I Am having A difficult time finding something stating specifically how long the Muscle Protein Synthesis that Alcohol Interferes with And among other things Like reducing HGH And Testosterone takes to return to normal.
I came across something that said it can last 1 Week after Drinking Alcohol I was hoping someone here might know more about how long after drinking say Like 2 Glasses of Wine before the full ability of muscle protein synthesis is back to normal?
Yeah as said above, I'd have noticed this sooner had it been posted in PED
It's a little more complex than just MPS, but I'll start there:
So muscle cells happily suck up amino acids post-training, even in the presence of alcohol. But evidence suggests anabolic signalling molecules like mTOR and p70S6K are suppressed initially, probably for at least 2-3 hours (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24533082). However, the body attempts to compensate for this and MPS tends to increase after the alcohol and acetaldehyde are out of the system, whereas it declines in those who haven't been drinking. There isn't any real research on the net long-term impact this has - though quite evidently it hampers recovery in the short term, the compensation appears to be sub-optimal, and if you continue to drink then we can assume you'll never match the recovery of non-alcoholic athletes.
Alcohol also destroys receptors that testosterone can attach itself to, though we don't know how long for nor whether acute intake really mimics the same effect (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16286851). In response, the body again attempts to compensate by increasing testosterone levels, which sounds good but it really isn't since receptor loss is more critical (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23470309)
Alcohol also impairs your ability to recruit the nerves that are used to contract muscles for at least 3 days post-consumption (
https://www.jsams.org/article/S1440-2440(09)00003-6/fulltext). Obviously if you're unable to recruit as many muscle cells, that will have knock on effects in terms of your long-term progress. The researchers also suspect that alcohol harms the nerves that stimulate the muscles to grow after a training session, and that alcohol inhibits the production of cytokines, which the immune system uses to clear up and restore damaged muscle tissue after physical exercise.
There's also some speculation on the molecular level that alcohol inhibits the attachment of energy-providing phosphorus groups to anabolic signalling molecules in muscle cells. In rats we see increased translational repressor protein activity, which tends to bind various growth initiation factors (that would normally activate post-training) and so represses MPS that way (
https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpendo.1999.277.2.e268). In terms of timescale, there's no data, but though some recovery would be expected, as seen in global MPS data 2-3 hours post-alcohol, this data is relevant because it suggests different muscle fibres are affected more than others (eg fast twitch vs slow twitch), which may result in an uneven poor recovery and long-term impairment.
FWIW if you must drink alcohol post-training, I suggest red wine would be the better choice. Not because of the alcohol but because it has a few other factors that appear to increase testosterone levels a little bit (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22958586). You'd get more benefit from non-alcoholic red wine though