second to explain to them who you are first

and why you think you have the right to tell us whether or not we should drink or not. I have a beer. We actually just pulled a random guy from downstairs at the casino. He wasn't wobbling too bad, so we thought, this guy must know how to do this right. So can you tell us a little bit about your background, what you do for a living living and how your lab works? Yeah, so I'm an associate professor at the University of North Texas in exercise physiology and biological sciences.

And a large part of my research deals with alcohol and the effects of alcohol in all different contexts of exercise, including how does it affect muscle, how does it affect hormones, performance, and so forth. Yeah, so your basically job is to study whether or not alcohol makes a damn bit of difference. Yeah, we do quite a few studies on alcohol as one of our sort of primary foci. And we're one of the few people in the world, or places in the world, that does that. You get college students, you just get them fucked up and then have them work out and stuff like that? Pretty much.

No, that's not how it works. No, that would probably cause some problems. But we do generally use college students. And what we always get is, oh, it must be easy to find subjects. Well, it's not always because, you know, they have to stick around until they get sober again before we let them go. And they're the only ones drinking, so it's not so fun when you're the only one drinking and everyone else is not.

You're sitting there by yourself, guys, and you're like, no one's around. This is awful. Exactly. So what kind of things are you testing for? So we do a lot of things looking at either how alcohol affects the endocrine response, how alcohol affects muscle recovery, how alcohol affects the immune system, how it affects long-term gains. Specifically, we've been looking at the short-term part of that

because you're not allowed to get people drunk for two months in a row. They kind of frown upon that. But you can do that with rats. But you can do that with rats, exactly. So we do that. You should check out the Navy. You can find sailors doing that every day. Well, there's quite a few people that do it.

We're just not allowed to purposefully do it. Does that make sense? You can follow people that do it. But you're right. We do use a rat model where we get rats drunk for almost two months chronically. So, hey, if they've got to live, they must live to do it, right? And then you've got to make a rat lift weights? Yeah.

So, as I said, the hard part is not getting them drunk. The hard part is getting them to squat. So, generally, you've got to use really small barbells, you know. No, that's not how it works. So, what we actually do, we strap a vest on them and we train them to go reach a light. And then they reach up and reach the light. Get up on their toes, reach the light,

goes off, they go back, comes back on, they go touch it. You can train them with a couple different techniques to where they learn, when the light comes on, I go touch this. So it mimics very closely a human squat, and then you can just load up weights in their backpack as they get stronger, and then you can move that across. But it's a little time-intensive when you have to do that with one rat at a time.

So you've got two groups of rats. They're both working out, so to speak, and there's one group of rats that's getting drunk chronically, and the other group is not getting drunk. Is that how that works? Well, yeah, exactly. We actually had four groups. So we also had two groups that worked out and didn't. So two groups that drank, two groups that did not drink, two groups that work out, and two groups that don't.

So you have all four different conditions. So you can compare, see how much of it's due to training, how much of it's due to alcohol. Okay. But it really depends on the question you're trying to answer. You set up your study. So in that particular question, or that particular study, what did you guys find? So in that particular study we found that with chronic alcohol ingestion, there were, it depended on the fiber type that you had, or the fiber type you're looking at. The nice thing about rats is that their muscles are either usually 100% type 1, or 99% type 1, or 99% type 2.

So you can do some fiber type specific, where humans are usually 50-50ish. Right, right. So you can do some things where you can look some fiber type specific, where humans are usually 50-50-ish. So you can do some things where you can look at fiber type specifics. And it appeared that in one set of fibers, alcohol prevented an exercise-induced or training-induced increase in antigen receptor. And in the other type of fiber, you just saw that alcohol, regardless of exercise, reduced the antigen receptor. Okay, so the antigen receptor is the thing that testosterone binds to that makes it active, right? Correct.

So a down regulation of that. Yeah, so if you have everything else been equal, if you have less antigen receptor or not as much of an increase as otherwise would have, then you have less of basically the log for testosterone being the key. So you have less of a signal coming from testosterone, less of an opportunity for testosterone to signal because if you have no antigen receptors, for instance, it doesn't matter how much testosterone you have, it's going to have no biological effect. So without the receptor, you have no effect. So more receptor, generally speaking, you have more effect. So which fibers were impacted in which

way? So interestingly, type 2 fibers were downregulated by alcohol, the antigen receptor, no matter what. So exercise didn't seem to make a difference in type 2 fibers. The fast twitch. The fast twitch fibers, exactly. The white fibers. Whereas in type 1 or slow twitch fibers, resistance training actually induced an increase in antigen receptor, but that was prevented when you had alcohol. So if you're slow twitch and you drink booze, that kills your gains. Right. And if you're fast twitch and you drink, either you lift or not, yeah, it's going to go down.

Yay! You're good. All right. You're screwed, Doug. We're good, yeah, it's going to go down. Yay! You're good. All right. You're screwed, Doug. We're good, Mike. I'm screwed. Yeah. Now, again, we're talking about chronic ingestion, and that's quite different from what we're doing here.

Although it's in Vegas, so it's pseudo-chronic, I guess. It's a bit CSO. Exactly. But it does fit in also with what you see around the world with people that have alcohol abuse, that their type 2 fibers are downregulated in number and size, whereas type 1 fiber seems to be fairly well protected. Yeah. Okay. I imagine most people that are watching this, they're not chronically drunk.

Right. Then they probably wouldn't be online, right? Yeah. So most people are probably drinking maybe one drink a night, or they're drinking only on the weekends. Is that a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to training? Well, I don't know that it's necessarily a good thing, although it's possible. That would be great if I could say that, right?

Yeah. You'd always have to drink. Yeah, I know I'd be a lot more popular, I'm sure, yeah. Well, it really depends on the context. So it depends on what type of exercise are you doing. Are we talking endurance type exercise? Are we talking endurance type exercise? Are we talking resistance type exercise? When do you drink?

Are you talking drinking before exercise, during exercise, or after exercise? Believe it, during exercise is quite popular, especially like softball leagues and some of these. I was trying to think, like, what in the world? I've done it before. And there's actually a lot of athletes that abuse alcohol and use alcohol doing games. You know what? I remember Mike McGoldrick hit a PR deadlift one time drinking a beer.

That was... Yeah, yeah. I remember he was like... I was like, unbelievable. I had a PR snatch once after a night of drinking. Oh. I mean, I started drinking around 3. I was hitting PR snatches at 10 a.m. Well, actually, there's signs not necessarily that you would get a PR, but when you look at just drinking alcohol, no training,

does not appear to have an effect on performance in endurance type, sorry, in resistance training type of power events. So alcohol alone does not appear to reduce maximal strength or maximal power either while you're drunk or after you're doing a hangover. So that's the good news. Now if you have a workout beforehand, a heavy workout, and you have muscle that needs to recover, alcohol does appear to reduce the recovery or increase the recovery time by reducing the amount of recovery that happens.

So it takes longer to recover. Is that muscle glycogen resynthesis a problem? Probably not muscle glycogen because that doesn't really factor in so much in like a maximal strength type event. But we've looked at a variety of muscle signalers including mTOR. The mTOR signaling pathway which involved a very important regulator in protein synthesis just like the testosterone is. And we've seen there, interestingly, in men, that pathway after heavy resistance drinking right after heavy resistance exercise reduces the activation of that pathway in men but not in women, believe it or not. So it appears

that men maybe don't drink so much, women go ahead and drink. Are there any other differences between the sexes that you found similar to that? We've found similar things with testosterone as well, where it appears that the hormonal response of testosterone primarily seems to be affected more in men than in women. Now, of course, men have a much more robust testosterone response than women do. Right now, we're looking again to see how does that then factor into actually looking at protein synthesis and how is that affected? Because what a group, Barnes out of New Zealand,

found in multiple studies was that, again, doing a heavy, they do the muscle damaging exercise, giving people a high bolus of alcohol, that the recovery was reduced. And here recovery, they're looking at strength recovery, so it would take an extra day or two before they were recovered. So we're interested in, okay, well, why is that?

So trying to look at, so these signals that are involved in recovery, including the immune system, but also protein synthesis and mTOR signal and pathway and such. See, can we narrow down actually, why is it that alcohol after exercise reduces? Because if you just take alcohol by itself, as I said, performance is not reduced the next day.

So an acute bout or a single dose of alcohol does not limit your maximal strength or maximal power performance. I think you just made every viewer very, very happy. So I'm hearing it's okay to drink beforehand, but afterwards it's going to have a hard time recovering. Right. Actually, generally the advice I give is if you know you're going out drinking that night, and drinking heavily, now again, we gotta talk about how much you drink,

then maybe you don't go and do a heavy workout, or do a resistance training workout that's gonna cause muscle damage, because you may be worse off the next day than if you've never gone to the gym. Because now your recovery, maybe, this Friday, maybe I'm not recovered until Wednesday instead of Monday. Right? And Monday I have another workout.

Maybe you're better off just waiting until Monday or waiting until Sunday and going in and getting your workout in. So you just gave me a reason to not work out and drink heavily. I know. If I don't drink heavily, don't work out. Got it. You're saying people could be wasting their time training on Saturday if they went out Friday night. No, the other way around. Right. That if you work out Friday right before you go out, right,

that that maybe is not the way to go. If you are going to work out, I recommend separating, although I don't have all the data to really support this. There's much time between your workout and the drinking, so maybe you work out Friday morning instead of Friday evening. Granted, I haven't done those studies yet. That's one of those things that are coming up to see what is the actual time frame because there's surprisingly little research done in this realm, Granted, I haven't done those studies yet. That's one of those things that are coming up to see what is the actual time frame.

Because there's surprisingly little research done in this realm, despite how popular drinking is. That's what a lot of people don't realize. People that exercise consistently drink. I mean, large national survey data consistently show that people that drink, sorry, people that exercise also drink more than people that don't. Athletes, college athletes drink more than the non-college peers. Consistently, consistently. So, a lot of people, oh, well, exercise and alcohol are incompatible. Well, we all know that it's not. Do you know if there's differences between drinking a beer or having hard liquor?

Because this isn't just ethanol. There's other factors in drinking a beer versus having a cocktail. And that's where it starts getting really tricky. A lot of the studies that I've done so far have just looked at alcohol, generally using vodka or some pure form of alcohol. Obviously, if you drink a beer, now you have antioxidants, you have sugar, you have a variety of other things that may help recovery as well. Of course, if you're really concerned with recovery,

maybe you can get those from other sources as well. Orange juice, for instance, is excellent in providing those. Now, maybe you can mix your vodka with orange juice and there you go, right? Ah, best of both worlds. Perfect. So that may be a possibility of getting around it. But no, with exercise, people haven't looked at the specific sources, but there are studies that have looked in the absence of exercise at what causes more hangover. And I actually see that the things that have been stored on oak barrels,

for instance, cause more hangover for a given amount of alcohol because it contains more methanol. And methanol is a big component of what causes hangover because it breaks down to formaldehyde. And if you're familiar with formaldehyde, that's what you store cadavers in. So that's good for you. So what thingsdehyde, that's what you store cadavers in. So what things are commonly stored in oak barrels like you were mentioning? So like whiskey or bourbon, brandies, the darker, generally all the darker spirits, dark rum, everything sort of gram for gram of alcohol, they give you more hangover. Now that's a little outside of the context does that include wine wine as well but in wine it's probably more there's some sulfites

and other things in wine as well so it gets yeah i know the company they specialize in creating a very clean wine and they claim to have less of a hangover if you're drinking this wine versus the traditional one you ever heard anything about that i haven't but it is possible if they reduce that it's not all the compounds that cause hangover, right? So if you can reduce some of these side-to-side, all the compounds that are in there, obviously alcohol is involved, or ethanol, if you will. But a lot of these other compounds really what causes the nasty hangover.

So we should be just drinking Everclear. As a matter of fact, Everclear vodka gin is fairly pure, but that's also why we use vodka in our studies because it's a fairly pure substance, as in pure in ethanol, have very little methanol content. So a lot of people, they claim whether this is true or not that they're hungover, they feel like they're dehydrated, and that's really what's making them hungover, which I don't fully believe at all, but does hydration play into any of this stuff? Absolutely.

I mean, so hydration, obviously, if you are indeed dehydrated, which you can become, then obviously that could affect performance. And certainly it can affect how you feel and perception. Although sometimes people feel really bad, but they'll perform really well. So that doesn't always go. Same thing we've seen many times.

People will be very sore, yet their performance is not affected at all. The maximal power, maximal strength is exactly the same. It does reduce the fun, though. That is true. It reduces the fun. It might. So you said it's easy to get the rats drunk. That's not the hard part.

No. But the general complaint about any animal model research is that the volume, whether we're talking antioxidants or supplements or pharmaceuticals, that we have to give the rats is usually so much higher than a normal human would consume them, right? So how much are you giving the rats? And then when the actual humans come into your lab, are they getting like a beer post-workout? Are they getting like a 12-er? Like what are we doing?

Okay, so let's take a break and then we'll get into that. Okay. And we're back with Jacob. We're in Vegas. We're in back with Jacob. We're in Vegas. We're in a hotel room. We're drinking some IPAs. And what are you guys having? Some brown ales.

Some brown ales? Yeah. Talking about drinking, recovery, strength training. And I think we, what was the question we left with? Well, I basically just wanted to get an idea of how much you're giving these people. So when you're saying that it harms endurance and doesn't harm performance, is that because they had 19 beers afterwards or they have one shot of vodka? Right.

So obviously the amount of alcohol you take is very important for determining the outcomes that happen. And you have the studies where they have a fairly low dose. They don't seem to find much of an effect with the strength, whereas with endurance performance, drinking before or during does appear to have, even a low dose of alcohol, does appear to have a reduction in performance. Largely, it seems to me to be due to glucose utilization being reduced, which obviously in long-term, 60-minute endurance type exercise is quite important. I could explain that. Now the studies we do, we give people a dose based on their lean body mass.

But for a reference male or standard size male, it's somewhere between six and eight drinks. But they get it in ten minutes. Say that last word again? Six to eight drinks in ten minutes. In ten minutes. Now, it's a standard drink, so it's not six to eight, you know, beers. But it is similar. No, they're taking shots.

Shots of vodka. Shots of vodka, yes. Six days shots of vodka in ten minutes. That is correct. And then what are they doing after that? After that, they hang out. Yeah. So this is after the workout.

So we have them work out first. They do this and then they wait in the lab, depending on if we're taking muscle samples, blood samples, whatever it is. We have another study coming up where we're going to do similar dose, but they're going to do it at night. And then they're going to come back in and we're going to test them in the morning to look at and try and see if we can tease down some more of these effects that are on endurance

training and specifically look at is it in fact glucose utilization or is it something else? Are you playing music? Dancing going on? We've got a strobe light going. Video games? Depending on the study a little bit, but generally speaking, we have Netflix and we have a big screen TV.

So they watch TV. They can do homework if they're able to. They can play on their computer. They can't sleep, but they have to be awake. So six to eight shots is considered low dose? No, that's considered moderate to high dose. So low dose would probably be about three to four shots. Something like that.

That's still pumping. Yeah. Six to Six dates a lot. Again, remember, it's not the same shot you get at the bar necessarily, right? So it's a reference shot. But it's somewhat similar. And we do get people legally drunk. I mean, that's part of it. Or you can't drive.

So generally our goal is to get people to 0.12 blood alcohol level, and we usually hit that pretty well. And remember, 0.08 is the legal limit for driving and you're definitely impaired when you're at, they're not sloshed or, but they're definitely impaired at that level. So when you're testing hormones specifically, what are you guys looking at and what are the results? So what we've looked at with hormones, we've largely looked at, well we've looked at a

variety of hormones, but testosterone seems to be the one that has the biggest effect. We've looked at total testosterone, free testosterone, which is the biologically active version of testosterone. And there we've seen actually an interesting phenomenon that was counter to what we're expecting to see. So we see in men a big rise right after exercise, what you'd expect. We haven't given them alcohol yet. They just exercised. Everything is fine. We give them the large bolus of alcohol.

In the non-alcohol condition, so a normal condition, it comes back down to baseline, and generally it goes right below baseline and stays there for several hours. In the alcohol condition, about an hour in, testosterone starts going up, and going up really high, as in higher than it was post-exercise.

So that was really surprising because we were expecting it to go lower than the other condition. And that really perplexed us. So that's why we moved on into looking at the antigen receptor. What we're thinking is happening, because antigen receptor is downregulated, is maybe that the feedback is not working properly or testosterone is being put out there, but the receptor is not taking it up. So it's not being used. It's not being taken up.

So, yeah, you have more testosterone floating around, but if it's not signaling inside the muscle, it doesn't really do you any good. It's not bioavailable. Right. It's not bioavailable or it's not going into the DNA to do the signal, which is what testosterone reads. The receptor binds to DNA to cause protein or initiate the signal for protein. Got you.

So on the surface, it kind of sounds like a good thing because testosterone is going to up and up and up, but that's only in your blood. That's not in the muscle cells. Right. We haven't measured it in the muscle, but also we've seen performances reduced. We've seen all these other things are down in the muscle that are all affected by testosterone. So it does seem that even though it's up in circulation, it's not beneficial. When at first this study came out, yeah, reading some of these blogs, oh, alcohol, the new

recovery drink. Yeah, yeah. I remember reading that, reading alcohol creates testosterone boost. And I was like, interesting. And I was like, well, it doesn't feel good the next day, but maybe three, four, five days later. Yeah. But I think that's people that read the first know, the first part of the paper and forgot to

read the rest of it because we do it in, you know, discussion, go into, you know. That would never happen. No. I'm not sure. Yeah, exactly. You know, you got to read the whole paper through, right, because we give some context at the end where we're kind of dealing with why we don't think this is necessarily a positive. Now, it could be, but I don't think it is.

When someone wants to believe something, they're just like, oh, yeah, definitely. I got it. Okay, drink up. I know what I want to believe. I'm going to find the data to support it. Exactly. But so be it. We've looked at a variety of other hormones.

They don't seem to be affected as much. It seems to be really testosterone. And it makes sense because testosterone, even in the absence of exercise, is affected by alcohol. And we know that chronically reduced, and that's why we thought it was going to be higher. Because in alcoholics, you have chronic reduction, like hypogonadism, reduction in testosterone. That's why we expected to see that. And even when you give a bolus of alcohol, generally, to a person in the absence of exercise, you see a reduction in testosterone. So it's interesting when you put the two together that have opposite effects.

You get this sort of weird, weird, weird increase that I can't explain other than something going on with the antigen receptor. So a lot of people, once they get out of their 20s and their 30s and 40s, you know, they drink three or four beers and they wake up the next day and they're like, man, I didn't used to feel like this. Like I'm so hungover. This never would have happened to me in college. That's me. Yeah. Have you found differences with different age groups?

Like younger people tend to tolerate alcohol better than older people with relative to We haven't looked at that. What's probably going on is also as you age, you probably don't drink as often. So just like with exercise, if you go do deadlifts every two weeks, you're going to be sore every two weeks, right? But if you deadlift three, four times a week, maybe that's a little over the top, but you're not going to get a sore. So it's probably the same thing because part of you adapts to drinking alcohol.

Your liver adapts to drinking alcohol, increases alcohol dehydrogenase, et cetera. So it's probably a training effect. So you've got to keep it going. Keep our conditioning up. Exactly. Now, again, that's not a scientific fact. Sounds like science. You're a doctor.

But that's true. So trust me. Whatever he says. Yeah, exactly. That's what I think is going on there. When you're an undergrad, you learn that there's four macronutrients, right? Fat, carbohydrate, protein. And alcohol is the fourth macronutrient, right?

Yeah. But what we're always taught undergrad is, but you can't metabolize it into energy. So is that true? How does alcohol metabolism in the form of ethanol work? And can you make energy out of that? But what we're always taught in undergrad is you can't metabolize it into energy. Is that true? How does alcohol metabolism in the form of ethanol work? Can you make energy out of that? Well, you do make energy out of it. It's just probably not energy you're going to be used for motor or movement.

So because it gets metabolized in the liver, it does produce or has seven calories, so it has almost as much as fat. Right. But the muscles do not use it as a fuel. So it's not going to, it's not a great fuel, right? It goes to the liver. Obviously, those calories eventually gets turned into something else, but it's not going to work.

It's a long process, a slow process. It's not going to help you during exercise. And if you're doing it for calories, well, just take the calories you need, like carbohydrate or fat or whatever, just depending on what you're doing. Right, because one of the things we were talking about before is, I think you brought it up, Mike, is the very common thing when people finish like a marathon or a hard workout, they're like, have a beer because it has all the carbs in it, have a big tall beer. So is that going to help or is that enough carbs or what?

Well, that's a good question. I mean, it's possible that the carbs in there will be beneficial. The amount of alcohol is probably not enough that it's an issue. So I get these questions a lot. Well, what should I do? How much should I drink? Generally, I don't ever advise people to not drink at all because that generally doesn't work. We've tried that, you know. Right. So usually the point is, and what we're sort of trying to show is, well, if you just drink less, drink a little bit less,

maybe separate it from your workout you'll be okay doesn't mean you can't have a couple of beers maybe just don't have 10 beers right after a workout okay and again depending on what type of beers you drink because some of them have a lot more alcohol content than others do right but i don't think there's anything wrong with having it for your drinks having a few drinks is fine now if you're training for the olympics you might can fail maybe not although maybe you do need it to de-stress on occasion but most recreational athletes or even elite athletes on occasion i think it's okay again moderation is really the key moderation is the key and then i separating it in my belief from from your workout so don't they actually have this term called drunkorexia where people go to the gym right before they go out to burn off the amount of calories that they're going to go out and

drink. Drunkorexia. Drunkorexia is a term that's been coined for that. Oh, wow. So. That's a disease. Well, yeah, I mean, if you do it excessively, right, it could be that if you, I have to go to the gym to do this, I have to burn these calories, it could actually be a problem, right?

I definitely know certain subcultures where that's really popular. Yeah. Like in certain cities, that's super common. So you get off work on Friday, hit the gym really hard, and then you go and go to the bar. Exactly. Now again, it depends on what you're doing. If you are going to go to the gym, probably doing an endurance type exercise is going

to be better or have less effect because you don't have as much muscle damage to recover from. That being said, alcohol also impacts glycogen resynthesis. But if you're doing a half hour run, glycogen storage is not your concern. Unless you're doing a marathon, you're not going to run out of glycogen. So it's not really an issue. Is there any research on how alcohol, chronic alcohol use affects soft tissue structures, joints, tendons, ligaments, et cetera? There might be, I'm not, that's not stuff I've looked into because I mainly look at the muscle tissue

and the endocrine system. I would be surprised if there's not, but I'm not aware of it. Okay. Jacob, you're from Denmark. That's correct. What brought you from there to America and why did you choose to study alcohol?

So I moved to the U.S. because my girlfriend at the time, who turned out to be my wife, is American. So it's one of those classic stories, follow the girl. Yeah. And the reason I actually got interested in alcohol was my advisor doing my master's degree, Perry Cazares, that was his interest area. So I picked up on that, and I was like, you know, this is really interesting. So I did my master's thesis, and actually when we got the rats drunk was for my master's thesis. That is so much cooler than most people's master's degrees. Also a lot more involved.

So that's kind of how I got in. But the reason I find it interesting, one, alcohol use is high among athletes, high among recreational users, and people that just physically act and consistently drink more. These large national surveys, it's very clear. But also alcohol affects a lot of the same pathways,

systems, tissues that we care about with exercise that we look at or investigate with exercise and often in the opposite direction. So if you have something that increases, something that decreases, you put the two together, what happens? That's kind of where my interest is. What wins out, right? Are you better off doing one or the other, doing them together? How do you do it and what is the outcome from it?

Like I said, maybe you're better off not going to the gym than then which is odd advice to give from an exercise guy right don't go to the gym but maybe you're better off going to the gym the next day or or skipping it all together so you were suggesting earlier that alcohol has more of an effect on endurance sports do you know if there's any research on how alcohol specifically specifically affects the cardiovascular system you know heart lungs respiration, et cetera? There's quite a bit of research on that side as well, but it's all from a health perspective with regard to how it affects exercise.

There's very little. We know that it reduces, it's at glucose oxidation rate. It reduces performance in these long, like 60 minute time trials or even a five minute time trial now of course the problem was some of these studies were done a while ago the earliest i found is a study from 49 and they gave people cocaine they gave people alcohol they gave people strychnine and they're one of the strychnines that's a rat poison so they gave

people all kind of different things and i looked at how that affected performance. What? Mine just perked up. What? So sometimes it's hard to, you know, okay, so what they did 70 or so years ago when methods weren't quite as good as they are today, how do you interpret that? Other studies, they let people drink ad libitum, one of the really big sort of similar studies, but they had people, everyone drinking somewhere,

but some drank five drinks, some drank 20 drinks. Cause they're allowed to drink. Cause they just, right. They had, here's an open bar, you drink, and then we'll come back tomorrow and we'll test you. Right? So, so some of those are where they have a lot of variability.

We try to really keep things very controlled with one amount of, or one dose of alcohol. Obviously you need, we need to be doing dose responses as well with more and less than what we have, the timing, what happens when you combine it with carbohydrates, antioxidants, orange juice, whatever it is that you're using. What happens if you take a protein bolus with it? There's a study on that showing that if you take a large amount of protein with your alcohol, alcohol reduces the effect of the protein or the amount of protein synthesis

you get from the protein. But if you take the, but it still is more than what you get from alcohol without protein. So if you are drinking alcohol, other advice could be make sure you get a bolus of protein to go with it. So you should just have dinner, drink a beer with dinner, and that's way better than just going out and drinking? Yeah, or just drink white Russians, you know. That's another way to go.

I have no idea. beer with dinner and that's way better than just going out and drinking. Yeah, or just drink white Russians, you know. That's another way to go. I've got some ideas for other substances you could use in your studies. Oh, I knew this was coming. What are you looking to study next? So, well, we're studying quite a bit. Again, we're looking at alcohol right now. We're doing a set of projects looking at 24-hour protein synthesis. Actually, that study is a doctoral student study that's funded by the NSCA.

Oh, very nice. Looking at 24-hour protein synthesis and some more trying to better understand this signaling pathway that's involved. So what that means is how much that you're growing or building protein up to 24 hours. Right, so how much protein you're building in the 24 hours after exercise.

Right. Whereas a lot of the studies have done so far don't look for six hours. Right hours or from two to eight hours. Well, we know that recovery continues on, you know, 24 and beyond 24 hours. So we're trying to look at it a little bit longer time. Do you have any sort of index in terms of how hung over they are?

So in other words, is there a relationship between the people who show up and say, Oh, I'm super hung over or the ones who are like are like oh i'm not so bad or is it completely arbitrary we don't measure that because it is a very subjective fatal flaw yeah yeah except except uh i do bobsies and all these people the next day and they don't seem to be hungover so what college kids man six to eight drinks yeah because we drank more than that in order to achieve hangover back in the day.

Yeah, that's fair enough. That's a warm-up probably back in college. Yeah, well, you know, we would have been really good subjects when we were in college. Well, it's not too late, people. I got it set up in my room, okay?

I can make this your show. He said you were going to come give me some muscle sample. That was the deal. I had biopsied him before. Okay, well, let's do it. That's a true story. I was his first muscle biopsy.

Well, there you go. Brave man. Oh, yeah. Popped his cherry. I'm better now. You're more gentle? I'm so much more gentle. I just caress it right in.

Nice. Yeah, so what I'm getting from this overall is alcohol may not be as bad as we think it is. And it depends on how we're doing it, and we need to compartmentalize it from our training. And I'm also hearing there's not really a lot of benefits to it, aside from maybe some psychological. Right. There might be some psychological piece. I don't think there's benefits. Certainly, whatever you would get, maybe from a beer you could get in another way

where you wouldn't have any of the negative, potential negative effects. Or cannabis. It could be, we haven't looked at that yet, but now that it's becoming legal, that could be something else to look at, although we're in Texas, so it'll be a while before that's legal in Texas.

I'm just going to come out and say, we'll be the last holdout, I'm pretty sure, but we'll come to Vegas and do some studies. But yeah, it's really the amount that you're drinking when you're drinking it. And just if you moderate your alcohol intake, it probably does not have as detrimental an effect as a lot of people think it is or does.

Yeah, a few drinks is fine. Now, if you have three, four drinks every day, that's a problem because now you're going to be over-consuming. But if once or twice a week you have a couple of drinks should be should be perfectly fine for most people i also thought it was really interesting that that it was more detrimental for the endurance sports than the strength sports i didn't know that before yeah well again depends on when you look at it so for recovery standpoint it has more impact on strength and power because strength and power doesn't recover as fast with alcohol but when you're looking at sort of acute,

like we're going to go lift now, we just had a beer, no problem. We're going to go run, our performance might be slightly reduced. Gotcha, okay. So it really depends. It's one of these you have to think of the context. When do you drink? Before, during, or after exercise? How much did you drink? What type of exercise are you doing?

And all those things, the answer to each one of those different combinations is going to be different. I thought it was really interesting about the fiber type specificity. You know, so if you have more slow twitch or fast twitch, you're more, you may be more or less likely inclined. Do you have any idea why, like mechanism, what in the heck? What's going on? No, other than type 2 fibers generally are much more finicky.

If you look at Cushing's syndrome, diabetes, a lot of other diseases, type 2 fibers are affected and downregulated and seem to just be easily affected. Whereas type 1 fibers are little tanks. They're really, really hard to mess with them. So it seems to be consistent across a lot of diseases and it is consistent around the country. The study that looked at that looked at populations all over Africa, Asia, Europe, America, and it seems to be very consistent. But chronic alcohol abuse, again, we're talking chronic alcohol abuse,

you have down regulation type two fibers. Okay, I have one more question. I'm sorry, but I just remembered this. This is actually my most interesting question. How hard was this to get approved by the IRB to do these alcohol studies and give college kids eight shots of vodka after a workout? Actually, it's not too... Because I'm on the IRB, and I would sign away, like, go ahead. We don't have any problems with that.

But again, we have a lot of safeguards in place. We measure their breath alcohol every 20 minutes. We keep them around until they are back down to zero we don't let them drive away we take their keys when they come they have to have someone come pick them up yeah so we have a lot of safeguards in place and honestly we have not had a single issue we also tell them if you leave we're going to call the cops we're going to come track you yeah i'm nice i'm serious and that's the university we have our own police force so it's not too bad but again

we haven't had a single person do this because it's not like you're at a club there's a party there's something going on

there's one person sitting there drinking everyone else it's a sterile environment like being at your doctor's office

there's no trouble to be had how long does it take them to get back to zero? between 5 and 7 hours wow there you go

Jacob if people want to read your research or studies or anything like that, where should they go? So, obviously, they can go to PubMed and look me up under Vingren. I'm the only person with that other than a Swedish dentist. So, if you find something with dentistry, it's not me. Everything else under my name, V-I-N-G-R-E-N, is me. You can also go to our laboratory website, the Applied Physiology Laboratory at the University of North Texas.

Shows what we do, has overview of our lab, also has opportunities we have in our lab both for... Are you looking for grad students and stuff like that? We're looking for grad students and we have funding for grad students and there's some information there about that. Doc students? You can see our doc students and master students. See the equipment we have.

We have a very nice and well-equipped labs. And do you provide free vodka for all the grad students? We do. My doc student who's here. This has got very big for applicants. Yeah, she just had to go stock up our lab. So she went and bought eight half-gallon bottles of vodka the other day. So she got quite a few stares when she walked into the liquor store and just cleaned them

out of their big bottles. That's awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, that was super interesting. You're welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Yeah. You bet.