How to combine alcohol and exercise – FURFUR
How to combine alcohol and sports: Doctors and sports instructors answer
We've already tried to figure out how to fight and dance while drunk. This time FURFUR decided to go even further and find out if it is possible to combine business with pleasure, namely alcohol and physical activity. Will alcoholic beverages help you break sports records, increase endurance and reduce fatigue? FURFUR decided to ask these and other questions to experts from the field of medicine and sports and give some useful advice to especially desperate drinkers.
Alcohol, along with other psychotropic substances, has been and remains the main taboo for professional athletes. Why? The fact is that the mechanism of action of alcohol inevitably leads to such unpleasant symptoms as dehydration, a decrease in the reaction rate and a deterioration in coordination. Ethanol, or ethyl alcohol, contained in alcoholic beverages, is a potent substance that enters the bloodstream within a minute after consumption. Red blood cells begin to stick together and, getting into the brain, cause hypoxia, that is, oxygen starvation. It is the lack of oxygen in the brain that we perceive as a state of intoxication. However, after a few hours, euphoria is replaced by extremely unpleasant symptoms, which, as practice shows, do not stop many desperate lovers of physical culture.
Nevertheless, alcohol still found a place in the field of professional sports. In the Shooting Federation, alcohol is a mandatory component of doping control. In small quantities, it reduces hand tremor and is therefore sometimes used to improve shooting accuracy. In addition, there has long been a debate about recovery after running with the help of beer. But much more often you have to combine alcohol and sports activities in everyday life. Each of us at least once in a drunken stupor came up with the idea to pull up on the horizontal bar, sit on a bicycle or just run through the forest. It is understandable: alcohol will make even the most frail alcoholic feel like an omnipotent Hercules.
Igor Konstantinovich Nezhdanov
psychiatrist-narcologist, director
Marketing of Dr. Isaev's Clinic
Theoretically, alcohol can be used as doping in extreme sports where the athlete is under extreme stress, such as skydiving. Alcohol acts as a tranquilizer, or, more simply, a sedative, and also increases the pain threshold. That is, a drunk person experiences less pain than a sober one. However, it is worth remembering that alcohol is not a stimulant, it does not increase endurance, and also acts depressingly on the central nervous system.
In my opinion, it makes no sense to use alcohol in the field of sports. There are other, more effective dopings.Alcohol in sports is, rather, antidoping, harm from it more than good. If a person decides to drink before training, it should be ready for the fact that during training it will be rosordinated, is overly relaxed, the reaction is reduced. Alcohol is a disorganisant beginning that no athlete in the right mind will not use in order to improve their sports achievements.
For an athlete, the use of any psychotropic substance means relaxation only for a period of time, however, I repeat, this will result in the depletion of the central nervous system. Athletes are satisfied at the expense of endorphins in a sober state. They do not need alcohol or other psychoactive substance to relax. Speaking about drunkenness in sports, it is only possible to mention those professional athletes who have already reached a peak in their careers and, becoming unclaimed, start to drink alcohol regularly.
Dmitry Vladimirovich Vashkin
doctor psychiatrist narcologist, organizer
Health, Chief Doctor Marshak Clinic
The fact that alcohol can be doping is a myth. It is believed that a glass of brandy increases the capacity of the body, muscular tone. Even if alcohol has a positive effect on the body, it is very brief. Alcohol briefly gives the feeling that you can do everything. However, in fact it is just self-deception, and a person has to pay a sharp decline.
Alcohol, even in minor quantities, inhibits the central nervous system, since ethanol in its structure is a toxic substance for the body. His splitting involves a violation of coordination, attention, reducing the activity of the muscular system. The muscle tone is reduced – for example, being drunk, a person raises his hand slower than in a sober state.
If we talk about extreme sports, then without exception, professional climbers strictly observe the dry law. The change in height causes a pressure reduction, the lack of oxygen in the brain appears. Therefore, there can be no speech about alcohol. Nothing, except for increased pressure, violation of perception and artificially caused by hypoxia cerebral cells, alcohol use will not give.
Alcohol really increases pain threshold. However, sports such as boxing or any other types of struggle, which implies some pain disturbances, also imply the clarity of movements, coordination. Therefore, there is simply no sense in alcohol. The fact that the athlete will not feel pain, will not make it a winner of the competition.
