Planning to hit the bars? Be sure to hit the gym first

A study conducted in mice suggests that daily exercise could help to counteract some of the negative impacts of college-age drinking later in life. Researchers will present their work this week at the 2025 American Physiology Summit in Baltimore. The Summit is the flagship annual meeting of the American Physiological Society (APS).

The research comes amid a growing number of studies linking alcohol consumption with an increased risk of cancer, heart disease and other chronic conditions that can shorten lifespan. While drinking little or no alcohol is better for your health than over-consuming, the new study suggests exercise could reduce some of the health harms for people who choose to drink more heavily.

“These data indicate how even brief periods of alcohol consumption, such as a period of heavy drinking during the college years and early adulthood, could affect later-life health,” said the study’s first author Avery Tangen, a master’s student at Florida State University. “This work also highlights the fact that aerobic exercise training may protect against some of the negative effects of alcohol that result in a shortened lifespan.”

The research was conducted by Tangen and was a continuation of a project initiated by Abigail Tice, PhD, a former doctoral student in the laboratory overseen by Jennifer Steiner, PhD, associate professor at Florida State University.

Alcohol and aging can both contribute to a loss of muscle mass. This led researchers to wonder whether exercising could offset some of the harmful effects of alcohol on skeletal muscle. Since many people go through a period of higher alcohol consumption in young adulthood and then drink less or abstain later on, the researchers mimicked this pattern in experiments to untangle the effects of exercising while drinking alcohol on health and longevity.

The researchers divided 37 mice into four groups. For a 6-week period during the equivalent of their early adulthood period, the mice either consumed no alcohol and performed no exercise, consumed no alcohol and did exercise, consumed alcohol and did not exercise, or consumed alcohol and did exercise. The mice were then given normal food, water and care as they lived out their natural lifespan.

As expected, the mice that drank alcohol and were sedentary had a significantly shorter lifespan than those that did not drink alcohol. However, mice that exercised daily during the period when they drank alcohol had a lifespan similar to mice that never drank alcohol, suggesting that exercise had a protective effect.

“From this work, we would encourage young adults who wish to consume alcohol to couple this behavior with an aerobic exercise training program to attenuate the potential for negative health effects from high doses of alcohol,” said Tangen. “Aerobic exercise positively affects all organs systems throughout the body, including those negatively impacted by alcohol, such as the brain, liver and skeletal muscle.”

While studies conducted in animal models do not always directly translate to humans, the researchers noted that further research in both animals and humans could help to clarify how exercise and alcohol exposure interact to influence epigenetic changes and the health of various organ systems. They plan to perform further experiments to look at the impact of exercise at other times across the lifespan.

This article was originally published on Newswise: Exercise and Fitness.