If you drink beer occasionally during strength training, you will gain weight.

This statement is not absolute at all. Whether drinking beer occasionally after strength training will make you gain weight has nothing to do with the single act of "drinking beer". In the end, it only depends on whether your total calories for the day exceed the standard, how much you drank, what snacks you paired with it, and whether you consumed enough during training.

Lao Zhou from our gym has been practicing for four years and has broken 500 in three major events. After doing chest training every Sunday, he always goes to a roadside stall with his football friends to sit for half an hour. He drinks two bottles of iced yellow beer and has two plates of boiled edamame and a portion of braised beef tendon as a snack. His body fat is stable at 14% all year round, and his abdominal muscles are more defined than the power bank I carry with me. Even after drinking like this for almost two years, I haven't seen his waistline increase by one centimeter.

But that’s not to say that drinking beer has nothing to do with gaining weight. I’ve seen people who really gained body fat because of “occasionally drinking beer.” Dang Xiaoyu, a student who just joined the club last year, has just shown some signs of training after practicing for three months. After practicing shoulder training last week, he was taken to have a supper by his classmates. He drank four bottles of beer and showed off two pounds of thirteen-spice crayfish and half a portion of fried crispy pork. The next day, he weighed three pounds on the scale. He was so scared that he asked everyone if it was beer. I drank him up and gained weight - in fact, most of those three pounds were caused by water retention and undigested food caused by high salt. He lost weight after two days of diet control. However, if he continued to gain weight like this two or three times a week, it would be a matter of time before he gained weight. However, the blame was entirely taken by the beer, which is really unfair.

In fact, if you do some calculations, you will know that the calories in beer itself are really not that scary. Ordinary yellow beer has about 30-35 calories per 100ml, and a 500ml bottle only has about 160 calories, which is lower than the chocolate cone you buy downstairs at the gym. If you just drink 1-2 bottles, do two more volume sets during training that day, or eat less rice for dinner, the calorie difference will be evened out. Where will the excess calories come from and be stored as fat? Oh, by the way, if you are really hungry and want to drink, give priority to dry beer or non-alcoholic beer. The calories are more than one-third lower than ordinary yellow beer, so you don’t have to worry about drinking it.

Of course, if you ask bodybuilders preparing for competitions, they will definitely give you the exact opposite answer. I was talking to a friend who is a bodybuilder. During the preparation period, he only drank Coke Zero, let alone beer. It is not because he is afraid of the calories, but because alcohol will reduce the rate of muscle protein synthesis, and will also affect the efficiency of sleep and recovery after training. For those who need to maximize the efficiency of muscle gain , for players who control their body fat to single digits, even an occasional sip is considered a very cost-effective option. They may even lose muscle due to poor recovery and lower basal metabolism, which makes it easier to accumulate fat. This logic is a consensus in the preparation circle, and it cannot be said to be wrong.

But having said that, we ordinary fitness enthusiasts cannot make the mistake of holding ourselves to the standards of competition preparation. After doing back training in the summer, you are soaked in sweat. When you walk out of the gym, the cold beer from the convenience store on the corner is steaming. The refreshing feeling you get when you take the first sip is really much more real than gaining half a pound of muscle and losing 0.5 points of body fat. During the two months when I was trying to PR in the deadlift last year, I had to show off a can of ice-cold dry beer every Saturday after my leg training. I consumed almost 1,000 calories that day during leg training, and a bottle of dry beer only cost just over 100 calories. This amount of calories was not enough to fit between my teeth. In two months, my deadlift increased from 140kg to 155kg, and I lost two kilograms of weight. My body fat did not increase at all.

Many people say that drinking beer will cause you to develop a beer belly. In fact, this is a huge misunderstanding. The accumulation of fat in the waist and abdomen is essentially a long-term excess of total calories. Coupled with changes in hormone levels as we age, fat is more likely to accumulate in the core area. It just so happens that when drinking beer, many people like to eat high-oil and high-salt snacks such as fried skewers, braised pork sausages, and fried field snails. They drink them until midnight. As time goes by, the belly will naturally grow. In the end, it is all the fault of beer. It is really the wrong culprit.

To put it bluntly, fitness is meant to serve life. There is no need to live your life like a walking calorie counter. Drink it if you want to drink it occasionally, but control the amount to no more than two bottles. Don’t order all the dishes that are high in oil and salt to go with the drinks. Don’t exceed the total calories for the day. You really won’t gain weight. If you really get drunk and eat too much, just do two more sets of deadlifts and run an extra two kilometers the next day to burn off the extra calories. There’s so much to pay attention to.