Ktmartin

I am sure that drinking alcohol and cycling don't go together but, if you're a college kid and drink on occasion what is the "best" thing to drink that will effect your cycling the least. Thanks

Also, Does smokeless tobacco effect your endurance or cycling in any way?

Kyle

Oops, I notice the typo in the title but the edit function won't let you correct the title.

forensicchemist

Not exactly sure what you mean by "effecting you the least"....if you mean what gives the least hangover....I recommend clear alcohol like vodka. Bourbon or scotch tend to create larger hangovers due to the other compounds present....

mark

jrennie

[QUOTE=Ktmartin]

Also, Does smokeless tobacco effect your endurance or cycling in any way?

[QUOTE]

It is harder to take air in when you lips fall off or are stuffed like a squirl(gee can you guess I am not fond of the chew) but I think the question would be the effects of nicotine on the system. Danno??

DannoXYZ 

I haven't studied any smoking or nicotine effects on cycling yet. I should though, I suspect there may be some combinations that might yield a performance-enhancing product . The effects of nicotine on the dopamine pathway in the brain should actually be very similar to the endorphin rush we get from exercise. However, you don't get the benefits of the aerobic and physical training.

I do know from personal experience the effects of alcohol though. ALL alcoholic drinks have the same effect and doesn't matter what you drink. It will dehydrate you, leeches vitamins and nutrients from your body and and cause hang-overs. If you're gonna drink you want to get the least amount of ethanol in you and make sure you wash it down with lots of water to combat the diuretic effects. That means pounding 15 beers is better than taking 15 shots, because you're getting more water and you can't drink more beers once your belly's full. But you can pound even more shots until your BAC gets to toxic levels.

Also recovery-rates from exercise are slower with drinking. You can't improve your fitness as fast (who wants to go on a ride when you've got a splitting migraine and a hangover? ). There's issues of cardio myopathy which undoes any beneficial effects of aerobic exercise. There's risks of hepatitis, impotence, sleeping-disorders, wet-brain syndrome, cirrhosis of liver, Mallory-Weiss tears of your esophagus (causes lots of coughing and vomiting).

Basically, there's is no possible way that alcohol can be neutral to your bike training; it will always have a detrimental effect. It just comes down to a matter of balance, how fast do you want to improve your fitness vs. how much you want to drink. Try sticking to the low alcohol-content beers like Clausthaler, Haake Beck, Kaliber, Buckler, O'doul's, Warsteiner, etc. Stay away from the hard-liquors and just moderate your drinking to 1-2 max a night and you should be OK.

I'm actually am researching some effects of diet-sodas on cycling physiology right now. The phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methanol in stuff like aspartame actually break down into formaldehyde and formic acid. Both of which are toxic to humans. I'm trying to figure out at what point of consumption diet-sodas can actually be detrimental to exercise. Actually, drinking a high-GI carb-source like a normal soda might actually be better for recovery after exercise than a diet one. Then again, we get into the unbalanced sugar with HFCS...

natelutkjohn

It's the only hangover cure that actualy works if you ask me. I always go for a ride the day after or else i tend to feel like crap the rest of the day. ALthough it's not a super fast fitness ride mind you, just a ride to sweat out the crap for as long as i can handle.

pinky

Hehe Saturday and Sunday morning hangover rides are ritual for me at school (well lately they've been hungover cross races). Honestly I've done better coming off full benders then when I've slept well. Me thinks the adrenaline from a night of drinking and promiscuity works better in 45 and hour long races than rest and hydration.

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As You Like It

Pinky--it could be a mental thing, too. Like I've had some of my best times running and riding when the weather has been just disgusting--rain, wind, and I have too many hills to count. Because I feel like the "chips are stacked against me," I exert myself that much harder to cope. My all-time best cross-country run was on a course that was brutally hilly. All of the other girls on the team had their worst runs of the season that day, and I had my best.

Maybe you're laying on more effort on your hungover rides than you would on a normal ride in order to compensate for your impaired state!

Enthalpic

Add b vit complex (plus c) and a fish oil for boozing.

sestivers

I don't advocate this, but one of my best running races was the morning after partying pretty hard...

But I have never had a hangover (even after several drinks). I'm not sure how I would have performed if I had not drank.

j.foster

I'm guessing it's related to the diuretic effects of alcohol consumption but after a night of lots of drinking and fluid loss i swear by drinking one of my go electrolyte replacement drinks, then the same in the morning and it seems to limit the hangover to a point.

Ktmartin

I was mainly just wondering if I should avoid drinks with carbonation and try to drink wine or something. Doesn't carbonation have an effect on lung capactiy/endurance?

DannoXYZ 

Nah, the amount of carbonation in a soda/beer is about as much as you generate in a single breath, not a big deal compared to the other stuff in there..

trmcgeehan

Nicotine may raise your blood pressure. When I was using smokeless tobacco, my bp went from 140/80 to 155/90. I quit that stuff.

Phatman

I heart beer.

but I will give you a college party tip. take the number of beers that it takes you to puke. If you are a smooth kinda person, divide that number by 2. If you are not a smooth person, divide that number by 3. You know who you are. got it? good. this is the number of beers you can still drink and be somewhat able to pick up chicks. I know my limit...its 5.

generally, this knowledge keeps me from drinking too excessivly at parties. It has probably helped my training too.

srrs

the most effective way i've found to drink if i'm cycling the next day is to do shots of relatively high-quality vodka. even though you get the nasty effects of the alcohol itself, you don't have the added burden of any of the other stuff in beer, wine, mixed drinks, or even impurities in the liquor itself. it doesn't help much, though. if you have an important ride, i'd stick to water or club soda.

also, i too think that cycling is a great hangover cure. when i used to drink, i'd wake up after 5 hours of passed-out sleep, and if i drank a ton of water and rode 20 miles i felt a lot better for the rest of the day than if i tried to go back to sleep. something about the achy zoned-out quality of my sleep deprived hangover made it easy to just keep those legs moving without thinking.

whitemax

Ive often wondered what the effects of my drinking on my fitness have been. I drink no less than 4 beers per night and have done so for the last 25 years. Obviously this is not causing a hangover and I feel fine in the moring but I do wonder what if any effect there is on endurance and recovery rates.

Phatman

4 beers every night is a lot of beers. if nothing else, you'd probably lose some weight if you cut down to just one or two.

mcoine

there's a lot more to picking up chicks than how many beers you drink.

anyway, guiness stout draught will not cause a hangover no matter how many you drink.

mcoine

oh and guiness draught is "carbonated" with nitrogen gas, not co2.

spunky

That's not entirely accurate. Co2 is the result of the fermentation process itself....yeast eating the sugars gives off co2. At the tap, co2 is often used to pressurize the tap to draw the beer from the keg. Sometimes nitrogen is used instead of a co2 tap....hence the "widget" that rattles in your can of Guiness is filled with nitrogen. Nitrogen serves to counteract much of the natural co2 in the beer creating a smoother finish. Traditionally, a beer used to be pulled by a hand pump at the tap with no pressurization at all. Some pubs still do that.

xyz

I'd be real carefull with that. Maybe a one hour race isn't enough but you can really hurt yourself doing very hard efforts after drinking. Maybe it also depends on your definition of "bender". A six pack might be a "bender" to some people.

Sinfield

The more ****faced I get the night before, the better I perform in athletic events. My best ever lacrosse game was played after 10 hours of straight drinking. My teamates had to carry my into the van and then we had to drive four hours to the game with all the windows open because I reeked of booze so bad. Wound up scoring seven goals and running harder than anyone else on the team.

I don't party that hard anymore, and haven't for several years but I do still find that I work harder when I'm trying to burn off a hangover.

zowie

www.drunkard.com

The chat boards should be able to answer any of your questions (as long as you don't care about the accuracy of the answer).