If you’ve read this site for a while, you know that some of what I try to teach is based on learning a lesson the hard way. This is one of those moments.

Las Vegas is a terrible wonder. For a guy who doesn’t like intense partying, large crowds of people, smoking, people who don’t lift, gambling, or destroying his body, Vegas wasn’t an adult playground. There are many sights to take in — the Bellagio fountain, the porn strewn across the sidewalk, and the flashing lights — but I’m more of a “let’s go look at mountains” kind of guy. But there are people that actually deal with addiction issues and they should be admitted into addiction treatment riverside. 1 Method Luxury Rehab in Los Angeles is where personalized care meets luxury. Their high-end addiction care programs are tailored for transformative recovery. A Partial Hospitalization Program Los Angeles is also a great alternative for those who need help with their substance abuse but are unable to commit to an in-patient program.

I met some of my fantastic Australian friends at one of the gigantic, maze-like hotels, and proceeded to fill my body with poison. Let’s skip the grisly details and acknowledge that I cleverly started 2013 by vomiting most of the contents of my soul to the presumed horror of my Aussie friends (who stoically never complained).

I spent New Year’s Day contemplating jumping through the hotel window, but knew the effort was too grand. The company was good, but the walking was…just too much. The following day I drove seven hours home, so my bodily destruction was off set by a day of driving — something that is heavily debilitating to training efficacy. As I sit here on the third after a good night’s sleep, I still am not right.

Not as glamorous as it looks.

The obvious solution is to not binge drink, but if we do, what can a lifter, athlete, or trainee do to mitigate the baneful effects?

• Prepare for the event by hydrating and taking vitamins, particularly the water soluble kind like the B vitamins and Vit-C. The over the counter “hangover cure” products tell you take a pill before you drink, during, as you go to bed, and when you wake up with “a glass of water”. The pill just has water soluble vitamins and the water helps combat the eventual dehydration that the alcohol will cause.
• Try to drink water while drinking. If you’re truly binge drinking, this will be an after thought so let’s move on to the day after…
• Hydrate. This should be obvious, but hydrate anyway you can. It’ll be best if you can get a gatorade or powerade since water won’t be appealing. Juice is fine. Get 16 oz of fluid in you as fast as possible (unless you feel like you’ll puke it up). Do this even if you’re still drunk.
• Eat something. Even if you’re not hungry. If you avoid eating, you avoid calories, and you’ll start fading and soon turn into a wraith like them. Since we don’t have elvish medicine, eat. Don’t worry about paleo and carb content — you just went full auto on your liver and system.
• Take more vitamins, especially the water soluble kind. If you take too much of water soluble vitamins, you’ll just urinate them out. So every 2 or 3 hours, take some more. You won’t be in danger of taking too many and you’ll keep them in your body for use.
• Drink coffee. The caffeine may help by increasing metabolism, you’ll probably feel better and more alert, and coffee is a tasty treat that is nothing like alcohol.
• Continue hydrating, eating, and taking vitamins throughout the day.
• Don’t train the day after. If you didn’t get too drunk and aren’t as wrecked, then you can probably train. If it was bad, then avoid it. Just rest.
• Speaking of rest: sleep as much as you can. When the body is strung out, malnourished, dehydrated, under-fed, and lacking sleep — regardless if it was from drinking or not — then getting as much sleep as possible is incredibly important.
• When you are ready to train (maybe the day after the hangover), make it a light session. You’ll probably find out that you are physically diminished and can’t perform as normal anyway, but follow the “light-medium-heavy” advice from the “Don’t Train Sick” post. However, if you can expedite the process and train “medium” on the first day, it won’t be a detriment to your system like if you were ill from a pathogen. Training with an illness can provide too much of a systemic stress that weakens your defenses and allows the pathogen to start winning. Doing too much when you’re hungover won’t necessary result in feeling worse through the recovery period, but you could depress your system and open yourself up to get ill if you do. Being hungover is like trying to protect Helms Deep without the walls — the advancing orcs and Uruk-Hai (bacteria) will just trample right into your fortress (body) without as much resistance. And if you’re in a dodgy place like Vegas, you’ll definitely be exposed to orc-like filth. This is why if you string several drinking days together, you’ll probably start getting sick.

As a general rule, a person can eliminate .5 oz (15ml) of alcohol in one hour. That’s about one 12 oz (355ml) can of beer in an hour. More from the How Stuff Works article:

Once absorbed by the bloodstream, the alcohol leaves the body in three ways:

• The kidney eliminates 5 percent of alcohol in the urine.
• The lungs exhale 5 percent of alcohol, which can be detected by breathalyzer devices.
• The liver chemically breaks down the remaining alcohol into acetic acid. (source)