2707: How to Boost Your Testosterone Naturally

0:00If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, raise your testosterone by 20 % to 40 % naturally, all backed by science. We only use science-backed information for you for this episode. By the way, along with this episode, we've put our program, MAPS 40 Plus, This is a workout program, lifestyle, diet for people who want to build muscle, build strength, especially appropriate for men over 40.

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1:18Get$350 off your very own pod five ultra. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com? I'm talking right now. Hit pause. Head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. All right. The data shows you can raise your testosterone by 20 % to 40 % naturally. We went through the studies. We broke it down. We picked the most effective ways, the ways that are likely to raise your testosterone, in some cases by as much as 40%. We're going to get into it if you want all those wonderful benefits of higher testosterone.

1:59Let's get into it. Now, do you think this is somebody who is at current baseline or suboptimal and then this is how to increase by that? Because if you're already peak testosterone, which very few people are naturally, you're probably not going to get a lot from some of the things you're going to talk about. You'll actually, so it depends on what we get to. So like nutrient deficiencies, Where you're deficient, yeah. Yeah, that's different. Although when we get to those so common, you'll probably see a rise. I was going to say, not only that, but you also wouldn't be at baseline if you're deficient in those things.

2:31That's right. But like you said, general testosterone levels have declined in men. This has been a trend that we've been tracking. I say we, the medical community, has been tracking for decades now. It's actually a long time. And one article I read said that a 20-year-old's testosterone today is what like a 60-year-old's was in the early 1980s. And they're attributing more environmental causes as like a bigger than they originally thought. Yeah, and it's multifactorial. Yeah, there's a lot to it. Yeah, it's like inactivity. So obviously less strength. Could be diet-related. Nutrient deficiencies seem to be higher in certain cases.

3:15So it's probably multifactorial. But what we do have - Do you not think - Sorry to interrupt you, but I mean, we did an episode recently, and you talked about this, and I think that a lot of lower testosterone would probably be related to the video gaming for hours and pornography would make you, because you would lose sexual drive. If you played a lot of video games and you were on porn every day, I would think that that would, because you wouldn't have this desire to go out and try. Unless you're winning a lot in the games. But, you know, lack of sunlight inactivity, lack of competing for mates.

3:55There's some data that suggests that that'll cause rises in testosterone. So it's all got to play a role. Plus, I don't know what the data shows on this, but I would imagine high – just because of the way that the reward centers of the brain are modified, not in a good way, especially with pornography consumption, that there's probably a correlation between high users of video games, pornography, and also a bad diet. There's probably a correlation. Yeah, sure. Where you've got a combination of all those things. Yeah. Yep, exactly. Yeah, great point too, Justin. You're probably not eating chicken breast and rice while you're gaming for hours.

4:32Yeah, you're probably eating garbage. Crappy energy drinks. Yep, you're not getting good sleep because you're up late watching your computer screen or your gaming console. You're not active, right? You're not exercising. And so testosterone is very adaptive. So here's the thing about testosterone that's interesting is it reacts quite strongly to lifestyle and environment. I mean, I could pull up a lot of studies that'll show what happens to a man's testosterone in the short term. So these are like acute changes when a man wins a basketball game or when he's in a room with other men and there's a pretty girl in the room.

5:09You'll sometimes see spikes in men. Or if he asks a girl out and he gets rejected, what happens to testosterone? There's even studies on chess, like chess players who win. You'll see the winners have a spike. Sleep will affect your testosterone. So it can be affected strongly by just your lifestyle in very short-term and then also long-term ways. and so well if it could get affected by lifestyle then what if we were to modify our lifestyle right to raise it and uh amplify by the way there's another part to this that a lot of people don't talk about because we measure testosterone um levels so we can see your total testosterone what's called free testosterone uh because of the sake of this podcast we'll stick to total testosterone but just you know to go just a bit deeper free testosterone is what your body uses because you can actually have a lot of testosterone but have it be bound up.

6:08This is unbound. So it's not usable. But we'll just stick to total testosterone levels. So we look at testosterone levels, but what we don't look at, and you can measure this, it's just much more difficult. Blood test is easy to see your testosterone. But you can also measure what your testosterone attaches to, your androgen receptors. And we can look at androgen receptor density. Meaning if you increase the amount of androgen receptors that you have, your current testosterone becomes more effective, essentially, because there's more places for it to attach. In fact, there was a study years ago that tried to correlate testosterone levels to strength gains in men following a strength training program.

6:53Now, all the men fell within range, so it wasn't like they had super low, super high. They had men that were all kind of normal, but there were men on the higher end of normal and men that were on the lower or medium, moderate end of normal. And the stronger correlate to strength gains was androgen receptor density. Testosterone was correlated, but it was the androgen receptor density that was a stronger correlate. So why am I saying this? Because the data that I pulled up for the things that we're gonna talk about, I looked up not only does it, how does it affect testosterone levels, but how does it affect androgen receptor density?

7:29Oh, wow. So all these positively impact that also? Both. Oh, okay. So you can get like a double whammy, right? So imagine if you were to, I'll use clean numbers so it's easy. You boost your testosterone 50%, which isn't going to happen with most things, but let's just say you did. And you increase your androgen receptor density by 50%. Well, you've essentially doubled the power of your testosterone. I don't think it's quite that clean, but you get the picture. So they're both really important things to look at. Now, is it possible for some people to increase their testosterone, but not their androgen receptors?

8:02And so they, and is this an example of people that may have reported, like, I took this and I did that and I didn't feel any boost. Is that what we're most likely seeing? Maybe, but I looked up specifically ones that were both were tested. But I think what happens when your testosterone levels go up is your body does increase its receptor density through that process. But like, I think acute spikes in testosterone, which are short-term, I don't think they have that effect. I think you just get this kind of spike and then it drops, you know, for a day or two or something like that. But yeah, that's a good question, Adam.

8:34But I specifically went and looked up what are things that raise testosterone and can increase androgen receptor density? And then what do those numbers look like? What do we see in the data? So we'll start with the first thing, which is strength training. So strength training, first off, strength training is the most effective way to increase androgen receptor density. The muscle building process, part of that process is increasing androgen receptor density. It's actually part of the adaptation process. So when your muscles want to build, one of the things that it does, or one of the things that your body does, is it increases the amount of androgen receptors that are available so that now the building process can occur.

9:20In fact, there's some studies with some people where they don't see a huge boost in testosterone, but you always see a boost in androgen receptor density, which is, again, pretty awesome and much more correlated to muscle growth. So I pulled up the studies so that we could see, and this is what's pretty cool. Strength training causes an acute spike in testosterone. We've known this, right? What exercise causes the highest spike in testosterone? Squats. Yeah, we see that, right? Squats, deadlifts, compound lifts. This is short term, but we see the biggest spikes in those exercises. we'll see a 20, 30 % increase acutely.

9:59Generally though, overall, when men engage in appropriate strength training, the data supports about a 17 % increase. The androgen receptor density goes up by 20 to 30 % though in trained muscles. Interesting. In trained muscles. And that's because they just test the muscle that they train. So they'll have people do squats and then they'll test the quad over 12 weeks through muscle biopsy and they'll see this huge boost in androgen receptor. Now, when most of these studies are conducted, is there a similar type of protocol as far as the training volume or regimen? Because there's a bit of a caveat to what you're saying right now is that lifting weights absolutely can do great things for hormones.

10:44If you do it right. It can also be adverse, right? So it could also have negative effects if you're overtrained, which a lot of guys typically do. It was like, I'll sleep when I'm dead. And it doesn't matter. I worked to a 12-hour day. In fact, I mean, you see people every day, somebody in my feed does a post of, yeah, got no sleep last night, but showed up anyways. They're crushing their workout. It's like, and I think that's okay once in a while. But if you chronically do that, you're going to actually see negative effects on testosterone. So I'm assuming that when they do these studies, they probably are applying two or three times a week.

11:22Typically, it's three full-body workouts. is a typical prescription. I would say, like we know this as trainers, how do you know if your strength training program is appropriate? Well, the best measure is are you getting stronger? So I think if you're doing it and you're not getting stronger, there could be a lot of reasons why you're not getting stronger. But if it's due to the workout routine, then you know that the workout routine isn't working. But if you are getting stronger, you're doing a lot of things right and your workout routine is appropriate. If it's inappropriate, you won't get stronger, is my point.

11:51You can't overtrain and get stronger. If you train appropriately, you will. So if you're getting stronger, I think you can pretty confidently say, this is probably doing positive things to my testosterone and my androgen receptor density. Next, we have sleep. So this is a pretty big one. One bad night of sleep, in one study I found, lowered testosterone by 30%. That's crazy. One five-hour night of sleep. They're not even having them stay up all night. Is it typically a kind of a cliff and then slowed down for that? Like the first really bad night of sleep, you have a huge 30%. And then if you have a second or third, does it taper off or does it continue to drop at that rate?

12:36Over time with people who report chronically poor sleep, you see a consistent 20 % reduction in testosterone. What's cool though about this is I pulled up a chart that showed five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours. It was more testosterone with each one. So even if you're like, well, I get seven hours of sleep, you're still probably not optimizing your testosterone because you're not getting eight. So even that one hour makes that kind of a difference. So, you know, prioritize it essentially. By the way, androgen receptor density down to 15 % to 20 % with chronic poor sleep. Is the only way to test that to really like biopsy the muscle tissue?

13:17Oh, that'd be so cool to know. I know. Like, yeah, where you're at with that in conjunction with raising testosterone. Yeah, no, I mean, people who's consistently strength trained over time have really, really dense, just have a lot of energy and receptors. Yeah, you just kind of factor that in. Now, with sleep, what's interesting about it is it's actually not that, for most people, some people have some really difficult to solve issues, but for most people, it's actually straightforward how you fix this. it's uh you know don't be on electronics right before bed uh don't go to bed um you know make sure your room is dark and cool uh don't eat right before bed go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every morning that's it for most people that salt sun up sun down i mean as close as you can yeah it's it's uh yeah it's simple but it's not easy to be consistent no it's like one of those things that theoretically you're like that's it just go to bed at the same time get up at the same time but unfortunately uh life and habits and all these other things are involved and and it's probably when i think of the things that i personally wrestle with the most in my own personal lifestyle is that i've got a really good balance nutritionally where i never let myself go way out of bounds and keep myself in shape there i fluctuate from volume and intensity of training it's always in and out it's like a really nice relationship there sleep is probably like i can't i can't be honest and say i've even strung two weeks of like what i would say perfect i've done two weeks of perfect dieting two weeks of perfect training done two weeks of of almost anything in regard to that yet sleep is one of the most impactful and i probably can't say i've had 14 perfect days of sleep then you get the cumulative backup of stress that you have to account for that carries with you when you don't get the recovery of the sleep.

15:09And then now that's going to impede on your energy and everything else. And so, yeah, it's a tough thing once sleep is a big factor to the whole cycle of being able to now recover and adapt and then go forward in progress. Well, what I have done is I've gotten older. What I have done, even though I don't think I've ever mastered the sleep thing, is I have modified my training and diet in relation to that, which is something I ignored when I was younger. In my 20s, you train hard no matter what. You train hard no matter what. In fact, many times I would push through those rough workouts, probably train way too hard, or indulge in the cravings.

15:47I'm so aware of what a good night or not so good night of sleep is, and it will dictate what my training intensity looks like, or at all, depending on how bad the sleep was. And that I've done. And I feel like at least I'm working with my body instead of against it and that's made a big difference yeah you know what's interesting about this this is largely a modern issue um as uh entertainment options have exploded uh sleep quality um and duration has dropped yeah so it's like there's so many things to do now late at night so much entertainment so many things to watch you could bring i remember when i was a kid uh i wanted so bad i love tv when i was a kid who doesn't right but when i was a kid i loved tv and I remember all I wanted for one Christmas was a portable.

16:37Remember they used to make those portable TVs that were like this big, but you'd have to put the in. And you couldn't pick up any station. And if I did, it was like one. And there was definitely nothing on at night with the one station that I could pick up, right? Now you have your phone, which follows you everywhere. And I have every TV show. Like literally anything I want available at any time. And this is the main reason why. You know, if you go back, not that far, what people did, first of all, TV had nothing on at night. You had the news and then that was done. And what people did is they read.

17:11They would sit in bed. Scrambled Cinemax. And they would read a bed. Well, I would like to even see, Sal, a comparison of your phone versus TV even. I think your phone is even worse. And so, you know, I know they're both admitting the blue light, but a TV that's 10, 12, 15 feet away from your room or wherever you're at versus this little tiny screen that you've got 12 inches from your face. And how much more stimulating is social media with a swipe, click, swipe, move, back and forth? So I would be willing to bet that even TV didn't have as near of an impact as what the cell phone has and just social media has in general.

17:52Yeah, so that's got to be the thing. I think just know this. I think telling yourself, ah, I'll turn it off. You have to have hard and fast rules, I think, with some of this. It's off. 8.30 at night or whatever. 9 o 'clock at night, it's off. It's not going to come on because that's such a negative effect on your sleep. And when you do improve your sleep, by the way, Justin, you said this. It's not just your testosterone. It's your recovery. It's your strength. It's your injury risk. One bad night of sleep will increase your risk of injury the next day for a workout by like 50%. That tripped me out.

18:24And it was one of those, I started to like correlate that. I could see that with my clients, like when they got real poor sleep, like how. They hurt themselves. They hurt themselves. Absolutely. So be consistent with this, huge impact. The next one is optimizing, there's a nutrient, vitamin D. Here's what's crazy about this. I looked up a study. I'm like, I don't even want to look up studies on people who are deficient. Because I know what difference that makes. You're deficient in any nutrient you supplement with, it makes a big difference. I found some studies. They took men. They gave them 3 ,000 IUs of vitamin D a day.

18:56They weren't even taking men who were deficient. They just said, here's 3 ,000 IUs of vitamin D a day. 20 % increase in testosterone. Wow. Androgen receptor density up also 20%. Wow. From vitamin D. Probably because a good percentage of people are deficient, but a great percentage of people are suboptimal. Yeah. So you might not have so little vitamin D that you have like these really bad deficiency symptoms, but you're probably not optimal. And so again, in this study, they just gave people 3000 IUs and we saw a boost. I wonder if you were to compare the 3000 IUs to somebody is like, let's say a protocol of one hour of sunlight.

19:42Oh, I'm sure that would be way better. Right? Because I think circadian rhythm wise, getting the vitamin D through the sun, so you're going to get all those benefits. And I would imagine that would be even better than supplementing. You would get the vitamin D plus all the other benefits of being outside. So, I mean, to me, it's like a bare minimum, take that vitamin D, but even better get outside because that's another thing that I think that we just don't do enough of anymore. I know I'm guilty of that. And I've seen a difference at this house that I'm at now where we have this, I haven't had like a real backyard that gets a lot of sun in the pool.

20:13And like, I've already felt such a huge difference from that. And so, you know, trying to make that effort to get out there every day and spend an hour or two in there i think would be as beneficial or more than i 100 agree the thing with vitamin d is so easy right right yeah you just take a pill so it's like you have that by your side in case you don't do that try and make yourself get out there for the worst case scenario you take the vitamin d next up is optimized zinc and magnesium in fact there's a supplement yeah that got really popular in the 90s uh it's uh was called uh zinc magnesium aspartate uh so uh zma zma is the name of the supplement and it got really popular in fact the creator of it was um what's that guy's name he had that lab that was making the the designer steroids uh and he was giving it to athletes the clear um you guys know who i'm talking about balco balco yes the founder of balco created swore by that created the company snack S-N-A-C.

21:15What's his name? Yeah. ZMA is still a very popular supplement. Well, do you remember why he was so... I know he got a lot of bad rap because of the whole steroid and the bowel thing, but he was an incredible trainer. Yes. And he had all these professional athletes that he was so detailed, and he tracked sleep and diet and hydration. Every little data point. And the ZMA made such an overall impact on all of his athletes. That's what blew that up. And he had the data to show it. And so after that, it went gangbusters. ZMA is one of the few supplements that I took. Victor Conte. Yeah, Victor Conte.

21:57That I've taken that I noticed a difference. And you say, ah, it's just zinc and magnesium. I mean, I'll show you. Here's a study here. 30 milligrams of zinc a day in everyday regular dudes, 20 % increase in testosterone, 20 % increase in androgen receptor density. Super easy, super inexpensive to take. And again, many men are maybe not deficient, although deficiencies relatively, it's more common than you would think. They don't have optimal amounts. And these nutrients are lower in foods than they used to be because of modern farming and that kind of stuff. So yeah, you optimize those things and you can get a boost in some cases.

22:39like I said, 20%, both in the androgen receptors and in testosterone. Next up, lower cortisol. When we say lower cortisol, generally what this means is reduce stress. Okay, how does this apply to the person listening to this episode? I think it goes back to what you talked about when it comes to overtraining. There's a lot of men out there that are trying to be fit, and they're doing tons of cardio. They're doing the strength training. They're in a calorie deficit, and they can't figure out why they have no libido, why they're not building muscle too much it's too much stress on the body you take a guy like that you cut his volume in half and suddenly he sees all this incredible uh gain and that's because the stress was just overwhelming his body couldn't adapt to it yeah um and so you you you you know they'll often refer to this as a lowering cortisol but really what it is is uh if you have too much stress in your body start to develop what's known as an inverted cortisol pattern where cortisol is all supposed to come up in the morning, give you energy and kind of taper down at night so you could sleep.

23:38But with chronic stress over application of say exercise plus work, plus poor diet, plus not getting good sleep. What happens is cortisol is low in the morning. So you need tons of caffeine to get yourself going. And then it spikes at night and then you find yourself wired, but tired and you can't get good sleep. And then melatonin doesn't get produced in quantity that you need. That's right. Which right now, which takes us to two herbal supplements. I looked up what herbal supplements have the best data for testosterone. There's two of them that came up, ashwagandha and Tongkat Ali. Both of those are the ones that have the biggest impact.

24:16Both of those in the data, ashwagandha has more data supporting it, but both of those will show a relatively consistent spike in testosterone over time, like consistent, about 20%, and androgen receptor density up by about 5 % to 10%. Now, does that hold? Because I felt like when I did that, it went up, I felt the difference, and then either one, I adapted to that new level and didn't notice it anymore, or it almost went back down to baseline. The longest studies I found are like six months. Okay. Yeah, so that's decent, but I don't know. And you're right, Adam. You're taking an herb that has an effect, I would imagine, because you're taking something that your body will adapt to it.

24:55Yeah. So I don't know if it's a long-term approach, but I think in combination with what we're saying, you know like i said like imagine if it helps manage your stress it does it does and ashwagandha uh has also been shown in studies to improve athletic performance muscle and strength so it's not just yeah sometimes you'll see raising testosterone but does it translate into the gym it's also a calming herb too so it helps you sleep at night and things like that too so if it helps all that like i mean i i mean i remember when you had you put me on a stack like this when we were we were trying to go and raise my testosterone level naturally and i definitely felt it i remember especially the first few weeks i felt the difference in it then it just felt like it kind of uh leveled off nothing like going through this list that you're talking about for me nothing was bigger than the actually lifting weights i've just yeah i could really tell a difference when i went and had a squat or a deadlift day and again appropriate i didn't go crush the weights it was like at that time i was very low energy didn't have a lot of drive and so but if i just got in there and did like three or four sets of squats or deadlifts it was like 24 hours later i felt like this and i'd feel in my libido i'd feel it my energy i'd feel it all the way across the board um that was the biggest of course prioritizing sleep every anytime i get to sleep i just i feel feel better but lifting weights was surprisingly um one of the most impactful things that well see what's interesting about what i'm talking about is a lot of men watching and listening to this right now uh could benefit from like two or three of these or maybe all so it's not just one right so uh lift weights appropriately prioritize sleep if you need to optimize your vitamin d probably also need to optimize your zinc throw a little ashwagandha at that some tonkatalee now you have this protocol that could cause a significant change in your hormone levels how much muscle you're building your libido fat loss insulin sensitivity all those things because again rarely is it just one thing usually it's multiple things and so people watching this try all these things.

26:53Everything I've named here is either free or cheap and can make a profound impact on how you feel. We also, now we do have a strength training program that I would say is probably one of the more appropriate ones for raising testosterone. It's MAPS 40+. It's very appropriate strength training, similar to MAPS anabolic with some modifications for people who, you know, need to do some modifications, things like squats and deadlifts, but it's really a muscle building routine. Because of this episode, MAPS 40 plus is going to be 50 % off. So if you're interested, you want that strength training side taken care of with the workout, the videos, the sets, reps, everything, go to MAPS 40 plus, so MAPS40plus.com.

27:34Use the code testosterone50, testosterone50, you'll get 50 % off. We also address a lot of the lifestyle stuff that you talked about in this episode too. It's programming recommendations in there. Yes, lifestyle, diet, all that stuff. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs.

28:15With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a 5-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump