These are the basic rules you should follow if you want to increase your testosterone levels. Some experts advise a lot of ways to increase testosterone – often these methods include taking vitamin and mineral supplements. This is where the big supplement manufacturers get the music.
But in reality, if your blood zinc levels, for example, aren’t critically low, it won’t affect your hormone growth. In other words, studies have shown that extra doses of vitamins don’t increase testosterone levels one iota, as long as you eat a balanced diet.
Rule 1: train hard.
Much paper has been written trying to describe exactly why and how intense exercise boosts testosterone levels, but few experts now deny that it does. To anyone who understands the principle of adaptation, this doesn’t seem paradoxical.
Your body functions according to the biological principle of homeostasis. One way to describe the principle of homeostasis is to say that, to conserve energy, the body produces the minimum amount of hormones it needs. It takes the path of least resistance.
Testosterone is a powerful substance that evolved during evolution to grow slow muscles. If your body thinks you can survive playing computer games, sitting on the couch and eating donuts all day, why would it waste energy producing extra testosterone? You don’t need it, right?
However, if you’re really struggling for existence and push-ups, pull-ups, pull-ups and other exercises seem like a struggle for existence to your body, then your body gets used to producing a lot of testosterone so you can create tools and get the job done, which will make your life easier. Your body is smart, but it only responds to the signals you give it.
Rule 2: Long, deep sleep.
Growth happens mostly in the dark, like in an iceberg, a plant or a man. The same goes for bodybuilding. Very few bodybuilders know that testosterone is only produced at night. More specifically, testosterone is produced during the fast sleep phase (FBS).
The main thing to remember is that during the first few hours of sleep there is very little FBS, but the longer you sleep, the more FBS there is. And this continues until you have exhausted all your available sleep reserve. Simply put, every extra minute of sleep your body produces testosterone.
Most Americans suffer from chronic sleep deprivation. The general recommendation of 6-8 hours of sleep is REALLY too little, in my opinion. How much is “too much”? Unless you have a brain tumor, there is no such thing as “too much” for a bodybuilder. If you get 14 hours of sleep a day, hell, go for it. Some will say that’s asocial. Well, that depends on what you compare it to.
Rule 3: Don’t be fat.
When obese men have had their blood tested, they’ve found negligible levels of testosterone. And it didn’t matter if they exercised or not. This may sound like gender machismo, but women need to have more fat than men to perform the function of childbearing. For this reason, body fat stores are inextricably linked to estrogen, the insidious female hormone, the irreconcilable enemy of testosterone.
Fat is often thought of as passive tissue, but in reality fat cells are chemical factories. Specifically, adipose tissue produces aromatase, an enzyme that finds testosterone (responsible for muscle and strength) and converts it to estrogen (responsible for sagging nipples). That’s why fat people have low testosterone. Every extra kilo of fat is an enemy base that destroys the right substances and replaces them with female hormones.
The downside is a vicious circle. The more weight you gain, the less testosterone you will have and the harder it will be to pump muscle and burn fat. The upside is the same as the downside: the more you exercise by gritting your teeth and avoiding overeating, the more fat your body burns. With every pound you lose, you regain some testosterone, which speeds up and simplifies the subsequent process of gaining muscle mass and burning fat. See? Your body knows what to do. You just have to tell it to do it, guys.
