Boosting Testosterone & Understanding Your Testosterone Levels (Aging, Muscle Growth & Nutrition)

Andy Galpin (0:00)

The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and life. Welcome to Perform.

I'm Dr. Andy Galpin, I'm a professor and scientist of human performance. In today's episode, we're gonna be talking about all things testosterone and performance. In the previous episode, I had my colleague and friend, Dr. Ben House, and we talked at length about all things testosterone and performance. And I left that thinking, we covered so much ground, but yet, there's a few things that we either went through quickly or just didn't get the chance to touch upon. And I just wanted to come right back in the studio and complete that conversation. So that's our goal today. These two episodes should be viewed as independent. You can watch this one, watch the previous one, or you could watch them both, which of course would be my recommendation. But I want to be really clear. This is a standalone episode. It is not a summary of the conversation with Ben House. We're gonna cross some territory, of course, but as I mentioned, the real goal here is to extend that previous conversation and cover some more territory and certainly more in depth with more specificity than we had a chance to do in the previous episode. This is a fascinating area. I learned a ton from Ben. I learned a ton in the last several months preparing for this and going over the topic. So that said, let's dive in and start talking about testosterone and performance. So I wanna start with a quick overview of some of the most interesting and novel points that Dr. Ben House brought up in our previous discussion, and then we'll extend past those points. First and foremost is he made a really compelling argument that according to the analyses and studies that he's published in the last few months, there doesn't seem to be a drop in testosterone with aging. Now that doesn't mean someone who's older won't have lower testosterone than someone who's younger, but it's not the age that's doing it per se. In fact, what his data indicate are that this is primarily driven by obesity or other forms of metabolic dysfunction. And when you tease those parts out, rather, it seems to be driving almost all of a drop in testosterone through age. So that alone is going to catch some attention. So pretty good information and evidence that testosterone will stay the same in terms of total amount in men across the course of your life. And I will get into some of those details here momentarily. He also brought up another novel point, which others have discussed, but he really hammered at home in that things like your total testosterone is not what's going to predict how well you respond to strength training. As long as you are within what's called U-gonadal range, meaning your total testosterone level is normal. It's not clinically low or exogenously, meaning an anabolic steroid use, elevated. So if you have a natural normal testosterone range, which is generally considered to be something like 300 nanograms per deciliter up to a thousand or maybe 1100 If you're within that range, it does not seem to be predicting how much or how well you respond to strength training. We'll get into more of those details in a minute, but we'll go over that stuff quickly. On top of all that, I think one of the other major things like Glean from our conversation was the fact that low testosterone is highly reversible. And I'm calling it reversible because this is where this word of constraints comes in. If you were doing something in your lifestyle is constraining your testosterone, once you remove that constraint, it really does want to naturally rebound. And we'll go over the exact numbers here so you can see how much of a magnitude I'm talking about. But weight loss is the most prominent one. Psychological stress and sleep are probably the other two biggest levers. And really, when you compare that to things like supplementation, it's not even close the magnitude of benefit you get from just restoring those things. And one thing that I found really interesting is you don't have to be perfect. And I will share with you here momentarily the difference between just getting kind of good in those areas versus really bad. And the spoiler of it is, that's actually your biggest win. So no one needs to be perfect here, but as long as you get out of really bad, you're gonna see huge, and I mean huge, elevations in testosterone.

So that was kind of what we're talking about. Diving in then specifically, what does this total testosterone number look like, and how is this changed throughout our age, and with alterations in body composition? So we're gonna talk about the opposing ends of the spectrum. The first one is overfeeding. This is simply consuming more calories than I need, which is gonna result in an excess gain of body fat. And then we'll cover the opposite. What happens to my total testosterone when I don't eat enough calories? Now I like this because the majority of the research and public conversation is around obesity and health, and that's important. But I actually see the opposite end of the spectrum more than I see that, which is people with high caloric outputs, people exercising a lot or trying to lose body fat for whatever reason, sports or otherwise, and so they're under consuming calories. So we're gonna spend time on both of those. So you can really have a clear understanding of if you're at risk of low testosterone because you're not eating enough, or if you're eating too much, and then how to understand where you're at in that spectrum. The presenting sponsor of this podcast is Momentus. Momentus makes the highest quality supplements on the market, period. Every single one of Momentus' products is third party tested to ensure quality, and many are even NSF certified for sport. While I love all their products, I'm really loving their new creatine powder, which is called Signature Spec Creatine. I've long talked about the benefits of creatine for everything from helping to increase strength gains to the benefits it has with brain health. It is one of the most research supplements in the world and has demonstrated benefits, which is why I make sure to take at least seven to 10 grams a day. This new Signature Spec Creatine from Momentus is the highest quality creatine to date, with 10x fewer impurities and two to five times stricter heavy metal limits than any other premium creatine on the market. All of this is backed by the six stages of testing and certification. My favorite part is that the creatine is ultra finely blended or micronized, which allows for it to dissolve rapidly and easily mix into water or whatever liquid I'm pouring it into. If you'd like to try this new creatine or any of Momentus' best in class supplements, just go to livemomentus.com/galpin and use the code Galpin for up to 35% off your first order. Again, that's livemomentus.com/galpin and use the code Galpin for up to 35% off your first order. So, getting us started, a quick reminder, generally, people are going to consider clinically low testosterone being less than 300 nanograms per deciliter. From here on, I'm probably going to stop using the units, and I'll just call it points or just give you the numbers, but you can convert that to different units if you're used to other forms depending on where in the world you're at on this one. So 300 to 1000 is kind of our rough range. If you look around most of the studies, you're going to see something like 25 to 30 percent of adult men will be clinically classified as low testosterone, meaning a quarter or so of adult men have a testosterone less than 300 Now, that's true. The data are not wrong. That's not a manipulation. It's not falsified. But at the same time, it can be misleading because when you break down those data further, what happens is this is heavily biased by people who are clinically obese.