I have a quick question I’m sure you’ve heard many times, however I’m having trouble finding a good answer (besides the fact that it’s not recommended). I’m 23 yrs. old and work out on average 3 or 4 days a week (mostly weight training with some cardio) and thinking about purchasing some creatine to help out my recovery time, however I also consume roughly 12 to 15 drinks of alcohol (on average) per week (I don’t consider myself an alcoholic, I just like to go out to the bar once in a while, usually just weekends). My questions are: what negative effects will I experience from this combination, should I even bother starting creatine with my unhealthy drinking habit, and finally do you recommend any other forms of supplements that would better suit my lifestyle. Thanks for your time, Bryan
Not preaching, dude, just letting you know: 14 drinks per week IS the cutoff point between “social drinking” and alcoholism. And if you are consuming this all on the weekend, 6-8 drinks per night can certainly push you into a BAC which will ruin your life if you get caught driving. Trust me, your body feel much better if you are able to cut down from this amount. We all already are well aware of the physical damage of alcohol, at alcoholic intake, right?
Say bye-bye to your T-levels and ability to properly recovery from training! Not to mention that booze has been proven to go right to your gut. “Beer Gut” us real. Creatine is the least of your worries.
Swale, I’m not sure of your credentials here, so pardon me if I sound patronizing here, but you’re dead wrong. There is not “magic number” that’s a cutoff for alcoholism versus social drinking. The criteria is major impairment is everyday life, occupation, family, social, etc. matters. People could meet that criteria with fewer drinks or many, many more than that. Clinical judgement is always preferred over a rigid, set number that’s got no basis in reality.
You are way off here dude. I’m not trying to brag about this, but at the end of last semester i was drinking 5 nights a week and probably averaging 7 drinks a night. Summer came and i had maybe an average of 3 beers a week. I certainly wasn’t an alcoholic, i stopped drinking without any problems or withdrawl. I think you might have been talking about binge drinking, which isn’t the same as alcoholism at all.
i totally argee with DocT. no set-point with alchoholism. if you ‘want’ to drink some beers, yer ok. if you feel you ‘have’ to drink, then you have a problem regardless if it’s 1 beer or 30…
if someone were to drink 1x a week. How many drinks approximatley would be the maximun to drink without hurting your goals.
For once, I was hoping someone could answer a question like this without preaching. Some of us are still in college, where 14 drinks a week is not an inordinate amount. Especially not with all the binge drinking going on these days. Yes, it kills our gains, but we’re young an able to get away with a lot. I’ve still managed to put on 20 lbs. this year. Please take the stupid youngsters into account when answering questions like these. Even if we wanted to escape the drinking atmosphere, for many it would be almost impossible. you’re only young once. I have years to take milk thistle and try and rebuild my damaged liver.
Bottom line. When you consume alcohol you cause damage to your liver, a small amount. When you weight lift you cause damage to your muscles, a small amount. Your body given the choice of repairing your muscle or repairing you liver will choose to repair the liver first. Then the muscles.
You yourself say it is an unhealthy drinking habit. Live is full of choices. Your choice here is to cut back on your driving and help your body achieve high levels of fitness or not.
Best of Luck.
Um, 14 drinks is alcoholism? That’s two glasses of beer or wine a day. I guess 90% of europe is ‘officially’ alcholoic.
as usual you got no helpful replies. i think you have legit answer. intuitively i feel like i pissed out all my creatin one time whne i went out to drink while takin it. i really dont know.
If you’re going to take creatine while drinking make sure you get a lot of water in you. Drinking alcohol deydrates you and when taking creatine you need lots of water. As far as the negative effects regarding your workouts it’s very individual. Me and by buddies have been binge drinking almost every weekend for years. And if you look at these guys you’d swear they’re all juiced up. They push more wieght in the gym then most juiced up guys and they’re always horny and get hard when the wind blows.(I can’t figure it out, maybe high T men). And by the way were not young guys. Me on the other hand, it kills my strenghth levels. When I want to get in shape for a vacation or the summer and I quit drinking and smoking for about 8 weeks, I put on about 5lbs of lean mass and all my major excercises go up about 20 lbs. It’s definetly not good for building muscle, so you just got to weigh the good to the bad depending on how it affects you. I can party moderately and still make progress. If I drink too much and start losing size and strength I slow down the partying.
Don’t give me any it’s-college-and-I-can’t-escape-the-drinking BS. I went through 4 years of college, and you can count the number of alcoholic drinks I’ve had on your two hands.
I agree. The “I’m in college” is a pussy’s excuse. What, they require binge drinking now to get a degree? Just say that you like to get drunk and that drunk girls are easy. Don’t cop with “I’m in college”. Be honest.
Rant over. BTW, I did see a study once on college drinkers and those that do a lot of partying have a much lower chance of graduating. So it appears that much of the binge drinking crowd are freshmen who don’t make senior. I just hate that all college students are judged by these sheep.
I didn’t mean to suggest a “magic number”, but rather, in this culture, MORE THAN two drinks per day, averaged out over a weak, is alcoholism. If you MUST have that much. Your advice that less than that may be so as well is well taken. Indeed, if someone only drank heavily one night per week, and it damaged their life, but continued to do so, they’d be there as well. We are indeed discussing alcoholic intake from a perspective of its effects on an individual’s (and their family, friends, fellow workers, etc.) life, not in terms of physical tolerance, dependence, etc. Don’t you feel we are much too tolerant of our excesses, including fat intake, etc.? In your “clinical judgement” is having more than 14 per week bad for your health? If a patient puts that down for their number of drinks per week on a medical history form, would you investigate it? BTW, that particular number (with the stress on MORE THAN) came from one of my clinical instructors, a man whose opinion I greatly value, who ran a substance abuse clinic. Also, I respectfully submit you might consider, rather than calling someone “dead wrong” responding instead with “there is more to it than that…”(P.S. I have the credentials).
I say drink more. Anything in life worth doing is worth doing right. Damn mescaline, you think they could make it a little less pure.