Pro sports teams celebrate championship wins with champagne. Weekend golfers often finish a day on the links with a beer and a burger. And amateur athletes of all stripes – from tennis players to softball teams to soccer leaguers – toast their victories and drown their sorrows with alcohol.

But new research suggests the links between drinking and sports are more than just social or cultural. In fact, two new studies indicate exercise may well influence when and how much people drink. What’s more, drinking may even affect whether people exercise in positive ways, The New York Times reports.

In the first study, researchers at Pennsylvania State University tracked 150 adult men and women age 18 to 75 who were surveyed about their lifestyles asked to record their daily drinking and exercise activities for three weeks. The results showed a clear correlation between exercising on any given day and subsequently drinking, especially if someone exercised more than usual.

“People drank more than usual on the same days that they engaged in more physical activity than usual,” the scientists reported in the journal Health Psychology.

For the second study, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers reviewed past experiments involving animals and found that in lab rodents, both exercise and alcohol increase activity in parts of the “reward centers” of the brain.

It’s possible that something similar happens in people who exercise and drink alcohol, said J. Leigh Leasure, an associate professor at the University of Houston, who led the new review.

Feeling a “slight buzz” after a workout, she said, may boost a desire in some athletes to extend and intensify that feeling with a beer, a glass of wine, or a cocktail.