Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [TRT] Natural Testosterone Support Without the Shots, Pellets, Creams, and Gels w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Travis Mash and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged you will learn: When is the right time to talk to your doctor about TRT Why lower testosterone can be a good thing When is TRT the right decision DHEA and additional androgenic options Recommended dosing if you want to take TRT How gut health affects testosterone efficiency How environmental pollutants and toxicity affect total testosterone levels Is Clomid a healthy alternative to TRT How micronutrient deficiencies affect testosterone levels   To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Physiology Friday, it's back! Today we're going to be talking about testosterone, which is really cool because one of the first reasons in which I reached out to learn about Dan Garner was about testosterone. Because it turns out, I am 41 whole years old right now. When you turn 41, you kind of start wondering about this testosterone thing because I don't even know if I want to have the 23-year-old Anders Varner level of testosterone. I think that would get in the way of a lot of life right now. But we also need to understand

what that actually looks like to still have optimal testosterone ranges for the rest of our lives, specifically kind of in this 40-ish range with libido, recovery, muscle mass, and how important all of these things are to the understanding longevity. That is why I met Dan Garner, which allowed us to have this beautiful relationship in all things rapid health optimization and labs and working with the coolest people in the world. And that's what we're going to be covering on today's show. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. Dr. Andy Galpin is over there with a free video for you on how you can unlock your true physiological potential.

The three-step process we use at Rapid Health Optimization to make the best in the world better. And you can access that free video over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dan Garner. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about testosterone because everybody wants more. Nobody wants less. That's for sure. I've never had a phone call with anybody ever in the history of all things fitness. And they're like, dude, can you drop my testosterone levels?

I'm looking for something in the 200s. Does anybody have a path to 200 in the testosterone category? It doesn't exist. But this is also just like a hot topic. I feel like I saw in the news the other day that as a species, this is the lowest on average our testosterone has ever been in the history of since we've been testing it that is that means there's a whole lot of men floating around with a lot of excess body fat and no

desire to go be alpha terrifying should we should we just start with that like dan do you have any any thoughts on on why we as a as a society have a collectively low testosterone level compared to years past? You should do the really scientific one because I'd like to go on a rant about feeling like I'm doing something. It's not actually ever doing anything. My dad was here all week last week or not all week he was here on thursday and friday and he looked at me i was like dude i gotta work all day he's like you've been sitting on your ass for 10 straight hours you haven't worked at all i was like how dare you how dare you i've been working hard that's what work looks like you just sit on your laptop or your phone it looks like

you're not doing anything i am even if you're a fitness professional i'm at my desk yeah damn why is why is low testosterone like what do we call it an epidemic of male uh 20 2022 it's crazy an epidemic of male femininity. Maybe you just titled the show right now. No, for real. I think probably the closest correlation that you're going to find, there's a lot of things that you could point towards in terms of, you know, increased exposure to plastics, increased exposure to stress hormones, which act as antagonistics to testosterone, less activity overall, worse diets overall. I mean, these are all things that are going that are all at an all time high that all destroyed testosterone. But I would probably say the number one closest

correlation you'll find is body fat percentage and testosterone. The higher body fat percentage you're going to have, the lower testosterone you're going to have. And I think that with how overweight people are, especially, I mean, I guess males and females, but this episode will probably be more focused on male testosterone production. Males should be for optimized testosterone between 10 and 15 percent now the exact markers aren't uh or the exact figures rather aren't exactly um fleshed out within the literature yet because there's so many factors to take into consideration but once you get a little bit too lean you actually do reduce your testosterone again there is a that's a published data. They did a case study on a natural bodybuilder and he went through his pre-contest. He began his testosterone at 922 and got all the way down to 217 by the end of his pre-contest. Now he got to 4% body fat and

looked great, but going from 922 all the way down to the 200s, I mean, that's four times reduction in testosterone. So you'll come across some people that will tell you the leaner, the better when it comes to testosterone. But that's only up to a point. Once you start getting a little bit too lean, you actually start seeing reductions in testosterone simply because you're not eating enough for proper synthesis to take place. But when you have too high of testosterone levels, you also get activity of things that hurt testosterone, like insulin resistance, like stress hormones, like more inactivity, like a worse sleep quality, all of these things with obesity will hurt testosterone. But something that's highly relevant is aromatase activity of converting testosterone into estrogen. That has increased dramatically at high body fat percentages. So you're going to have way more estrogen than you're going to have

testosterone. So that, you know, from a bird's eye view, I would say is why collectively we're at a lower testosterone than ever, but I'll let Anders start yelling into the microphone now. I'll wait until at least like Bennett 30. You just, you want, you, you, you cued me up so well right there. I'm going to, I'm going to hold off. Cause I actually feel like one of the, it's really interesting. Um, how body fat, why, what is the reason that when you have excess body fat, that your testosterone is then turned into estrogen? Why is aromatase a thing in our body? It's very simple. Aromatase is found within body fat tissue. I know, but why would that process even exist? Your body, I would assume nature wants more testosterone. It's the sex hormone. It's going to be in charge

of muscle like so if you if you start putting on really bad body weight you would think nature be like dude this is not the path we want let's make more testosterone instead of making your situation worse and worse let's go the other way but estrogen is important i mean like that's the thing is that people think estrogen is so bad there are plenty of good qualities of estrogen. It's just that when you get obese, the body wasn't prepared for that. So it's doing too much. That's all it is. Yeah, there's protective mechanisms in place. And Travis is totally right. Estrogen plays a lot of protective roles. And it makes sense that actually the body would want to prioritize estrogen a little bit. So first off, before I get into anything,

estrogen didn't make you fat. You have more estrogen because you're fat. That's very important to point out. First off, that's an energy balance situation. Now, another several points I guess I'll make here, estrogen isrogen is cardio protective. So it does make sense that the body would want to protect the heart a little bit more in cases where say chronically elevated glucose and triglycerides could otherwise hurt cardiovascular health. Another thing is that even when you inject men with estrogen pre-workout, they burn more body fat. So testosterone, sorry, rather estrogen is very important for fat loss. You can look that up. That's published literature, you can inject men pre workout with estrogen, and they

will burn more body fat. And one of the reasons this takes place is because low estrogen is actually directly associated with low growth hormone. So when you have no estrogen, you have very, very low growth hormone, Growth hormones, primarily what's going to allow us to mobilize body fat and in turn, burn a lot more of it. So with respect to cardio protective ability, the effect of being able to burn more body fat, the effect of increasing growth hormone, not to mention there's over 100 studies, and I don't say that to be dramatic, there's literally over 100 studies demonstrating estrogens, anabolic and anti catabolic effects on physiology. So it's one of the most misunderstood

and underrated and underrepresented hormones in male physiology today. Even on top of this, as a sidestep from obesity, estrogen is what's the primary hormone driving erections and sex drive. You'll actually notice that a lot too if you work with bodybuilders. When they get a lot leaner and they get closer to the show, they want to start taking anti-estrogens to look drier and look leaner because it's going to help reduce water. That's usually the absolute tipping point where their sex drive is gone, gone. And a lot of that is because now estrogen is gone. It's a very prime driver of sex function and desire and even erections in male physiology as well. So you can build a very strong argument as to why we have an

innate biology creating that type of direction for us. Yeah. If we were to go and test like indigenous cultures that are not affected by sitting in front of Zoom and like their whole lives being on computers where they actually have to like get up and go do stuff every day, where, what is like an average testosterone level of people that are unaffected by modern society? So your testosterone, it's a large scale, which, which I never like it kind of whenever there's like an enormous reference range, it kind of just tells me, okay, so we don't know anything about this yet.

Yeah, it's like, hang on, it's like throwing a dart and just, okay, it's somewhere there. But the depending on what lab you use, I'm pretty well versed in US figures, just because that's predominantly where all my clients are. You're going to be anywhere from 200 to 900. That's the scale of testosterone. And your average person, if you had a pretty good testosterone, you're hanging around, say 500 to 600. If you're high testosterone, that's more like 700 to 900. And low testosterone, I wouldn't put 400 in that category, I would say like 300 or less is quite low. And it's not going to actually make you technically low. But if you want life optimization, rather than just surviving life, you're going to want a lot higher than 300. And some people actually question, you'll actually

come across if you run in circles of evidence-based coaching, you'll come across people saying that natural testosterone levels don't really matter. It's only super physiologic levels that are going to alter body composition. But research has actually demonstrated already that moving your testosterone from 306 to 570. So all within the reference range and not even all the way to the top, increase lean body mass by 6.6 pounds. So that's significant. 6.6 pounds is three kilos for those who aren't familiar with those numbers moving from, uh, 306 from 306 into 570. That is a big difference there. So I think that any kind of advantage we can get to get to that normal range or high normal range is going to create a big impact on all parameters of health and performance. Because

if you took like, let's Anders, let's say you've got a biological twin, and I put you on the exact same diet and the exact same program as your twin, but one of you has low testosterone, who's going to get the better result? The guy with more testosterone. Absolutely, because it's not just the calories and training that you're doing. It's the physiology that is taking in those calories and performing that training that's going to determine the end result. Like that's why steroids can do what they do. Exactly what I was going to say.

If you put two people on the same diet and training program and one's chemically enhanced, the anabolic and anti-catabolic and fat loss and energy expenditure effects are completely and utterly different. So the higher you can get on that scale, massively. So the higher you can get on that scale, the better in any respect. And there's actually a hilarious study that can upset some people, but I'm going to go over it anyway, is because it's funny. They took four groups. They had one group take 600 milligrams of testosterone and train. And then they had one group that was natural and trained. And then they had another

group that took 600 milligrams of testosterone and didn't train. And then they had a placebo group do nothing. I know this study. Yeah. So of course the placebo group, they got the least gains. But what was funniest about this study is that the natural group that trained the entire, this was a 10 week and it was kind of a weird program. They just did bench and squat, four sets of six each three times a week. The natural group that trained for 10 weeks built less muscle than the group that did nothing at all and only took 600 milligrams of testosterone. How bad does that suck? That's a sore right in the ass for natural Chinese and demonstrates how powerful hormones are. I feel like there's also the psychological component of it. Like if you're on testosterone, like you're going to have better mental clarity. You're going to be more confident. clarity you're gonna be more confident you're gonna be more aggressive like there's it's not just about putting on muscle mass it's like you you're gonna be able to do hard

work and it's gonna feel good and because you can do hard work and it feels good you want to do more of it and you will train harder because it feels good to train harder like the next day you feel better than other people yeah you recover quite you recover faster and so you want to train again, so you're going to train again sooner so you can do more frequency. Like it just scales. Yeah. I feel like I heard that on Huberman for the first time and I was like, that makes so much sense.

Like there's like a feeling to that. I feel like it's not just – I used to get it all the time in the gym when I was training really hard and like had real gym goals, but now it's like business or, uh, business is the big one. But, um, when you, when you put those days in and you see the momentum building, you're like, you're trying to, um, get that feeling back of like accomplishment every single day. And, uh, when I heard him say that, I was like, ah, that's like the actual feeling of the hormone coming through. So I used to feel in the gym all the time. Now it's like on a daily basis, you're like checking the box of hard work and

accomplishment and it feeds itself. For sure. And people don't realize what they're capable of, even without drugs. But once they begin, say, testosterone, then they actually just naturally start pushing themselves more, even when it doesn't make sense. So like I've worked with a ton of people who take special supplements and they could have something, say, say testosterone stipulate, which more has a half life of 10 to 14 days. They could have their shot that morning. And then later that afternoon, they're already increasing the weight in the gym. They're pushing themselves way harder. It makes

physiologically no sense at all that they could have pushed themselves harder that day, but they do. And they get better results for it because now they're actually allowing themselves to take themselves to the next level because that belief in buy-in, even in the absence of the actual chemistry change, is huge enough in order to create a major effect in physiology. Excitement of what's to come. I mean, I've noticed a lot of friends who took steroids in the past. Like, yeah, the minute they take it, they're stronger that day. I think it's just excitement of what's to come.

And then in a few weeks, it's like a bomb goes off. In about three weeks, it's just excitement of what's to come and then in a few weeks it's like a bomb goes off in about three weeks it's explosion I'm curious if you can I've heard you talk about pieces of this so you're going to know the details but how stress is related to testosterone production where the pathway goes basically from

cholesterol to pregnenolone and then if you're super stressed it goes toward cortisol and if you're not as stressed it'll go toward all the variants of testosterone. Can you walk us through that pathway and how all that works? Sure. Yeah. So it kind of begins in the brain. Like we talked about the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal access in previous cortisol episodes. The hypothalamus pituitary gonadal access is what's going to allow us to make our own testosterone. So we're going to get gonadotropin-releasing hormone from the hypothalamus, and then that's going to bind to some receptors on the pituitary.

And then the pituitary is going to shoot out luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone. Luteinizing hormone primarily driving testosterone synthesis, follicle-stimulating hormone primarily driving spermatogenesis. So depending on if you want kids or if you want testosterone, your method of choice kind of changes a little bit there. But once that testosterone synthesis, so it's going to bind to something known as to lay dig cells on the testes, you're going to bind to lay dig cells. And then that's actually going to kick off the process with cholesterol. So you're going to bind to latex cells. And then that's actually going to kick off the process with cholesterol.

So you're going to have cholesterol and you're going to throw it together with some micronutrients to create a cool thing called acetyl-CoA. And then acetyl-CoA can be converted to pregnenolone in the mitochondria. And once you have pregnenolone, it's known as the mother of all sex hormones because you need it to make anything. If you want to make DHEA, if you want to make any of the estrogens, if you want to make testosterone or androstenedione, they all come from pregnenolone, but so does progesterone and cortisol. And basically when you have

pregnenolone, it's only going to go in one of two directions. It can go left in order to prioritize a stress pathway, or it can go down in order to make DHEA, which is the precursor for all of the estrogens and testosterone. So just kind of think of that visually for anybody listening right now. That pregnenolone can only go one of two ways, DHEA to make things you want, or it can go left in order to prefer a stress pathway to make cortisol, which you want sometimes, but not all the time. When you consistently have stressors in your life, your body is always going to make cortisol 10 times out of 10, because stress is associated with survival. As far as the evolution of our biology, we haven't come leaps in magnitudes in terms of the intracellular pathways that take place in us with respect to stress. So anytime you were exposed to stress back in the day, in a lot of ways, it meant life or death. If a tribe was going to invade you,

if there was starvation taking place, if you were in a fight with another guy, or if you were in a fight with an animal, if it was hunting, all of this stuff is very fight or flight based. And you are going to prefer that stress pathway at the expense of the DHEA pathway, which would have otherwise got you all of the estrogens and testosterone that you want. With chronic stress, due to traffic, due to hating your job, due to not being happy in the relationship that you're in, due to overtraining in some cases, due to not sleeping enough, all of these things are going to have pregnenolone going left, left, left, left, left, constantly to make more cortisol. And when you use the same resource to make stress hormones, as you do to make testosterone, but you're making stress hormones constantly, then your testosterone

will always suffer 10 times out of 10. And that's why that antagonistic relationship exists to begin with. Anytime you are stressed, the raw materials used to make stress hormones will go towards stress hormone synthesis at the expense of testosterone. And that's why you see supplements say like ashwagandha improve testosterone by up to 15% in some research. And it's not because they activate the latex cells and increase testosterone. No, it's because they reduce cortisol. And that antagonistic relationship just begins to correct itself so you can make more of what you want and less of what you don't. That's beautiful.

Yeah. You mentioned earlier plastics. You actually mentioned like three things, and I basically flagged for all of them in my lab reports. Plastics, stress, work, diet, lab reports. Plastic stress. Plastic. Work night and activity. Stress, sleep. Lifestyle. Lifestyle was a big one because I did all my labs with you when I had a four-month-old.

So I'd love to just kind of break in. The plastic one is really interesting because I wouldn't say I've done research on it, but I've been paying a lot of attention to plastics in my life after getting my labs done. Um, and I don't know how we escape this as a society, much less a single human being trying to eliminate plastics and like the food we're eating. Like we, I feel like we have glass Tupperwares, but every time I go and get a Starbucks coffee, I just look at it and I'm like, I'm about to pour piping hot coffee through this plastic thing as if it's not melting while I'm drinking it and I'm consuming like just how does plastic…

That's why you get cold coffee, cold coffee. Problem solved. I'd rather have estrogen. I know. Totally. How do we – how does play play into the testosterone conversation because that if you also if you have listened to that episode on rogan where the lady talks about plastics and uh basically your uh low testosterone and reproductive abilities for the rest of your

life is one of the most terrifying things it's like the most terrifying two hours that you, I don't know if Rogan ran out of things to say, or was actually so taken back by the research on how plastics and reproductive cycles happen for men throughout their life. You should go listen to it. It's terrifying, but on like a more practical level, how do we deal with plastics in our life? Because they're freaking everywhere. And I flag for plastic toxicity. Yeah. I mean, and I think that a lot of people will because like the four of us here, we kind of grew up where we were microwaving our food in plastic. We were taking all our lunch to school and work in plastic. Like there's really nobody talking about it at all, but that's kind of the way things come to be. You know, there's several things that

would have been considered quackery 20 years ago. Like if you discuss the microbiome 20 years ago, you were considered a quack. If you discuss inflammation, if you discuss, there's so many things, even sunlight, getting access to sunlight. Like if you discuss these things 20 years ago, people say that guy's a quack, he doesn's talking about until research comes out and you're like, Hey, what was that you were talking about again? Holy crap. It's like that, that continues to happen. And that that's happening in the world of, um, and I, I don't even like to say, I don't like to say toxicity because so many people do not understand it. And, uh, that word's kind of been ruined in a way. Um, if you look in the literature and you want to actually do real dives on this stuff, look for POPs, persistent organic pollutants. The research in that world

is going to absolutely blow your mind. Some of these things in our physiology, they have a half life of a decade, a half life. So consider coffee. A half-life is when something is in your system and it degrades in half after a certain time period. So caffeine has a typical half-life of five hours. So if I have a large coffee, which is 200 milligrams at noon, at 5 p.m. I'm going to have 100 milligrams in my system. And then at 10 p.m. I'm going to have 50 milligrams in my system. At 3 a.m. I'm going to have 25 milligrams in my system. That's a half-life playing out. A half-life begins in some of these compounds after 10 years. So it's unbelievable. You can see a baby's umbilical cords have things like styrene and rocket fuel in them. It's unbelievable how long this stuff from many, many decades ago is still in

our physiology today. And that's continuing to create a lot of issues. I think we'll probably have to attack this as a podcast all by itself. But one kind of cool anecdote that I'll bring back to testosterone here that a lot of people don't know about, but I'm going to talk about it in in-person seminars in the future, is there are compounds, toxicity compounds, that have chemical pathways to not leave physiology. So just like something, as if it would be something that is trying to survive and thrive, just like a parasite or a bacteria has certain protective mechanisms to stay in physiology, certain toxic compounds actually reduce resting metabolic rate, so they cannot be mobilized and excreted out of the body. I know that sounds absolutely insane, but the literature is already out there. There are certain, when you put people in hypocaloric states, you can not only

measure their resting metabolic rate, but there's predictive models at which you can predict how much their metabolic rate will reduce in response to hypocalorism. Those who have high levels of persistent organic pollutants reduce significantly more than those with moderate to low levels of persistent organic pollutants in that these people need to create a way larger caloric deficit in order to not just achieve fat loss, but to actually try and get rid of these toxic compounds to begin with, because there are certain mechanisms in place that are keeping those compounds in physiology. And that in turn is going to make those populations

struggle much more when losing weight, which will, of course, add to their trouble with testosterone because not only are they having a harder time dropping body fat, which hurts testosterone, but they also have toxic compounds in their physiology, which absolutely hurts sex hormone synthesis as well. So that's kind of a hint as to some things I'll be talking about this year, but stuff we should absolutely do an episode on in the future. Yeah. So there's like the natural half-life of 10 years for whatever compounds, like, but is there ways to, to use supplements or pharmaceuticals or whatever it is to like to bind to these compounds, to have them be excreted at a faster rate? Yeah, absolutely. You're basically

looking to do mobilization, binding, and excretion. And those are three different processes at which you get rid of something more effectively. So it's absolutely possible in order to get the job done. But it's not through doing a juice fast or drinking any kind of tea, especially when you're looking for real human trials in order to get it done. What's actually existing in the literature looks way different than some nonsense you're going to see in the supplementation industry. How does sauna play into this? Is sweating it out something like one of the one of the ways that people can start to kind of detox on this stuff? 100%. So that's just a part of excretion. So basically, you've got phase zero to four, in terms of getting something out of your body,

phase zero, they called it phase zero, because it was only discovered in 2007. So they actually discovered phases one, two, and three before they discovered phase zero. So they just called it phase zero. So if you have a cell that can detoxify something, like say a hepatocyte, a cell in the liver, getting something into that cell, just getting it into the cell, a toxic compound is phase zero. Phase one is changing the molecular structure of that compound so that it's ready for phase two, which is converting that compound into something that's water soluble. Now this compound is water soluble, so it's ready for phase three, which is excretion. So we can sweat it out or urinate it out. So going in the sauna makes sense for excretion, but only once it's

actually been put through phase zero, one and two first to be considered water soluble so that it is ready to be excreted. And most of these compounds are fat soluble. It's known as biotransformation, converting something that's fat soluble into water soluble. So sonus can help, but unless you have phase zero, one and two in check first, then it's not going to do a whole lot for you. Gotcha. Another piece that you've brought up on the testosterone side of things is sleep. And I've seen you post on your Instagram account about even like the percentage is just going from like eight to nine hours can increase the testosterone production by 15%, which is a crazy number. But what are some of the mechanisms in play that makes sleep so important when it comes to testosterone specifically? Most all systems are anabolic during sleep. So anabolic in terms of

hormones are being synthesized, yes, but also bone tissues being remodeled, ligaments and tendons, muscle tissue, neurotransmitters. Our body is basically doing a full recycle and restock. And this includes hormones as well. And the physiology behind sleep is absolutely huge. There's a book called Why We Sleep from Matt Walker. That's an excellent read. And there's also good information on sleep from a biologist named Robert Sapolsky. He wrote a book called Why Zebras Get Ulcers. And he did some great stuff in the world of sleep as well. But yeah, even in like, I really like speaking in normal terms, because there is one study a lot

of people reference and they say sleep deprivation results in a reduction in testosterone by 33%. And although that's true, they actually kept those people awake for 33 hours. I'm kind of like, that's kind of cool, but not that relevant. So yeah, it demonstrates that there's a pathway in place that we should probably learn more about. But what's more realistic? Well, in a way more realistic sense, restricting sleep from eight hours to five hours resulted in a 10.4% reduction. So that's a lot more relevant to me because I know a lot of people, myself included, a lot of the times that will sleep maybe five hours a night and then try to overcompensate it with stimulants. But a 10.7%

reduction in testosterone is huge when you're talking about a scale that can go up to 900. Can you talk about the relationship between total and free testosterone and, you know, what the numbers on each one of those mean? Sure. So your total testosterone doesn't always mean a lot because it's bound to something. There's a lot of binding proteins, but something that's super relevant is sex hormone binding globulin. Sex hormone binding globulin, it's a protein that the body uses to grab onto hormones and then act as a vehicle. So if this hormone needs to be somewhere else in physiology, then it'll grab onto it and take it somewhere else in physiology. But so long as that hormone is bound to sex hormone

binding globulin, then it can't bind to any other testosterone receptors. So it acts as a vehicle, but if there's too many vehicles, then we've got a lot of hormones with nowhere to go. So it's much more relevant to look at total testosterone and free testosterone because free testosterone is not bound to any vehicles. That's the bioavailable usable testosterone in physiology. Now, some people kind of misinterpret that and begin to look at it as if it's important to really lower sex hormone binding globulin. You'll see a lot of this in, say, biochemistry circles where people, okay, sex hormone binding globulin, testosterone can't bind to any receptors. So if we lower sex hormone binding globulin, we're going to increase free testosterone. That kind of makes sense on, say, a theory perspective, but sex hormone binding

globulin does do more than that. And there's actually very, very good research and correlations that the lower your sex hormone binding globulin is, the higher chance you're going to die. Mortality risk goes up dramatically. And sex hormone binding globulin actually also increases heart contractility. So it helps your heart beat more effectively. But sex hormone binding globulin also increases breathing. So it increases your ability, your bronchial, um, alveoli, your ability to actually take in oxygen a lot more effectively. And this kind of starts slowly making sense in some powerlifting and bodybuilding circles,

because the number one thing that reduces sex hormone binding globulin is insulin. If you want to lower sex hormone binding globulin, take insulin or eat a lot of sugar. But the problem with really low sex hormone binding globulin is now there's more stress on the heart, we've increased our mortality risk and we're breathing a lot less efficiently. And I know bodybuilders, a lot of them who take insulin and put a lot of stress on their heart and breathe like shit. A lot of them. So that entire, that game, that whole game between, okay, total testosterone, free testosterone. We want more free, so let's lower sex hormone, vitamin, and globulin using carbs and insulin. It's like, crap, we've reduced our mortality.

Crap, there's more stress in my heart. Crap, I'm breathing like a bag of shit right now. Then you kind of, it's like in the name of results and progress, I'm still going to do it because I want to increase my bench. I still don't even think that that's necessary because boron and magnesium allow testosterone to unbind from sex hormone binding globulin. And that's why you'll actually see in literature that magnesium and boron increase free testosterone. So in my opinion, instead of trying to lower sex hormone binding globulin, let's ensure boron and magnesium status is on point so that your total testosterone gets effectively converted to free testosterone on an as-needed basis like biology designed it to do.

Well, I was always wondering why some of my bodybuilding friends, I mean, you know, because they do cardiovascular work, you know, you'll see them on the treadmill. But still yet, they would, you know, act like a power lifter. They would walk a few feet and they're sweating and can't breathe. So there you go. And they're ripped. I'm like, you should be able to breathe. Power lifters, if they're fat, I get that. But a ripped dude should be able to breathe.

But now I know. Yeah. And like that, that sex hormone binding, I've been to hurt you in that category. But then a lot of these guys also will have sleep apnea as well. So then you're kind of getting hit while you're awake, and you're getting hit while you're asleep, and I think that there's just better ways to go about it. I wonder what the overall mortality rate is for bodybuilders.

Lately, every other week, somebody dies. It is an epidemic now and in that world so like anyone out there bodybuilding really you gotta really want it and ask yourself why do you want it actually dan when is your uh seminar coming up on blood work for bodybuilders may 28th yeah that's awesome yeah yeah i've sent it to a ton of friends yeah i'm gonna be doing i'm doing a talk on blood work and bodybuilding because there is a lot there's a yeah they need it because the epidemic is really a lack of good education that that's like if guys just knew a certain few things to track and how to augment that stuff even just like what i just talked about right

there is boron and magnesium like probably 99% of guys don't know that kind of stuff. And you're already talking about a very risk averse population. Like they're willing to do whatever it takes in order to get the job done, which is fine. I actually love that kind of passion. I work with these people. I work with people who want to be one percenters. There's a cost to that and but the way in which you want to approach it is to at least minimize the cost i know what you're going to do but let's at least minimize the cost while not sacrificing your performance because there's some silly things that you'll do or not know about that would have allowed you to get the result but take less than half the damage like the amount of the tank i know in powerlifting world it's like i wouldn't i was never willing to like go to these places these guys are willing to go

but yet i was winning i'm like you know it makes no sense i can still have kids i feel great they're dying and they lost to me it's a sad day so like use your brains yeah go to go to this guy's seminar for sure isn't that like the most testosterone testosterone cliche thing you can do is be 27 and take it all the way to the end, and then one day you're like 35, and you're like, that was so stupid. Why did I do that? That is like the – that is testosterone speaking to you when you are 27 years old trying to be in the 1%

without like the real conversation on how the long-term effects because they don't matter. That's why everybody, all the Olympians would prefer to take steroids to win and even if it meant they died in five years or whatever that study was. Dan, some of these dudes will take like, they'll say that if you're not taking 10,000 milligrams of testosterone per week that you're not even taking steroids. I'm like, you are a fool, man. It makes no sense. It makes no sense because your administration

should be based on milligrams per kilo. So whenever someone just says 10 grams, it's like, what the fuck are you talking about? That literally makes no sense at all. You weigh 400 kilograms. You're not 880 pounds i mean yeah yeah when when you are working with somebody who's obviously taking super physiological doses of exogenous testosterone like what are the red flags you're looking for on blood work to make sure this person is you know going to be healthy enough to to win and compete but but like also not not healthy they're going to be able to win and compete, but also not healthy. They're going to be able to win and compete, but then also they're healthy enough to get by until they're done competing.

Yeah, not that. There's a lot of things that you have to take into consideration because if you give 10 guys a stack, you're going to see 10 different lab reports. So there is a lot of individualization to take into consideration here. Just like anybody, if you put 10 people on the same diet, 10 people on the same training program, physiology and the way it responds to stressors is always different. So it'll be very individual from one person to the next, especially from a mental health perspective.

But from a physiological perspective, with respect to testosterone, what you're going to want to look for mainly is red blood cells and lipid profile. So with some people, you'll actually see HDL reduced, which is your good cholesterol. And then you're definitely going to see an increase in red blood cell count and all of the measures associated to that. So things like hematocrit, mean corpuscular volume, mean corpuscular hemoglobin, mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration, all of these things will begin to rise. And that really thickens the blood and makes the stress on the heart even more. So that boost in red blood cell production can actually create an acute performance increase.

But then it's important to control red blood cell production with cardiovascular training, but also for those populations just to give blood anywhere from two to three times per year, depending on what your numbers are. Because if you've got blood that has the consistency of salsa, then your heart has to work so much harder than it already had to, to move a 300 pound body around. Do you work with any cyclists? No, no, I've never worked with a cyclist. That world is a whole new ballgame, man. I mean, I know I studied, I was, when I was studying ergogenic drugs, cyclists take things to even a newer level because you know they're taking the EPO and testosterone so you're just like their blood is literally I know one guy had died it was like this

world class and he just went to sleep didn't wake up and his blood was like sludge they said yeah so thick there's guys out there who actually they're in their cyclists and they have to get up in the middle of the night and cycle or do aerobics or they'll do yeah to loose to loosen their blood up because if they stay immobile for too long then their blood actually locks up and that's what killed that guy so you actually have to set an alarm for the middle of the night to get your blood moving dear god that's too far well like yeah no kidding man if he forgot to set his alarm you don't wake up like that's in that's insane and that's some of those groups will get a guy that goes around and wakes them up because you know they do it in teams they'll be like the

mitsubishi team or whatever and still have a guy who wakes each of them up to get up and do the little thing, go back to sleep, so they're alive. That would be a red flag to me. I'd be like, all right, I'm out. We're doing what? Wouldn't you think that level of sleep disruption would be detrimental to your performance enough where you would not want to take it that far? But they're doing all that stuff anyway. What's the balance?

When they're taking growth hormone, they're doing all that stuff anyway. What's the balance? When they're taking growth hormone, they're doing all the things that sleep does, but just chemically. I don't know, but ask the expert. That's just my thoughts. I would say that if your hormones are all synthetic, then sleep's restoration of hormones isn't going to matter too much.

Also, your 24-hour sleep count is going to help too. So if you did four hours on and then – or on as in sleeping. So four hours sleeping, wake up, move the blood around, and then four hours sleeping, you still got your eight hours in and you didn't die. Was that the same though? Because like you know how if you want like REM sleep and you want deep sleep, are they ever able to get into those?

For sure. Yeah, that happens in 90-minute cycles. Oh, good. Yeah, cycles being a pun here. Yeah. Earlier you were talking about the range of total testosterone being so large and kind of saying like we don't really know that much about it. I think you said something like 300, 900. I've like 300 like 1300 on some some um you know labs that

i've done and i've always thought that was similar to like if you took something like a mile time and you're like well the you know the standard mile time for you know men between 20 and 80 is between like five minutes and like 20 minutes and and you're're 1750, you're in the normal range, like you're fine. But that's absolutely horrible for a mile time. Of course, if you're a 30 year old male, who's like somewhat fit at all, do you view testosterone kind of the same way where it's like, really, there should be much tighter ranges for the different age demographics? Yeah, 100%. And even even testosterone reduction as you age isn't really a thing. You'll actually find literature, biological age is very different than chronological age. So if you took the average

testosterone of all of the 45-year-olds out there, it's going to be very low. But then if you took John Berardi's, it's going to be high. And that's because biological testosterone is very different than chronological testosterone because that guy is as healthy as anything he looks posted his did he yeah he just posted i want to say like uh maybe like three or four weeks ago and do you remember what it was they're like extremely high that that makes sense is that because you did it is that because of you no no but i just it makes sense for everybody not watching on Zoom, he was saying no and nodding yes. Yeah, the dude has his life in order. Like it's very, he comes across as very low stress, very active. He's very lean. He's a happy guy. This is, these are all things that

are going to boost testosterone. That actually leads right into one of the questions that I wanted to ask about just overall lifestyle. And I mentioned earlier that when I got my labs done with you that I had a four-month-old, which is like not only insanely stressful with really low sleep, but also there's, I would imagine there's some sort of evolutionary thing where it's like, hey, dad, don't go over to the neighbor tribe while your wife is breastfeeding and up all night. You should probably lower those T levels so that you don't feel like you're going to be out doing your warrior dance at the neighboring fire. With him, he posted it as his lab work when he owned Persistent Nutrition and his lab work when he owned persistent nutrition and his lab work now. And those

two differences were gigantic. Yeah. One building a company, very stressful, especially precision nutrition, uh, post sale, uh, which he did very well on and his current lifestyle, much lower stress. Uh, I would imagine a much, I wouldn't say happiness is the word because that's a very loaded word, but there's significantly lower stress levels than trying to build a company to nine figures or whatever it is that he got to. How does lifestyle factors play into it? Even if you are eating well, you have all these pieces lined up, but for eight hours a day, you're just kind of like battling life. Yeah. So just make nine figures and you'll be good. Yep. That's the goal. No, for real. Just go build Precision Nutrition.

Yeah. The best nutrition company in the history of the world. We'll be fine. Yeah. Your lifestyle and your attitude play a huge role from a history of the world. We'll be fine. Yeah. Your lifestyle and your attitude play a huge role, um, from a lot of different perspectives. So there's actually research out there that, um, demonstrates five minutes of talking to an attractive female increases testosterone, 30%, 30, three zero. Um, so that, that's a huge, um, acute increase. So depending upon your lifestyle and your confidence to go do those things, that's just one example of how being successful in certain social situations and not bringing a ton of anxiety with you, which is going to produce stress hormones and reduce testosterone, that

all of these things kind of contribute to what would be considered a high testosterone guy. Your lifestyle also with respect to the decisions you make, like alcohol. Alcohol is very well demonstrated to reduce testosterone on top of reducing sleep quality, which is going to reduce testosterone even more. So like your assertiveness in situations, your alcohol consumption, even your like choice of training style like uh there's differences people most people never actually achieve overtraining because they don't know what it's like to actually overtrain and they've got to train hard much less train hard for like five

months in a row yeah so there's actually research this was done by fry at all and um he demonstrated it was very very cool um i was i was my advisor in graduate school for a period of time do you know the one rm study i'm about to talk about absolutely yeah that's actually how i got to university of memphis well i met fry in vegas and we we drank scott we drank scotch and smoked cigars together and that was my graduate interview i called him up a few months later i was was like, I want to come to your program. He was like, yeah, we'll count Vegas as your interview. You're in. No way.

And then after I was there for like a year, he bailed and went to Kansas. And I see him every once in a while. But yeah, I know the stuff you're talking about. Go ahead. That's so funny. Yeah. So it's basically just the difference between intensity over training and volume overtraining. So he actually had people performed their one RM 10 times a day for two weeks straight. So 10 times a day, one RM, two weeks straight,

testosterone levels unchanged. So intensity-based overtraining does not impact testosterone, but volume-based overtraining does every single time. Every single time, volume-based overtraining will crush your testosterone levels. So that's, to me, a lifestyle factor. How do I choose to set my goals? How do I choose to train? What gives me reward? Which path you choose to go down impacts your testosterone a lot. So there are many different lifestyle factors that all come into play. Sleep, stress, training, pathway, drug use, alcohol. It's all there. You just wrecked a major argument amongst weightlifting coaches. Really?

You just upset their feelings and I'm about to make sure they know. I'll send you the study. This stuff's available. It's not my opinion. I'm going to look up the study. Yeah, great. I can't believe I've never heard of this study yet because, yeah, they're always like, oh, you go too heavy too often. You know, we just increase our volume like crazy so our athletes won't get hurt. Check yourself. Yeah. And those guys also, they weren't even allowed to say that was my weight at max.

If they got the lift, they had to add five pounds until they failed. They went to failure every time twice a day for like two weeks. They had to add five pounds every time. This is the best day of my life right now. You can ask Andy about that because Andy was actually with me when we did all that. That's how we both met Andy Fry and both ended up at University of Memphis because we were out in Vegas together. That's so funny, dude. I want to go study with this guy.

What a small world. Yeah. That's cool. Surprise me. One thing that actually just came to my mind right now, and I guess I'll put it in the lifestyle category, is how much you like to cheat on your diet. It's associated with testosterone, but not directly going to, I guess you could make the argument it's going to directly affect it. But what I've seen is that bad fats actually

increase the binding of sex hormones to your prostate. So high testosterone was already associated with prostate hypertrophy, which is what a lot of people hear of right away when it comes to testosterone therapy or anabolic, just legit anabolic steroid cycles is what's going to happen to my prostate bad fats actually increase the rate at which your prostate is going to hypertrophy so very relevant point to um point out here as well is how often you eat crap is not just going to impact your waistline dan garner where can people find you, bud? At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. Go follow him. Coach Travis Mash.

Mash Elite Performance. Instagram, mashelite.com. If you want to go check out the website. And I'm looking up that study as we speak. Doug Larson. Doug C. Larson on Instagram. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged and Barbell underscore shrugged.

Get over to rapidhealthreport.com. If all of this stuff is interesting to you, wait till you see Dan Garner read my labs. Watch your mind get blown. Schedule a call with me. Come hang out. We're going to make you super healthy. And we're going to chase optimal performance here by making you as healthy as possible.

Friends, we'll see you guys next week.