How Does Exercise Increase Testosterone Levels?

Low testosterone brings a lot of other medical problems with it. Men with low testosterone are at greater risk of developing depression, sexual dysfunction such as erectile dysfunction and cardiovascular disease. There are plenty of options available to men looking to increase their testosterone levels; of which exercise is probably the best. Medical research has put a lot of emphasis on the relationship between exercise and testosterone. When combined with supplements to boost testosterone, exercise can help you recover from your testosterone deficiencies. As such, this blog will discuss the exercises that can help boost testosterone and reduce testosterone, along with natural ways to boost testosterone in the body. Contents

• How Your Fitness Level Affects Your Testosterone Levels
• Does Exercise Increase Testosterone Levels?
• The Best Exercises To Increase Testosterone
• Are There Exercises That Can Lower Testosterone?
• When To Exercise To Get The Best Results
• More Natural Ways to Boost Your T-Levels

How Your Fitness Level Affects Your Testosterone Levels

Fitness incorporates multiple factors, such as your weight, whether you have any pre-existing medical conditions and your age. Each of these factors affects your testosterone in different ways. Obesity can affect the brain’s ability to regulate hormones. If you’re overweight, then your pituitary gland might malfunction and your body may under-produce testosterone. Excess weight is why many obese people suffer from erectile dysfunction and lower libido. If you have a condition like diabetes, nerve damage during the later stages of the disease could prevent the transmission of signals from the brain to the testes to compromise testosterone production. Similarly, if you have a heart condition or high cholesterol, the lower blood flow to the testes will reduce testosterone production. Finally, as all men get older; the body produces less and less testosterone. The body malfunctions much more often as we grow older and one malfunction specific to older men is the lower production of testosterone. Men who get regular exercise and maintain healthy diets will probably never experience testosterone problems. With regular exercise, your cardiovascular system will remain healthy, you will never be overweight and your body will age much better. Research indicates that since regular exercise can prevent the development of many illnesses, it’s also linked to consistently healthy T-levels in the human body. Since exercise is essential to maintaining your fitness, it’s also linked to testosterone production in the body. If you maintain your fitness through regular exercise, it’s very unlikely that your body will ever suffer from a T-deficiency.

Does Exercise Increase Testosterone Levels?

The prevention of illnesses isn’t the only way that exercise helps with healthy testosterone production. Certain types of exercise can also increase testosterone in the body. Resistance training or high-intensity training places strain on the body, which increases the potential for muscle growth. When your body is strained during HIIT exercises, it releases testosterone to help the muscles grow. For this reason, regular exercise is often linked to increases in testosterone production in the body. In cases where your body doesn’t produce enough testosterone in the body because of obesity or prior illnesses, it can restore testosterone production in the body. If you have diabetes and the resulting nerve damage reduces T-production, controlling your diet and exercising more often will help your body function better. As the effects of diabetes become less pronounced, your body will increase T-production beyond what the production was before you made the lifestyle changes. You must remember that not all exercises boost testosterone production in the body. Research indicates that endurance exercises reduce the amount of testosterone in the body by increasing the concentration of cortisol in the blood. You need to ensure that your exercise routines don’t hinder testosterone production. To prevent this, you should consistently change your training routines to maintain healthy levels of T in the body.

The Best Exercises To Increase Testosterone

As we’ve mentioned before, there are two ways in which exercise increases testosterone levels. Firstly, it improves physical health to ensure consistent T-production and secondly, it stimulates muscle development, which stimulates T-production. This narrows down the range of exercises you can use to increase testosterone. Any exercise that strains your body will increase testosterone. This usually includes resistance training, weight lifting and high intensity training routines which will leave your body burning with physical exertion. If at any point you feel that your body is getting used to the strains from your workouts, you should immediately change your routines. Any workout that doesn’t put a strain on your body comes under the heading of an endurance exercise and will only reduce the strain on the body. To prevent this from happening, you should change the exercise altogether, or you should increase the weights so that a consistent strain is placed on the body. If you hold on to these considerations, then you will walk out of your workouts a completely different person. Having said this, here are some options you should try out to boost testosterone in the body:

Weight Lifting

A few days into weight lifting, you feel aches and pains throughout your muscles. This is called DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). Although medical experts don’t fully understand what causes the soreness, the prevalent theory is that the pain is caused by micro-tears in the muscles. As you continue to work out, the muscle gets less sore and your instructors tell you to shift to higher weights. As you work through the pain, the repairing tissues and muscles develop more blood vessels to accommodate greater blood flow and oxygen to help you lift heavier weights. As more blood vessels develop within the muscles, the muscle around it also grows. Testosterone and growth hormones are two very important chemical components of the muscle healing and growth process. During heavy weight lifting exercises, the body realizes that the muscle needs to grow to accommodate the heavier weights. In response, it releases growth hormone and testosterone to help with muscle growth. As you increase the weights, the more testosterone will be released to accommodate greater muscle development. If you’re looking to increase testosterone levels through exercise, then you should put yourself up against increasingly heavier weights to stimulate muscle development. This is not to say that you should lift heavier weights each successive time you go to the gym, but rather keep pushing yourself if you feel that a certain weight level has been reached. In addition to increasing the T-levels in the body, strength training also replaces fat tissues with muscle mass to fix any medical problems arising from your excessive fat. Multiple studies have testified to the efficacy of resistance strength training in helping boost testosterone production in the body. Each of these studies concluded that weight lifting increases testosterone concentrations in the blood across all age groups, although these effects weren’t as pronounced in older subjects as the younger ones.

High-Intensity Interval Training

High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a special kind of training regimen where you work out in short bursts of intense activity. It’s used to help prepare your body for intense physical strains in short spans of time so that it can bear any amount of short term physical activity. Most exercises conducted during HIIT revolve around increasing the oxygen capacity of the whole body. While weight lifting shifts focus towards each muscle group, HIIT works out the entire body at the same time. As you move through increasingly strenuous HIIT regimens, you will literally feel like your T-levels are rising. Researchers are of the opinion that HIIT increases peak power output in the muscles by directly affecting muscle power. The intense strain on the body throughout HIIT routines does for the whole body what weight lifting does for specific muscle groups. When the effects of HIIT were studied, it was seen that these benefits were a result of higher testosterone production in the body. As the body gets used to one specific form of HIIT, it is suggested that you shift to more vigorous HIIT session which will continue to boost T-production.

Increase Your Reps

The only way exercise can ever help increase T-levels is if you place consistent strain on your body. If you keep pushing your body, then your body will push itself to increase muscle mass or strength in the body. This requires it to produce extra amounts of testosterone. If you feel that a certain amount of reps is too light and you can’t increase the weight, then you should increase the number of reps instead. The extra reps will put your muscles under strain and stimulate T-production. Always remember that if you don’t feel like your body has completely been spent from weight lifting, then you probably won’t achieve higher T-production either.

Are There Exercises That Can Lower Testosterone?

The type of strain you put on your body will stimulate the production of specific types of hormones. Endurance training, for example, forces the body to morph itself to handle very specific types of strains. Marathon athletes have to train a lot to run marathons, but after a certain point, their muscle growth stagnates. They train their bodies to handle only certain types of strains and the body instead of growing accommodates enough strength to bear only those strains and no other. You can consider this the process of streamlining the body, where muscle growth isn’t important but perfecting the muscle is. Endurance training reduces T-production and enhances cortisol production instead. Some forms of endurance exercises include:

Jogging

Jogging is a lighter form of cardio that doesn’t place as intense strains on the body as resistance training or HIIT does. People jog to improve the conditioning of the body and as their bodies get used to running a specific distance, then only increasing the distance will help raise T-levels. If they continue to run the same amount of distance, then their bodies get used to running only that amount and nothing more. They will not get winded, but their body won’t produce as much T as it otherwise would.

Biking

Biking is similar to jogging in that it is only stressful for short periods of time until the body becomes used to going a certain distance. Only with increasing the distance you bike or reducing the time spans to go a certain distance will ensure higher T-production otherwise, it will fall.

Swimming

Swimming is another example of an endurance training exercise where your body gets used to the strain very quickly. You should make sure that you put greater strains on your body as it gets better at moving through the water. Try increasing the time you spend in the pool to continue swimming to make sure that your body continues to push itself and produces greater testosterone.

When To Exercise To Get The Best Results

Testosterone levels in the body fluctuate throughout the day. It’s the highest in the morning and it’s the lowest in the afternoon. Experts say that working out in the afternoon won’t help as much because the low testosterone won’t allow for sufficiently intense workouts. Similarly working out in the morning might help with muscle growth, but it won’t increase T-production levels since there’s already too much of it in the body. To get the best results, exercise in the evenings after work while you have moderate T-levels in the body. This is enough to get an intense workout and leaves enough room to push T-production beyond ordinary levels.

More Natural Ways to Boost Your T-Levels

Although exercise does boost testosterone levels in the body, the general consensus is that it doesn’t have as much impact as many people would like. You could instead use herbal supplements which can help boost T-production in the body. Herbs like Fenugreek, Ashwagandha and minerals like zinc and magnesium can increase testosterone production in the body. Testogen, for example, is an all-natural herbal formula that contains all of these ingredients and more to help boost T-production without any side-effects.

Conclusion

In many ways, exercise and testosterone go hand in hand with one another. Although exercise alone can’t give huge increases in T-production, if you combine these with natural supplements, then you will enjoy greater testosterone gains in the long run. This blog has spoken of all the ways in which exercise boosts testosterone; it has further described which exercises are the best to boost T-levels and how you can enhance the effectiveness of these. You should consult your doctor or fitness instructor if you’re going to change your exercise routines to boost testosterone production. Taking all the necessary precautions will ensure that you live a healthy life.