Six rules for increasing testosterone levels

Here are the basic rules to follow if you want to raise your testosterone levels. Some experts advise a bunch of ways to raise testosterone-often these methods include taking vitamin and mineral supplements. This is where the big supplement manufacturers make the music. But in reality, if your blood levels of zinc, for example, are not 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.

Testosterone levels can rise and fall slightly for a variety of reasons, most of which are minor and temporary. However, these rules are the most significant and the most sustainable. Follow them if you need fuel for your muscles.

Rule 1: train hard

How much paper has been inked trying to describe exactly why and how intense exercise stimulates testosterone levels, but few experts now deny that it does. To anyone who understands the principle of adaptation, this does not seem paradoxical. Your body functions according to the biological principle of homeostasis. One way to describe the principle of homeostasis is to say that in order to conserve energy, your 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 make sluggish muscles grow. If your body believes you can survive by playing computer games, sitting on the couch, and eating donuts all day long, why would it expend energy on producing extra testosterone? You don't need it, do you?

However, if you really have to fight for existence and hard push-ups, pull-ups and other exercises feel like your body is fighting for existence, then your body gets used to producing large amounts of testosterone so you can create tools and finish the job, 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 - as in an iceberg, as in a plant or a human. The same is true for bodybuilding. Very few bodybuilders realize that testosterone is only produced at night. More specifically, testosterone is produced during the fast asleep phase (FBS). The main point to remember is that in the first few hours of sleep, there is quite little FBS, but the longer you sleep, the more there is. This continues until you have exhausted all of your available sleep reserves. In short, for every minute of extra sleep your body produces testosterone.

Most Americans are chronically sleep-deprived. 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 cancerous brain tumor, there is no such thing as "too much" for a bodybuilder. If you manage to sleep 14 hours a day, hell, do it. Some might say that's antisocial. Well, that depends on what you compare it to.

Rule 3: Don't be a fatso

When obese men have had blood tests, they have found negligible levels of testosterone. It didn't matter if they exercised or not. This may sound like gender chauvinism, but women have to have more subcutaneous fat than men in order to have a childbearing function. 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 fact fat cells are chemical factories. Specifically, adipose tissue produces aromatase, an enzyme that finds testosterone (responsible for muscle and strength) and turns it into estrogen (responsible for sagging nipples). This is why fat guys have low testosterone. Every extra kilogram of fat is an enemy base, destroying the right substances and replacing them with female hormones.

The downside is a vicious cycle. The more weight you gain, the less testosterone you have and the harder it is to pump muscle and burn fat. The upside is the same as the downside: the more you work out by clenching your teeth and avoiding overeating, the more fat is burned into your body. With every pound you lose, you reclaim some testosterone, which speeds up and simplifies the further 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.

Rule 4: Consume cholesterol

By and large, bodybuilders on low-fat diets forget that testosterone is made from cholesterol - cholesterol forms the building blocks of testosterone. That's why vegans (unless, of course, they're sitting on chemo) have muscles like Ray Harryhausen's walking skeletons. If you follow rule 1 and give your body enough exercise and rule 3 and don't let yourself get fat, then a little cholesterol-rich food like eggs, sausage, cheese, and a fatty piece of meat won't hurt you. But it will raise your cholesterol levels.

Rule 5: Be teetotalers

Smoking gets carbon monoxide into your bloodstream, and this substance is bad for your ability to turn cholesterol into testosterone. Alcohol lowers testosterone levels in several ways. Beer, for example, contains hops, which are a powerful phytoestrogen (that is, plant estrogen). Hops are converted to estrogen in the body very quickly. For example, women who harvested hops already had delayed periods hundreds of years ago. It has always been known that alcohol kills libido, hence the term "drunken unsteadiness". Interestingly, Protestants opposed the Renaissance purity law for beer in Germany because they understood that alcohol destroys the libido.

Another point that athletes are simply not told about is that the job of the liver is to secrete enzymes that limit the amount of estrogen in the body. When you take drugs (even those sold at the drugstore), you kill the liver, and it becomes increasingly difficult for it to suppress estrogen release. One of the most obvious signs of liver dysfunction in male drug addicts and alcoholics is shriveled genitals and gynecomastia (literally enlarged breasts). When estrogen levels in the body are so high, testosterone levels become critically low.

These five rules are the most important to follow if you want to improve your hormone levels - in that order. But there is also a sixth rule.

Rule 6: Don't take steroids.

Simply put: The most damaging thing to the hormonal background of the modern athlete is steroids.

"How can that be?" - many people ask. Guys who take steroids build tons of muscle, don't they? Well, pretty much, yes. But they pay a disproportionate price for it - endogenous testosterone levels.

All modern steroids are in many ways synthetic analogues of testosterone. At the very moment when you take the chemical, the homeostasis principle starts working and the body thinks that since there is so much new testosterone around, there is no point in producing your own. So gradually the endocrine system fails - it literally commits suicide. That's how it turns out that even athletes who take steroids in moderate doses have shriveled genitals-their testosterone-producing organs (genitals) are failing. This is why those who are on steroids have "boob shaming" syndrome--gynecomastia, which is the growth of the mammary glands. This is incredibly common in bodybuilders today.

Perhaps the worst thing about all this is that the damage caused by steroids lasts a long time. Yes, if you have been taking steroids for a short period of time, you will be able to recover your testosterone levels to some extent after many months, but the higher the dose you take and the longer the recovery process, the longer the endocrine system suffers. You may not know that those who take steroids for long periods of time never produce testosterone again. Their body simply can't do it-it is no longer capable of it. Once the damage they do to their endocrine system reaches a certain level, it can no longer recover. These people are totally dependent on drugs, and the sick person doesn't care if they are dependent on dialysis. So what about strength? Remember, the whole point of bodybuilding is to create the right hormonal background. But by taking steroids, you're doing exactly the opposite... You're destroying your endocrine system from within.

There is a myth today that it takes steroids and big weights to get into incredible shape. This is a picture of bodybuilder Bobby Pandour. Pandour was born in 1876, and synthetic testosterone (made from cholesterol!) was invented as far back as 1936, so this is one of those rare cases where you can be sure you're looking at 100% natural muscle. Pandur built his muscles solely with his own weight and muscle control (isometrics) technique. He was convinced that lifting excessively heavy weights was detrimental to his health, and he never lifted dumbbells heavier than 10 pounds while training. But he was as strong as an ox, and in shape he was a match for modern bodybuilders on steroids. It's very real.

Despite what you may think, the medical industry is furious that steroids have become illegal because it means they can no longer bar- live this crap. They're trying to get around the law now, though. They just call steroids testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and sell the very idea that modern men need to take steroid medication because we are somehow oddly flawed and have low testosterone levels. Modern men don't have low testosterone because they are sick-it's all about lifestyle.

STT is a fraudulent trick invented to take money out of your pocket and kill your endocrine system. Why do the "doctors'' benefit from constantly weakening your natural testosterone levels? So that they can sell you this crap for the rest of your life! Don't believe in illusions when dealing with exogenous hormones. They harm your endocrine system right away - from the first injection, from the first pill you put in your mouth. If you want to be strong and muscular in your old age, you can achieve that by following the rules I've introduced you to, but if you take steroids, forget it. The current steroid boom will lead to an even bigger pharmaceutical disaster in the future. In the next few years all these guys who are trying to look pumped up in the clubs will be in their 40s, 50s and have the testosterone levels of eighty year old women.

Don't join their ranks. Dedicate your life to intense training and a healthy lifestyle and you will be strong, muscular and healthy into your old age, just like my mentor Joe Hartigan, who could do one-arm push-ups in his 70s, like Joe Greenstein, the "Mighty Atom," who bent steel bars in his 80s, like Manohar Aich, who competed in bodybuilding competitions in his 90s. They succeeded because they adhered to the six simple rules outlined in this chapter.

You can join the ranks of these glorious men. Following these six rules will dramatically increase your testosterone levels in a matter of days. If you follow these rules steadily for months and years, over time you can effectively develop your endocrine system, just as bodybuilders selflessly develop their muscular system. Old-school athletes had more testosterone in their old age than the average modern twenty-year-old office hamster. They got it right, and so will you.

The modern myth of testosterone deficiency

The modern myth of testosterone deficiency

An argument that is made in defense of steroids and ZTT: "Modern men live in a world polluted with harmful substances and toxins, they are forced to eat foods that have been processed and therefore have lost their nutritional properties. For this reason, the average man today lacks the right substances to activate the natural production of testosterone as men did in previous generations."

If an athlete decides to take steroids, that's his problem. But this reasoning is just an excuse that many lazy athletes cling to.

Be that as it may, testosterone levels do drop over time in men.

Our ancestors were engaged in hard physical labor-they got a daily workload comparable to that of the gym. Today, many guys leave labor to machines and sit at office desks themselves. That's why their bodies don't produce enough testosterone.

We sleep less and less because of irregular working hours. Before electric light bulbs were invented, people slept 10 or more hours a night... now the worker sleeps an average of 5-7 hours. Modern men lack the REM sleep phase, during which hormones are restored.

Being overweight, which literally turns testosterone into estrogen, was a rarity 100 years ago, and fat people were paraded around in a circus circus circus. Now the problem has assumed epidemic proportions. You could say it has almost become the norm.

While previous generations ate fresh, healthy food high in cholesterol-eggs, ham, cheese, whole milk, lard-the modern "rippers" eat high-carbohydrate convenience foods. This is how a vicious circle is closed.

Light drugs and alcohol have always existed, but in today's world the problem of their use is much more urgent than before. All of this lowers testosterone levels.