Maybe you meant to call it an early night. Maybe you didn’t need that nightcap. Maybe it was just your turn to lose at hangover roulette.
However it happened, there you are, 15 minutes into your workout, and your training partner looks at you and says, “Do you smell that? Something smells like tequila.”Yes, you actually can sweat out alcohol.
“The liver can only metabolise a limited amount of alcohol, about a 12-ounce serving of beer or five ounces of wine in an hour,” says Indra Cidambi, M.D., founder and medical director of the Center for Network Therapy, which treats patients for addiction issues. “When a person consumes alcohol at a faster rate than what the liver can metabolise, the alcohol accumulates in the blood,” says Cidambi.
Your liver then works overtime to break down the alcohol, but what it can’t break down will be excreted through your urine, breath, and sweat.
You may produce more sweat than usual during these hungover workouts. As alcohol accumulates in your blood, your blood vessels enlarge. “This, in turn, makes the skin warm and triggers the sweat glands,” says Cidambi. But here’s an important point: Sweating alcohol won’t help you clear your hangover faster. Cidambi says that your liver processes about 90 percent of the alcohol. Breaking down that booze takes time—especially if you over-imbibed.
In fact, trying to sweat it out may even make your hangover symptoms worse. Alcohol cues the kidneys to produce extra urine, which results in dehydration. Sweat like crazy during a set of intervals and you’ll compound that dehydration problem and may even worsen your hangover symptoms. Here’s the smarter way to cure a hangover.
Cidambi says that a single instance of drinking so much you smell like a trashed mini bar isn’t a sign of a problem. But if you’re regularly getting whiffs of whiskey during your Saturday morning workouts, you may want to rethink how much you drink—and why.
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