How to naturally increase testosterone with exercise (types of exercise, reps, rest period, etc.)

how can you optimize your workout to boost your testosterone I'm Dr Rena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today I'm going to tell you all that we know about how to boost your testosterone Naturally by exercising we're going to talk about how the body produces testosterone how intense you need to make your workouts what kind of exercise should you be doing and what is the order of exercise you should do whether it's resistance training or endurance training lastly we'll talk about the lasting effects on testosterone as well as what factors can limit your ability to

produce more testosterone naturally so how is testosterone made well 95 of the male body's testosterone is produced in the testicles and this is done by specialized cells called latex cells the signals to stimulate these cells starts from the brain in the hypothalamus which releases a hormone called gonadotropin releasing hormone this hormone causes the pituitary another part of the brain to release LH LH sends signals to the late excels of the testicles to then produce testosterone then testosterone goes to specific cells around the body including the muscle then the testosterone goes inside the cells and binds

to an androgen receptor The Binding of the testosterone and the antigen receptor then causes a Cascade of Gene production which then goes on to make proteins and building blocks for your body how does exercise actually lead to increases in serum testosterone well when you exercise there is a release of both catabolic and anabolic hormones that means hormones that break you down and grow you up one of these hormones includes testosterone this increase in testosterone also upregulates the expression of the Androgen receptor and subsequently causes increases in protein synthesis and the theory is that after exercise

your testosterone goes way up this increases the half-life of the Androgen receptor mRNA which is the gene product of the Androgen receptor and increases its Half-Life so this makes makes it more likely that you're going to have hypertrophic adaptation or essentially muscle growth but it's important to note that there appears to be a threshold of metabolic demand or volume of work that you need to achieve to actually get the testosterone boost so let's get into it we're going to talk about the intensity of the workout the number of sets and repetitions the order of the

workout as well as the amount of resting period you should have so let's start with resistance training resistance training has been studied and specifically used these terms so you'll understand them intensity describes the difficulty of the exercise and is typically based on the amount of weight that you lift a repetition maximum is the maximum amount of weight you can live for a defined number of movements and volume of work which I said is the key marker for testosterone boosting includes the number of sets the repetitions and the intensity of the work so let me give

you an example for increasing intensity if you did 5 five reps of something with a hundred pounds and you did then five reps with 150 pounds you have then increased the intensity but if you went from five reps of a hundred pounds to 10 reps of 100 pounds you increase the volume in the testosterone size looking at what types of exercise actually boost testosterone there have been two kind of bigger studies that have come out once they looked at three to five repetitions of three lower body exercises that a hundred percent of 6 RM or

repetition Maxes so meaning you're maxing your weight capacity and doing six repetitions three times of each of the three exercises the other side I looked at five sets of ten repetitions of ten repetition maximums so not focusing on the numbers I just gave you but the thing to realize is that you need to be using your 100 repetition maximum so you want to take the heaviest weight that you can to do the entire set what about endurance training so endurance training does increase testosterone in the short term so when doing very short durations or two

to five minutes of 90 to 100 VO2 max which is kind of the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during an exercise usually in order to find out your VO2 max you'll either get a stress test at your doctor's office or go to an exercise medicine sort of Clinic where they can measure that for you so an endurance exercise specifically you will often see an initial increase in testosterone but later because of the stress of the aerobic exercise your body starts releasing cortisol and cortisol then inhibits testosterone production which causes a decline in

the testosterone particularly in high Elite endurance athletes you'll find that they may actually have lower testosterone levels this is because the high endurance athlete creates what's called reactive oxygen species in response to stress these reactive oxygen species can actually blunt the pathway in the brain that tells the testicles to make more testosterone so when you're comparing should I do resistance training or should I do endurance training ideally resistance training is going to be the one thing that boosts your testosterone the most there also have been some small studies which have looked at high intensity interval

training that do show improvements in testosterone levels after performing high intensity interval training however looking at the data a lot of the data says the testosterone boosts only for an hour or a short period of time after the exercise some Studies have shown improvements in testosterone as long as 48 hours after the exercise but it's important to realize that doing one-time resistance training is not going to boost your testosterone levels for a prolonged period of time what about the number of sets and repetitions well as I mentioned before the volume of work is what matters

the most so you can modify the numbers of sets and the numbers of repetitions as long as you keep the intensity high and you can get get the same amount of volume of work what about training to failure well one study actually looked at this they essentially followed 40 men and they divided them up into three groups one that exercised to failure I mean they worked out until they could not lift anything anymore the others exercised not to failure and the last group didn't exercise at all what they found was that those who did not

go to failure had greater gains when doing lower extremity exercise in muscular power output whereas those who went to failure had larger gains in the number of repetitions they could do with the bench press but what about their testosterone they found that the group that didn't go to failure had lower cortisol concentrations meaning they had less stress in their body and had higher testosterone levels so going to failure may not be the best thing for your testosterone level all right so we said resistance exercises are the best but what kind of resistance exercises well as

we mentioned before or you want high intensity but you also want to use large muscle groups so even if you do a high intensity small muscle mass it's not going to boost your testosterone for example a jump squat which is using your lower extremities and your core are going to have a higher testosterone increase than those who are getting the bench press also things like squats and Olympic lifts can actually produce a higher increase in testosterone what about using free weights versus machine when they looked at this free weights actually increased plasma testosterone levels more

than those who had machine weights the reason for this is likely because when you're using free weights you're also using other muscle bodies like your core to help stabilize whereas with machines they really try to isolate the muscle that you're exercising with what about resting periods how long of a rest should you take so in a study looking at intensity number of sets and repetitions as well as resting time what they found was that moderate intensity higher volume and shorter resting times actually had a higher increase in plasma testosterone so using a shorter rest period

in this case using 60 seconds versus 90 seconds led to better improvements in total testosterone levels so if you're going to do both resistance and endurance training what goes first well based on the hormone physiology you want to use as we mentioned before large muscle groups and you want to be able to have that elevated testosterone level throughout your entire workout so the best bet for having a greater boost and prolonged boost in testosterone is to start with the resistance training for us using the large muscle mass followed by the endurance training what about changes

in the basal testosterone level that means your resting testosterone level when you're not exercising does doing resistance training actually impact that level well from now we're not exactly sure while we've seen that continued bouts of exercise particularly in one city where they looked at 3 three different bouts of exercise they persistently saw increases in total testosterone after each of the bots of exercise so we know that the resistance training does improve testosterone level even when done repeatedly if you're exercising regularly regardless of the type or intensity of the exercise it does not seem to have

a lasting effect on the basal testosterone level however we do see some small studies particularly in obese individuals and older patients where we do see an increase in basal testosterone levels the theory for this for at least the overweight and obese individuals is that they're also losing weight so they're losing waist circumference as well as fat loss which can also boost testosterone levels so if you want to see the continued testosterone boost you got to keep doing the resistance training that's why you never Skip Leg Day alright so what if you're doing all the right

things you've been doing all the right exercise but you're still struggling while there are a couple factors that make it more difficult to boost testosterone response the first one is obesity obesity can cause endothelial dysfunction as well as vasodilation of the blood vessels what that means is the blood vessels are not as good at carrying blood to and from the testicles this can then make it more difficult for them to respond it does seem that they do boost their testosterone but it may not be as high of a boost as someone who is leaner in

weight the second thing is age so man's ability to produce testosterone peaks at about age 40. after that it tends to decline about one to three percent per year over the course of the lifetime and this is just like any other part of your body the cells in this testicle called the latex cells have less of a response because they've gotten older to the stimulation produced by the brain or the pituitary so older men still similar to obese men still Mount to response but usually it's less of a response than younger men but the bottom

line I want you to take away from this video is regardless of your age any other condition editions you have your weight there is sufficient evidence that doing resistance exercises with large muscle mass using moderate to high intensity with short resting periods and high volume can produce increases in testosterone level so right after you're done watching this video get up and do some jump squats you can do them right at home you don't need a fancy gym and start getting that boost of testosterone as always I'm going to take care of yourself because you are

worth it [Music]