After a busy week at work and all the hard work you’ve put in at the gym, you may feel like you deserve to let your hair down and open a bottle of wine, or two?

Well, you could be undoing all your good work and preventing yourself from making any future physical gains. We all know alcohol is high in calories and we usually consume these additional calories on top of our daily amount.

These calories hold no nutritional value. They are empty calories which our bodies will store as fat, particularly around our waist.

Alcohol quickly hits our brain and our normal inhibitions are soon affected, causing us to do things we wouldn’t normally do and so eat things we wouldn’t normally eat.

We tend to eat less mindfully when we consume alcohol, choosing more fatty, salty, unhealthy foods and often over-eating. So then we have the additional calories from the alcohol, plus the calories from the food we wouldn’t have usually ate too.

Short-term alcohol use can impede muscle growth and long-term alcohol use diminishes protein synthesis.

To achieve a lean toned body, you need to reduce your calorie intake without depriving your body of any nutrients, and exercise/train hard.

As we know, if we are eating well and training hard, our bodies will build muscle and lose fat.

However, for this to happen your body needs to create a positive protein balance so that protein synthesis can occur.

Protein synthesis is necessary for your muscles to grow in response to your training. Alcohol can hinder protein synthesis and, instead, put your body into a catabolic state in which it will lose muscle tissue.

This will obviously have a big effect on your training and results.

If you continue to drink alcohol during your weight loss regime you may never achieve your true results.

Consuming alcohol the evening before you exercise may cause muscle cramps so it is advisable to avoid consuming alcohol for the 48 hours before you exercise to give your body tissues time to recover.

Try to take the same approach to alcohol as you do to your diet and health. Cutting out the booze may be the answer to achieving great results.

l To get in touch with Claire, follow her on Twitter @CLKpt or email ckopicki@me.com