alcohol and training

[oceanic_shark]

well i think that drink alcohol not healthy at all and i never drink and go underwater i have some friends are doing that but the most of thim is geting problims eith thay student under water and i think that divers don`t have to drink alcohol before diving at lest 12 hours for to be fit for diving
TAREK

 

[Bill McIntyre]

Sigh.

No one here, and certainly not me, is advocating diving while under the influence of alcohol.

The original question was whether social drinking will affect performance. If I have a couple of glasses of wine, will it affect my diving the next day.

Of course adolphin has constantly tried to enlarge the discussion to drinking and driving, alcoholism, and why we should want to poison ourselves with alcohol, but no one says you should drink a bottle of wine and get in the water immediately.

 

[Walrus]

Hi All,
My thoughts are if you aren't hungover it shouldn't effect your "breathold" too much. The biggest danger would be dehydration, this could make you blackout ealier. It would probably have a greater effect with repetitive diving and spearfishing your energy levels probably won't be very good. Wine is probably the worst for diving, often makes you blocked up, and is more likely to give you a hangover and dehydrate you. As far as having alchohol in your system it shouldn't have that much effect on breathold, but doing a high risk activity while under the influence is of course very dangerous.

My last freediving competition I was really stressed out after the first day. I had 3-4 drinks with dinner that night. The next day I did 2 new PB's with 187m and 184m dynamics in the heat and the final. No drinking doesn't improve your performance, all I'm saying is a few drinks won't ruin your breathold the next day. This would also highly depend on the person, some people are more sensitive to alchohol and get worse hangovers/ ill effects the next day then others.


Cheers,
Wal

 

[adolphin]

Hi Bill ..

Of course adolphin has constantly tried to enlarge the discussion to drinking and driving, alcoholism, and why we should want to poison ourselves with alcohol, but no one says you should drink a bottle of wine and get in the water immediately.

Every time you talk about alcohol as a good thing you turn me on .. it's like talking to Dian Fossey about how good is the taste of Gorilla's meat ..

Now regarding "No one says you should drink a bottle of wine and get in the water immediately" .. I assure you I undertand that no one is saying this, believe me I do, what I was trying to say from my side (that has a relationship with the subject) is that alcohol effect is accumulative, over time it builds up, both the bad and good effects, the bad effects are far more dominant, the assumption is that freedivers are sports men and women who seek a healthy life, therefore it would be part of the best practices of the sport to stay away from any harmful behavior or lifestyle .. now tell me you also understand my point please .. !
have a good morning ..

 

[Pastor]

Is it so wrong for the likes of Bill and myself, our families and freinds to go out and enjoy a quiet drink?

 

[naiad]

No drinking doesn't improve your performance, all I'm saying is a few drinks won't ruin your breathold the next day. This would also highly depend on the person, some people are more sensitive to alchohol and get worse hangovers/ ill effects the next day then others.

That's why I don't drink much alcohol. It affects me badly and if I got drunk every weekend, I would feel ill most of the time.

What a thread :head rofl

Lucia

 

[fcallagy]

Hi Adol,
To take this on a step surely alcohol is only one part or whats bad for your health and your training. I think it depends on how badly you want to be super healthy etc. As you already said coke and fizzy drinks are also bad as is tea coffee sweets salt sugar meat fruit etc. No matter where you look about anything somebody somewhere will claim its bad for your body because !!! Too much cardio training or weight training can also be bad for you. At the end of the day its a personal choice. At the very top level of any physical sport the elite athlethes make sacrifices to try and give them a critical edge. I am no where near that level so if i consume alcohol this weekend its not really going to effect my life so critically that I feel I should abstain. I think the same applies if I eat a load of junk which I do at times or simply don,t train for a while.

 

[naiad]

I think it depends on how badly you want to be super healthy etc. As you already said coke and fizzy drinks are also bad as is tea coffee sweets salt sugar meat fruit etc. No matter where you look about anything somebody somewhere will claim its bad for your body because !!! Too much cardio training or weight training can also be bad for you. At the end of the day its a personal choice.

That's true. If it were proven that freediving has bad effects, would we all give up? Some certainly would, but all? I am much more likely to give up alcohol than freediving, but that's just me.

Lucia

 

[adolphin]

Hi fcallagy ..

Ofcourse most of the things in life would hurt us if we take too much of it, while moderate amounts should not be a problem usualy (except in case of allergy), but we could say this about nutrients, this is not the case with toxic or poisonous substances, we never say that moderate amounts is ok !! ..we never talk in that sense do we .. .. still we can take it (in trace amount) as a medicine, under strict medical supervision (this applies to chemical or radio treatment against cancer for example).
Moreover, the kind of foods you've mentioned could have negative effect over our bodies if taken excessively over long period of time, but any of it doesn't have such a loooong list of dramatic effects on almost every aspect of our bodys vitalities .. alcohol does !
To make you see what toxicity would mean, try eating too much meat or sweats during 24 hour, or drink too much coffee or tea for the same duration .. what could be the ultimate result ? .. abdominal pain, vomiting, or diarrhoea ? .. now concume too much alcohol over 24 hours, what is the ultimate result ? .. death ! .. your body won't take a BAC of 0.50 .. 0.4 will take you into a coma and eventually death .. now this is toxicity, you sould not put alcohol together with food stuff in the same category. Ofcourse I'm talking about Ethanol alcohol, which you could find in wine and other alcohol bevreges .. I'm not talking about other kind of alcohol such as Methyl, Propyl or Butyl alcohol .. those ones kill much faster, in that case it's called poisoning, not toxicity.

Regarding freedivers being sports people, it has nothing to do with world records and competing, it's about freediving itself.. I was talking about the nature of the sport which requires high levels of fitness and conditioning .. even if you want to do it for recreation, safety in freediving requires commiting yourself to a healthy lifestyle .. coz you don't want to blackout somewhere underwater not knowing why ( well even if you know, it won't help that much .. ) .. you want to minimize this possibility .. alcohol is not a good choice here.
Have a nice day .. and .. dive safe all .. :inlove

 

[Walrus]

If you really think about it pretty much everything you do is bad for you. You can get cancer from using a cell phone or sitting behind a computer screen. There is a risk in just driving your car to work. The only way to be really safe is to stay in bed and eat raw foods and just drink water right ?
Well I'd rather enjoy my life, if I die a few years earlier so be it. :t

Cheers,
Wal

 

[fcallagy]

Same point of view Wal,
Going back to what i said earlier it would be interesting how many top level sports people don,t drink at all or reduce their intake. I don't think that many would have a skipful of drink and then expect to perform well the next day. If I am diving either free or scuba I would always take it easier as it does dehydrate you and predisposes you to the bends with scuba at least. I have heard it said that the party after some freediving comps goes a bit mental because a load of people suddenly go on the batter after months off the beer and are pretty tired after the comp.

 

[Bill McIntyre]

what I was trying to say from my side (that has a relationship with the subject) is that alcohol effect is accumulative, over time it builds up, both the bad and good effects, the bad effects are far more dominant, the assumption is that freedivers are sports men and women who seek a healthy life, therefore it would be part of the best practices of the sport to stay away from any harmful behavior or lifestyle .. now tell me you also understand my point please .. !
have a good morning ..

I am not aware of any evidence that bad effects of moderate alcohol consumption are cumulative.

In any case, as others have said, there are many other things we do and things we consume that are bad for us. For instance, eating a lot of saturated fats or trans-fats has definitely been shown to have a deleterious effect, and its cumulative. Simply overeating causes body weight to increase with a very definite cumulative effect. Why aren't you crusading against high cholestorol levels or obesity? There are all sorts of harmful behaviors and lifestyles, and I believe that many of them are pose more danger than a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.

 

[DeepThought]

[ame="http://www.metacafe.com/watch/90957/drunk_animals/"]Drunk Animals Video[/ame]

 

[Pastor]

MMMMMMM fermenting fruit Gods own gift

 

[adolphin]

We all know that alcohol is not a thing that we need to think about it pretty much in order to know that it is pretty bad for us .. .. yes, if we think pretty much about what's bad for us then some of us might conclude that every thing is bad for him/her, but then he/she would find out that it's wrong for sure, coz this leads him/her not to do anything, which leads to death, while knowing that there are things which are realy bad for us doesn't kill us, it makes us live a healthier life, now this is big difference for sure ..

Highlite this : " alcohol .. we .. pretty much .. know .. is pretty bad "
this is a fact for sure.

 

[adolphin]

Bill ..
Yes,

eating a lot of saturated fats or trans-fats has definitely been shown to have a deleterious effect

.. now tell me please, are you saying that although eating alot of saturated fats is very bad, but you suggest that people need to keep doing it? .. if not then you agree with me, unless you are trying to ask me why I didn't talk about saturated fat being bad instead of talking about alcohol ? .. oh yes, you did ask me that !! .. come on, I don't have to put a list of what is bad for us in order to justify talking about one of them, we are talking about alcohol here .. so I stated what I know about it .. if it was about high satureated fats intake, I would have talked about it.
The only difference here, is that saturated fats are food, real food .. we all need it, but need not to over eat lots of it over long period of time, if we don't eat any of it at all, we get serious health problem, thank God that saturated fat, sodium, sugar .. etc is every where in our food and it's almost impossible to get read of it completely, otherwise you would have seen alot of deaths because of people not taking them. Alcohol is not ! you don't need to intake it in order to live. Please, is there a nutrition specialist here to help me .. HELP ! .. rofl

 

[Spaniard]

I got bat-faced last night and dreamt I was great at freediving. Unfortunately I now realise that I am not because I have the hangover from hell....But hey it was a good dream so maybe I should get hammered all the time and I might break a record or something.

 

[Manuel]

I just wrote my last exam in school for my life...
Time for party...
I' ll report tomorrow.

Normally I drink almost nothing, but you can't let go away such chances.

MANUEL

 

[Erik]

To the original point: ETOH (alcohol) is a poison, as are other things that we sometimes use for good purposes. ETOH at any level does in fact kill brain cells, but it is now accepted that new brain cells are grown to replace them.... within reason. Drinking in even 1 episode to the point of blackout (severe memory loss/lost time) kills approximately 10 million brain cells. A few ounces of ETOH/day will kill brain cells at a rate that stresses the brain enough that new, healthy cells are put into place, which is also being accepted as a positive thing. Consider strenuous exercise ie: weight training- muscle cells are damaged/destroyed, then replaced with newer and even more cells. This works IF you do not lift weights 8 hours/day, every day... you must rest and recuperate. Stress the body just enough to create a healthy response.
Similarly, if you drink 26 ounces ETOH/day or even a few times per week, you cannot regenerate enough brain cells to replace the damaged ones.
As usual, moderation is the key, which can be quite subjective.
The other aspect; probably more appropriate to a moderate user of ETOH, is that you go into a mineral/nutrient debt even with a few drinks, that takes more than a few days to recover from. These are minerals and nutrients that are imperative for proper neurological function. In short, your brain wont work optimally until it has recovered fully. Will it affect your performance? Probably, only you can say in what capacity. The relaxing quality of the night before may in fact help, helping to calm the brain and body.

Salam brothers/sisters,
Erik Y.

 

[matrixed82]

ETOH at any level does in fact kill brain cells...

Heres a funny way of thinking about that :t (I got that by email a few years ago);

In one episode of 'Cheers', Cliff is seated at the bar describing the 'Buffalo Theory' to his buddy Norm. I don't think I've ever heard the concept explained any better than this...
"Well you see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo and when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive drinking of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers."