How to Naturally Increase Your Testosterone
Frequently, I’m asked how to increase your testosterone. Whether it’s guys in their teens and 20s wanting to gain more muscle, or guys in their 30s, 40s and 50s who feel like they’ve lost a step, and want to regain the muscle, and um… potency of their youth.
Let’s get the obvious ways out of the way first. If you want to increase testosterone, you need to:
Original source: here.
- Watch Rocky 3 and Rocky 4. This should happen at least once every 3-4 months.
- Don’t watch romantic comedies. If the list of actors includes Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Jennifer Aniston or Matthew McConaughey, you’re not allowed to watch it. Sorry, but it’s for your own good.
- Listen to Modern Talking. Enough said.
So besides a little sociological way of increasing your testosterone, let’s talk physiology. One of the biggest mistakes men make is to go after increasing testosterone directly through supplements like tribulus or other herbs. That’s wrong since they’re not addressing the root cause of what’s causing low testosterone, and there can be a few causes.
If you’re a geek like me, take a look at this steroid hormone pathway. If you’re not a geek like me, skip it. Your eyes will glaze over, and you’ll stop reading, and we can’t have that.
Original source: here.
In that diagram, you’ll see that there can be a few reasons for low testosterone, including:
- Overconversion to estrogen.
- Overconversion to a different hormone called “dihydrotestosterone.”
- You may also have insufficient amounts of the precursor to testosterone, called DHEA (if you’re curious, that stands for dehydroepiandrosterone. Right. I’ll bet you wish you didn’t ask).
- You may also have your pregnenolone (another precursor to testosterone) getting converted to cortisol. The stress hormone.
Also, not on this chart, but other reasons for low testosterone:
- Insufficient amounts of LH (luteinizing hormone). This is a hormone that is secreted by the brain that tells the testes and ovaries to increase testosterone production.
- Too much SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin). This is a protein that binds to testosterone and makes it unavailable to use by the body. So even though your blood work may show that your total testosterone is “normal”, you may have symptoms of low testosterone. If you want a better picture, ask your doctor to test your “free testosterone.”
And of course, there are other reasons for low testosterone.
When we work with clients, we leave no stone unturned, and figure out the exact causes of low testosterone and what to do about it, but of course, in a newsletter format, I can’t address every single cause, so here are some generalities that will address more than one of the causes:
- Manage stress. This will help prevent your resources from going into the cortisol pathway.
- Part of stress management is great sleep.
- Another part of stress management is to avoid excessive and exclusive endurance exercise. Some people have gone as far as to say that it’s exercise-induced castration. The reason for that is that men who do endurance training exclusively (without concurrent strength training) have lower testosterone than couch potatoes.
- Lose body fat. Body fat causes both excess cortisol, as well as overconversion to estrogen.
- Clean up your liver and gastrointestinal system. This is the body’s processing plant, and if your liver is not firing on all cylinders, it’s not processing and detoxifying the hormones properly.
Follow these guidelines, and your testosterone will increase. But if you’d like some precise suggestions based on your unique body, let me know.
Short Summary
- A big mistake is to take direct testosterone-boosting supplements. It’s important to find the root cause of low testosterone, and fix it.
- Testosterone can be low for a number of reasons. The cause will dictate the approach to raising it.
- 3 sure-fire ways to boost testosterone are:
- Manage stress
- Lose body fat
- Clean up your liver and gastrointestinal system
