Testosterone has been a clickbait buzzword in the health world for decades.
However, its significance in a man’s body has been equivocal and confined to the title of the “primary male sex hormone”. While it is the foremost sex hormone, testosterone’s serendipity is not solely manifested in the bedroom.
It is a crucial player in numerous metabolic actions and its presence is a requisite for growing muscle, defying age, staying cognitively sharp, and preventing disease.
This multifaceted hormone plays various important roles in the body and it is an essential component in cultivating health and attaining athletic dominance.
Men who are looking to boost their testosterone for increased muscle gains often fall victim to buying testosterone enhancers that are “guaranteed to boost testosterone in 30 days!”
While there are some promising supplements that can upregulate testosterone production, the large majority of testosterone supplements are a waste of both paper money and emotional currency.
The truth is that most men will see their testosterone levels soar through the roof by not actually buying anything but rather changing their daily sleeping and dietary habits.
The best things in life are free and raising testosterone is no exception. Now let’s look at the three most effective ways to advance your testosterone into levels where optimal health and athletic excellence will be achieved.
Lifting weights is a sure fire way to increase the presence of free testosterone. However, unless you are getting sufficient rest, testosterone has a challenging time showing up and getting to work.
Testosterone expression is contingent upon the decreased presence of cortisol, another hormone known for regulating stress. Working in relationship with the sunshine, cortisol naturally lowers at night in correlation with our sleep.
However, if you are not sleeping sufficiently, cortisol remains at higher levels which results in the inhibition of testosterone secretion. Multiple studies examining sleep’s effects on testosterone have all concluded that sleep deprivation suppresses testosterone production.
This is why sleep is absolutely essential for elevating testosterone. To maximize testosterone synthesis, working with cortisol’s circadian rhythm is imperative so shooting to be asleep by 11:00pm should be a primary goal.
Sneaking their way into pretty much all fast food, prepackaged food, and supplements, vegetable and seed oils are arguably the most devastating substances humans consume.
The triglyceride shape of polyunsaturated fatty acids (vegetable and seed oils), leaves room for oxygen atoms to maneuver themselves onto the fat molecule to do what they do best: institute inflammation via free radical cascades.
Just as oxygen enables a fire to ignite in nature, the same rules apply in our bodies. Minimizing and neutralizing free radicals requires the total avoidance of vegetable and seed oils.
Furthermore, these opportunistic criminals impair cellular membranes, allowing for the destruction of mitochondria.
Disease starts with defective mitochondria. Health accumulation cannot happen with malfunctioning mitochondria.
Additionally, vegetable and seed oils have repeatedly been shown to lower free testosterone, reduce sperm count and impair sperm motility.
Avoiding vegetable oils in America is a challenging task that requires extreme vigilance. Keep your eyes out for The Hateful Eight seed and vegetable oils: canola, sunflower, corn safflower, cottonseed, rice bran, soy, and grapeseed.
For a man who wants to live a healthy and fit life, circumnavigating vegetable and seed oils will allow for testosterone to ascend uninhibited.
There has been a long-held belief that elite athletes can eat anything because “they burn so many calories.” This is a deeply flawed train of thought because it leads to the belief that all calories are created equal.
This is nutritional blasphemy. A calorie is a unit that represents energy and tells us nothing about nutrition. One calorie from an apple is not metabolically equal as one calorie from a Snickers bar.
The nutrient density of the calorie from the apple would be beneficial while the calorie from the Snickers would be considered an antinutrient, meaning that it does more harm than good.
Furthermore, testosterone homeostasis necessitates very specific nutrients such as the B vitamins, boron, zinc calcium, vitamins K2, A, and D.
You cannot acquire these nutrients by using calorie counting as your only nutritional methodology.
Instead of counting calories, count nutrients and antinutrients. Think “What sort of vitamins and minerals are in this?” or “Is there excess sugar in this?”
Nutrient sufficiency is crucial for testosterone production and testosterone levels will not be mediocre at best if you are lacking these micronutrients. Through eating minimally processed and whole foods, testosterone will then have all the right ingredients it requires for thriving abundantly.
Prioritizing sleep, shunning the Hateful Eight oils, and focusing on eating real nutrients will lay the groundwork for maximizing testosterone.
When these things become second nature, testosterone will work its physiological magic and you’ll reap the many health and fitness rewards of having Spartacus-like testosterone.
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