Are you more likely to drink on a day when you exercise
We’re consistently being told to exercise more and increase activity, but could it in fact have a detrimental effect on our health?
New research shows that people drink more alcohol on days that they’ve exercised. The US researchers say that when people do more exercise, usually Thursday to Sunday, they drink more too.
David Conroy, lead study author and professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Time Magazine: 'Monday through Wednesday people batten down the hatches and they cut back on alcohol consumption,'
'But once that "social weekend" kicks off on Thursdays, physical activity increases and so does alcohol consumption.'
'We zoomed in the microscope and got a very up-close and personal look at these behaviours on a day-to-day basis. [We saw that] it's not people who exercise more drink more. It's that on days when people are more active, they tend to drink more than on days when they are less active. This finding was uniform across study participants of all levels of physical activity and ages.'
Researchers believe that it could be that people are rewarding themselves for going to the gym, or perhaps being physically active means they come across more social situations where alcohol is present, like after football or such.
David continued: : 'It could be that people who are more physically active on a given day have to use all their willpower and cognitive resources to get themselves to be active, and they don't have enough willpower left to resist the temptation of a drink at the end of the day.'