Mark Bell's Power Project - Beginner's Guide to TRT: Benefits, Risks, & Natural Alternatives Explained!

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Testosterone is the hormone every man thinks they understand, but most get wrong. In this episode of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, hosts Mark Bell and Nsima Inyang learn from hormone expert Dave Lee as he breaks down everything you need to know about TRT (testosterone replacement therapy). From the benefits and risks of TRT to natural ways to boost your testosterone, this episode dives deep into the facts that every man should hear.Discover how testosterone affects mental health, stress resilience, and energy. Learn why more young men are experiencing hormonal decline and what you can do to fight back. Dave Lee also uncovers the truth about weight loss, supplements, and lifestyle habits that make or break your testosterone levels. Whether you’re considering TRT or just want to optimize your health naturally, this is the podcast episode you’ve been waiting for.Follow Dave on IG: https://www.instagram.com/imdavelee/Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!Best 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=enFollow Andrew Zaragoza➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/Chapters:0:00 Testosterone's impact on mood, brain health, and stress7:20 Natural ways to boost testosterone before TRT11:20 Why younger men are facing hormonal decline13:05 Obesity, weight loss, and permanent hormonal damage16:30 Lifestyle habits that maximize TRT results18:00 What hormone levels reveal about testicular health21:15 Tips for shift workers to improve sleep and health25:45 Alcohol: Balancing enjoyment and health risks30:15 Holistic self-care to naturally improve testosterone34:50 Dangerous supplements to avoid36:20 Supplements that enhance health and performance41:00 Essential nutrients for better health and energy44:10 Vitamin D and CBD for immunity and well-being48:40 CBDA for arthritis and inflammation relief53:15 THC’s effects on hormones and sleep57:55 Natural testosterone vs. injection-based production1:02:50 Balanced hormones for better performance1:09:00 Preparing for accurate hormone testing1:12:20 New trends in testosterone treatments1:17:10 Cream-based TRT for lower side effects1:18:50 Weight loss injections and insulin resistance solutions1:26:10 The importance of personalized TRT approaches1:31:00 Testosterone's role in overcoming life’s challenges1:35:40 Transitioning from heavy lifting to functional exercise1:40:25 Free resources on hormone education

A lot of the time when people think about testosterone, they think about it purely as a performance enhancing or like an anabolic agent. Testosterone has a lot of very interesting mechanisms in the body. So it regulates all of the neurotransmission firing the way that it's supposed to. If someone's in a suboptimal testosterone state, they're going to be more systemically inflamed. Their bodies will be less healthy. And when the body is less healthy, we make less dopamine. Not only does testosterone increase drive, but it also increases calmness. If we can have this combination of this molecule that makes you more driven forward, more motivated, but then

also give you something that at the same time allows you to stay cool, calm, collected under stress, that's a really good state for a man to be in. And sometimes people might not know or understand you don't just go to TRT clinic just for steroids. People need to be patient, but I think the best thing that people can do is focus on nourishing the human body with what it needs, which is essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, with sunlight, with good sleep, and then with good home cooked nutrition.

But you wanna check all your hormones because if other hormones are deficient, not only will that create issues with tolerating the optimal amount of testosterone, you're gonna become overstimulated, you're not going to be able to sleep properly, you're not going to be able to focus your mind. So when we hijack this system, it's a really complex system. Maybe permanent damage.

It would seem so, yes. We were talking a little bit on our walk about testosterone and like testosterone brain, sort of like what testosterone can do for the brain. And maybe some people are unaware of maybe some of the positive, maybe we can get into some of the negative as well. some people are unaware of maybe some of the positive, maybe we can get into some of the negative as well. But what are some of the positives? Like what are some things that testosterone can do for somebody?

Yeah. So a lot of the time when people think about testosterone, they think about it purely as a performance enhancing or like an anabolic agent. And testosterone absolutely is anabolic. And I'll come back to the term like anabolic androgenic steroid, which is what AAS is an abbreviation for. And the part of testosterone that I think is best to look at from a mental standpoint is the more androgenic side, the masculinizing side. And testosterone has a lot of very interesting mechanisms in the body.

So I was previously doing a master's in neuropsychiatry. I wanted to learn how the brain worked. And what you end up learning is how to drug people. You don't really, and you don't really learn how the drugs work either. So it was quite scary. So when I was trying to understand, like I had this, I had this question that I was kind of posing to myself, which was why is it that the world is objectively, probably depending on who you ask, the best time to be alive.

But so many people are dealing with this like low grade depression. You know, they maybe don't want to end their life, but they don't want to get out of bed. And this seems very prevalent in my demographic at the time. I was like mid twenties. So when you look at how human biology works, hormones sit at the top of a lot of cascades. They're kind of like marionettes,

like puppet masters for how all these processes work. And a lot of the time when we talk about hormones, we talk about neuro steroids, which is basically looking at how these hormonal molecules regulate the way the brain functions. So the difference with something like testosterone versus something like amphetamine, like if we use Adderall for an example,

is that amphetamine releases neurotransmitters for no reason. So you can sit here, stare at a wall, and your brain will just flood dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, mainly dopamine. And that leads to this euphoric state. Testosterone, on the other hand, doesn't do that. But what it does is it regulates all of the neurotransmission firing the way that it's supposed to. So that when you go into a workout or maybe you're really

into Marvel movies before it went to shit and you went and watched like Endgame or something like that, maybe you were like me, you watched it the day it came out in like the Gold Class Cinema and it was like one of the best days of your life. But when you do something meaningful or something that exerts effort or something that has purpose, it's supposed to feel good.

It's supposed to light your brain up like a Christmas tree. And when hormones are deficient, dopamine doesn't transmit properly. So dopamine transmission doesn't work. And a lot of the time when testosterone is low, because we have to look at things on this spectrum of biology, if testosterone is not optimal, it's suboptimal. So if someone's in a suboptimal testosterone state, they're going to be more systemically inflamed, their bodies can be less healthy. And when the body's less healthy, we make less dopamine, we synthesize less dopamine, and then we clear it out faster. So it's kind of like this opposite end of the spectrum where testosterone

makes things feel good that are supposed to feel good, but the other side of that coin, like what I was affectionately referring to was like the Jager bomb of hormones before, is that not only does testosterone increase drive, but it also increases calmness. So if we can have this combination of this molecule that makes you more driven forward, more motivated, more interested and driven to push outside

your comfort zone, but then also give you something that at the same time, the same molecule then allows you to stay cool, calm, and collected under stress. That's a really good state for a man to be in, especially in his 20s and 30s when he's still trying to make something of himself. Can you go a little bit deeper on the calmness aspect, because that's not something I've ever heard

anybody mention, that's testosterone. Yeah, it's usually the opposite, right? Usually people assume it's the opposite, right? So what do you mean when you say testosterone increases calmness? Yes. So a couple of things. So from like a behavioral standpoint, sometimes people associate high testosterone as someone who's got like a hair trigger, like aggression window, like triggered, boom, throw a punch. This is more associated with massive doses of things like trend alone,

roid rage, things like this. These are not, this is not the action of a bioidentical hormone. So what testosterone does primarily via its conversion to DHT and its metabolites is it modulates what's called the GABA-A receptor. So it basically modulates in terms of it brings the sensitivity up to where it should be for the receptors that things like alcohol, Valium, things like also mindfulness meditation, things that bring you into a calm state, it makes that part of the brain fire properly as well. So it may not act like a sedative, but it brings your brain into a state of equilibrium that it should be in. And that balance between drive and calmness under stress is very important because one

of the primary aspects of what testosterone does biologically, not just in the brain, but everywhere is it acts as an opposing force to cortisol and adrenaline. So when we think of cortisol, cortisol is catabolic. It breaks things down. So testosterone is something that is basically making you more biologically and psychologically resilient to stress. And in terms of calmness, I would say that's what facilitates being calm, is being resilient to stress.

So it's not necessarily going to make someone, you know, you do a couple of shots of testosterone and you become a stoic, but it does lend to a more stoic lens in which to view the world through. Yeah. It seems like it in some ways can just make you a little stronger, right? Like stronger mentally, stronger physically, right? Yeah. What about just like your natural testosterone? I mean, we know like a great way to get it is to be young, But like, and then also it seems like you have to have

a lot of things intact in order to have your testosterone be, or at least it seems that way. At least it seems like you got to have your sleep intact and like all these other things. What does just like, some natural testosterone kind of do for us and how could someone maybe go about boosting that up in a safe way? Which I'm not saying an injection of it.

I'm not saying it's not safe, but. Yeah. This is the most important question for anyone who is or isn't on TRD for a couple of reasons. So we should always be, if we're looking to optimize testosterone, the first part of that discussion should be, how can we try to fix the natural production first?

Testosterone placement therapy should only be initiated if the cause of low testosterone is what's called intractable, meaning we can't fix it. There's nothing that can be done. It's broken. It's gone. And in that case, testosterone replacement therapy kind of becomes a no-brainer because we don't have to worry about damaging a natural production that's already destroyed. If it's decimated, it's not going to be of any merit to you. But what we want to do is see if we can recover the natural levels optimally. And the reason why this is still important for guys on TRT is what I've found practicing

in the space for a long time now is that if you're wanting to inject yourself with optimal levels of testosterone, you have to be living in a way that you would be making those levels naturally if you could. The gap between those two scenarios is what causes side effects. And people can fixate on the mechanism and how the side effect occurs. It can be mediated by estrogen or water retention or this or that. But what's driving that inflammatory cascade is taking a supercharged engine and putting it into a piece of shit Suzuki Swift. And this creates a biological disconnect because this is unnatural.

This is now super physiological, even if it's within the reference range. Because if you are overweight, alcoholic, you know, looking after yourself terribly, you're never going to be at the top of the reference range or above that for testosterone. It's not possible. So if we then take that and go, okay, body, you're suppressing the production of this hormone because I'm living so terribly, but I'm smarter than you, I'm going to come in and inject the levels

of a healthy 21 year old, you're kind of asking for a problem. So it's important that guys on or off TRT are looking at the same thing, which is what can I do to either optimize my natural production or optimize the way my exogenous, meaning external testosterone works. And it's basically, it's doing all the stuff my grandma told me to do growing up.

Getting plenty of sleep, getting plenty of sunshine, not eating garbage, removing the vices is a big one, drugs, alcohol, junk food, not doing enough exercise. That's the big cluster that causes the most problems in practice, but excess body fat's a really big one. Excess body fat. Anything over 15% body fat in men will contribute to some degree of insulin resistance, and this is the pathway that drives a lot

of these metabolic problems as well, is insulin resistance. Yeah, just having higher body fat, your fasted insulin most likely is going to be a little higher, and then over time, your body's like, gets resistant to that insulin since it's constantly elevated, right? Absolutely, and this problem extrapolated out chronically seems to be the underlying driving factor

for the four big diseases of aging being cancer, heart disease, dementia, and diabetes. So insulin sensitivity is very important and the main thing that we can all do day to day to improve insulin sensitivity as well as natural testosterone reduction is plenty of exercise, a good amount of muscle mass, and a lean body 5%. So you use the term or the term broken, right? If they can't get it back themselves. Now I guess what one would wonder is like, how do you know if you're at that place?

Like, have you been doing good protocols for a good amount of time and you see no change? Like, how does someone actually know? Yeah, this is a really good question because this is the stuff that's practical, right? So the part that kind of prefaces this discussion is that 20, 30, 40 years ago, testosterone replacement therapy was just for older men. So you get to the age that a woman would hit menopause, a man hits andropause, levels decline, testicular function drops off, and then we replace what the testicles can no longer produce. The problem is that there's a huge amount of men in my generation and even the generation a bit older,

anywhere from guys age from 18 to 35, who were doing everything right to the point that it's like almost kind of neurotic, even obsessive. And they've still got the testosterone levels of a 90 year old woman. And sometimes it can be due to damage from anabolic steroids. So using steroids under the age of 25

does seem to cause more permanent suppression to the system, especially the 19 Norbase steroids, Nanjalo and Trenbolone. Don't know why that is, but that's a trend that a lot of people have picked up. But part that I- Maybe permanent damage. It would seem so, yes.

So some people, especially the younger people could, because you kind of hear guys that use stuff, you know, they're like, oh, all you got to do is go off and you're going to be fine. But there's some people that are getting permanent damage. Especially from the Psalms. And this is the problem is guys are going for Psalms because I think they're safer than steroids.

But like I've seen suppression from steroids all the time. Like guys come back with like, you know, bottom of the range or just below the bottom of the range testosterone levels. I've seen six to twelve months after Psalms where the levels are literally zero, like almost nothing. Um, so... Wow. Because these are experimental compounds. This is a big deal, by the way, for young people that eventually want to maybe try to have a kid someday. Yeah.

They could be in great compromise and not even really know it. It's a huge thing that people are becoming more and more blasé with. You know, when I was 18, 19 in the gym, steroids was like, it was super taboo. Now it's just like, oh, I've been training for a couple of years, I'm on TRT,

might as well do a cycle. Let's blast. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, when I look around at some gyms, I'm like, there's a've been training for a couple of years. I'm on TRT. Might as well do a cycle. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. When I look around at some gyms, I'm like, there's a lot of shit running through this right now. Who's got this stuff? Who's the hookup? Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in the bloodstream that's not showing up in a Lambo. So that's one of the challenges that we have now, which I think is a relatively new challenge as well, is that people are going through puberty obese. This didn't used to be a thing. So one of the problems that we're seeing in practice is that guys who were like, you know, let's say 25 years old who are obese, they're told, oh, well, if you lose weight, your testosterone levels will recover and you'll be just fine.

That doesn't really seem to be happening, at least in practice. And all we can really hypothesize is that, you know, if you're obese during development, that system might not develop properly. And then if you take till after that development window was closed to fix the issue, that seems to be causing some permanent endocrine issues as well. And the last one, without, you know, sounding like it's all this fucking doom and gloom pitch is the endocrine disrupting chemicals. So this is something that, you know, people theorize about. We don't really have hard data on this.

We just have like, okay, this is a trend. There's some mechanistic theory. We have some observations and I think it's a piece of the puzzle, but the plastics, pollutions and pesticides that, you know, we're all bubble wrapped with and growing up with everything covered in plastic. It would seem that that could also be having an endocrine disrupting effect over time and I do wonder when and if the science will catch up to that as well. So we're currently in a situation now where a lot of young men are needing to fix their

hormones who shouldn't have to, but are still in a situation where they're in a, it's kind of like catch-22. It's either you start TRT at a young age, which is a big commitment to make. It's a serious, serious medical intervention to make, or go through the rest of your life with low testosterone levels and see how that works out for you. And neither of those options are very good.

And you'd have to make big changes, right? Yeah. I mean, you gotta get outside more and all these things. You might not feel well. Like a lot of times, once somebody's already sick, they're kind of trapped. And they might just be like mildly sick. And they just maybe aren't participating in sports,

they're not really doing anything super active. The next thing you know, life is kind of passing by, the years are passing by. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that you're just simply not getting outside, not getting activity and all those kinds of things. Yeah, the daily habits are a big factor. And one of the things I've been very blessed with

in my work with Primal Zone, which is the clinic I partner with in Australia, is getting to see just a huge volume of guys coming through. And there's a good amount of athletic people in there, but there's also just a good amount of general population guys. Guys who've heard about DRT, realize their levels are low,

gone on treatment and feel much better, which is fantastic. But one of the things that's very interesting is that you can very strongly see trends at volume. You know, when things scale up, trends become very obvious. And the daily habits in terms of what you're eating day to day, how much alcohol you're drinking day to day, or hopefully week to week, how well you're sleeping, and just how well you're sleeping and just how

well you're looking after yourself in general. This is a much bigger factor for how well you respond to TRT than the nuances of the treatment protocol itself. Like dial all those in is much, much, much more effective than taking an extra 20 milligrams of testosterone a week. So it's only through work and practice as a health coach in the TRT space have I really learned going,

okay, the daily habits and how well you look after yourself is the biggest variable to take into account for how well your treatment is gonna go outside of just being on a decent, basic, good TRT protocol to begin with. I have a quick question because I know we're gonna move on to like, what this all entails for people who do choose to use DRT, right?

But I also wonder, you know, you mentioned how some guys, they're doing all the right things and they see no change. And since you've worked with so many people, I wonder, have you seen an intervention just take a long time? Right? Or, or is it like, okay, you've been doing this great for six months, just because like, you know, we know that it's gonna, someone who's like very heavy, it's gonna take them potentially years to drop that weight.

It's not gonna take a few weeks or a few months. So I'm just wondering like the range you've seen. Yeah, absolutely. And you also asked a question before that I didn't properly answer. So it ties into the same thing. So one of the ways that we can work out what's going on with someone's hormone levels is

the signal from the brain to the in men, the testicles, which is called they're called gonadotropins and on blood work, you've got luteinizing hormone, which is LH and then follicle stimulating hormone, which is FSH. And to oversimplify the concept for people who might be new to this, LH is what tells your balls to make testosterone. FSH is what tells everything to make sperm. And there's nuance to that, but that's to put it simply. So typically we're looking at a reference range

from one to 10, the units globally are the same. Now it might say two to 12 or whatever, but we'll say one to 10. So if someone's luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone are elevated above a 10, that gives us an indicator that the testicles are damaged to some degree. So what's happening is the brain is starting to scream at the testicles and the brain's going, hey, I'm giving you a signal, but there's not enough testosterone coming back up here.

So this feedback loop is basically saying, work harder, work harder, work harder. So in a woman who's menopausal, because the ovaries have basically gone kaput, those LH and FSH numbers will be through the sky because the ovaries just kind of drop off a cliff. The testicles kind of fade over time very gradually. So you also see things like extreme testicular injury, guys who've had testicular cancer chemotherapy that will jack the numbers up.

But the other thing that you see is guys who are obese or doing like shift work who are super stressed, shift works at are absolute killer. Drinking a bunch of alcohol, taking a bunch of drugs, opioids, things like this. You see that LH number go the opposite end. So it becomes suppressed at like a one or a two. So what's now happening is the body is going, hey, the testicles are fine.

We could make more hormones if we wanted to. But we're focusing on just like keeping you alive because you're not doing very well. Because the body only has X amount of resources that it can do to conserve energy. And the body's primary goal is survival and the last goal is reproduction. So if the body's in an inflamed stress state, all the energy gets diverted away from reproduction, which includes testosterone production. So what we want to do when we're looking at interventions is if someone comes in with like borderline low testosterone, but the LH and FSH is at like a one or a two, we're going, your testicles are gone. Like this is, this is, this is completely non-fixable.

What's interesting, which has kind of been a new thing, and this isn't covered in the literature and I mentioned it in my Silverback presentation, is that we're getting guys with the LH FSH numbers in the middle. So it's basically saying, I am locked in where I should be. I'm not suppressed. The testicles aren't working. The testicles are working fine. We're not suppressing production.

The signal from the testicles and the brain is working very well. It's right where it should be, but the levels are in the gutter. And then that's this relatively new phenomenon that we don't understand why that's happening. Is it at the certain age range or is it you just seeing it in general?

Certain age range, under 35, but particularly under 30. So we're going, is the system not developed properly? Is the system damaged due to saturation from endocrine disrupting chemicals growing up? But if we're in a situation being like, well, how can we increase your natural production if the production's shit but it's not suppressed? And in those scenarios, there's nothing else we can really do except come in and replace the production entirely. It seems to be very difficult to find a cure.

I guess we could all agree that if you can get all your habits together and you can have awesome habits and you do it for 20 years, that maybe you could fix a lot of stuff. But even then, it still might be really difficult. And so these interventions of pharmaceuticals, as much as maybe some of us don't like it, they're kind of necessary sometimes. And I think with what you're pointing out

is really interesting. You mentioned shift work. What do you do for someone who has shift work? People have certain circumstances in their life where they can't just like pop outside and go on a 10 minute walk. And even if they could, if they're doing shift work and it's 3 a.m., like the sun's not out,

so they can't even get the benefits of it that way. So what do you do in some of those situations? It's such a challenging one. It's like for people who live, I live in Lithuania where it's very dark for more than half the year. And the best solution for that is we'll move somewhere sunny.

It's like, yeah, that would solve it, but we need something that's actually feasible. Same with shift work. The best solution for shift work is to not do shift work. Works amazingly. Solves 100% of the problems. But the problem is that a lot of the time people who are doing shift work have a skill set that's unique to an industry that is shift work based. So obviously there can be pathways to get better swings or to get a different role that

doesn't have such a harsh shift. And I mean, that kind of goes without saying, but if those things aren't an option, I think the best strategy that we have is to mitigate the damage that's being done and accepting and going, this is not ideal. This is definitely one of those things that ages people faster. You can't feel a hundred percent fantastically awesome and be doing shift work. So you kind of have to accept some concessions there. But I think the best strategy is get as much sunlight as you can when you can get it.

Blackout blinds at home to sleep properly using a sustained release melatonin while you're sleeping to be able to give you that at least darkness side of the circadian rhythm covered and what I was saying to a couple of guys. So almost artificially giving yourself that a little bit, huh? This is a supplement of melatonin. This is one of the settings that I think the word biohacking is appropriate. Yeah, that makes sense. But the other thing that I was speaking to someone about, so I'm from Perth, originally Western Australia. We have a lot of mining in Perth. So a lot of the guys do, we call it a fly in fly out, which is like FIFO work. And they'll do like shift

work underground, like operating drills, like brutal. And then there'll be a way for a week or two from home and come back like very, very disruptive stuff. And I think on top of the things like the melatonin and trying to, you know, very disruptive stuff. And I think on top of the things like the melatonin and trying to keep conscious of your sleep schedule, the best thing that you can do, and people don't want to do this and I understand why, but you just have to dial everything else in to 11. So if you're doing something that's difficult

and harsh on the body, no alcohol, take care of your diet really well, take care of your training really well. And if you're going, hey, I'm living a life that's got a deficit here that I can't fix, that I have to work around. The best thing that you can do is to support all the other aspects that are within your control. Kind of like what we were talking about before, it's like focusing on things within your control

and outside of your control. You know, when you mentioned, you know, for example, someone like digging your car, the best thing that you can do is go, okay, how am I going to respond to this? And I think in a circumstance like that, the best thing that you can do is go, okay, how am I going to respond to this? And I think in a circumstance like that, the best thing that you can do to respond to it is look after yourself as best as possible. And the worst thing that guys do when they can't sleep and they're up on a mine site with all the guys

and they miss their family, beers. And beers is not the solution. But that's what most people lean to when they're feeling bad and they feel shitty in the short term, especially if they're feeling overstimulated and they can't sleep, they go for alcohol. And alcohol solves the problem for 10 or 15 minutes

and then creates a much bigger problem for the hours and days afterwards. You know, I think some people that are listening may have heard the no alcohol thing, right? But it's such a common thing. And you see so many people that are doing just fine and they drink beer here and there or wine here and there that you wonder, is it really that big of a deal?

So could you just explain like why no alcohol? Or I mean, is there a minimum dose for some people who can't let it go? Yep, I love this question because this is an important question when you're dealing with general population TRD patients, because if you're dealing with only elite athletes saying no alcohol, that's a pretty easy sell. But general population, very patients. Because if you're dealing with only elite athletes saying no alcohol is, that's a pretty easy sell. But general population, very, very different.

Some guys think it's normal to drink 20 or 30 standard drinks a week. Yeah, that's pushing past it. But one of the most interesting things, kind of like what you said before, is that I had a client once and I said to him, and I shouldn't have said this and I don't do it this way anymore. I said, whatever you're doing for your liver, keep doing that because you've got the best

liver blood workups in my life. And he just laughs and he goes, I drink six beers every night. I was like, damn. I was like, okay. I was like, I'm changing how I do this process now. But we had a great laugh about it and I was like, well, look, man, like you must have some amazing genetics, you know, like Steven Tyler genetics or something like that. Like there are just some people that, you know, like rock stars who were in their seventies

and eighties who are doing fantastic, who've just been on drugs and alcohol their whole lives or I'm sure we've all heard of or know someone who knows someone who like, you know, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and then their lungs are perfect when they're 90 years old outliers. And this is one of the interesting things about science online is people have started someone who like, you know, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and then their lungs are perfect when they're 90 years old. Outliers, and this is one of the interesting things about science online is people have started to think that outliers disprove rules. If something is like a one in 10, it's eliminated from the data because it's not part of the trend.

So outliers don't disprove rules. In general, no alcohol is a hundred percent going to be the best. What I found from lab work, and again, one of the blessings of working with Primal Zone is because we do this comprehensive blood panels on all of our clients, you can see trends. You go, how much alcohol do you drink? And what does the liver panel look like? And how do the side effects show up on TRT? And my general rule of thumb, in terms of what I see not elevate liver enzymes and not cause acne and nipple sensitivity and water retention on TRT is anywhere from one to two standard drinks one to two times a week.

So, you know, four shots of whiskey or over the course of a week or, you know, a few good sized glasses of wine over the course of the week. I think for someone who particularly likes whiskey or likes wine or likes craft beer, I think that's an amount that people can get around and people can be like, yeah, I'd love to keep binge drinking, but maybe if I want to look after my health, that's not something I can do.

And some people don't do well with moderation. Some people go, look, if I have two, I'm having 20. So they're better off having none. But if people enjoy the ritual, like I had a guy who I spoke to once and I was like, how much alcohol do you drink? And he was like, every Friday night for the last 20 years, my wife and I have split a bottle of red wine and a cheese board. And we talk about our week. And I said, never stop doing that. Like that's, that's perfect. And he said, is the alcohol a problem? Like, no, not in that setting. And his blood work was great as well.

So I think that culturally there is a place for alcohol, but if you're drinking to get drunk and you're binge drinking to party, that needs to stop. And I think that's as simple as it is. On this podcast, we've been sponsored by Merrick Health and we've been utilizing Merrick Health for a long time. I think a great place for people to start would be just get a good blood panel done.

I think maybe for most people, even people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, the most blood work maybe they ever got was somebody to check their lipids, or maybe somebody checked something because the person was sick with something. And having a comprehensive blood panel is really critical. You mentioned FSH and LH and all these different things

that you're gonna have tested and sometimes people might not know or understand. You don't just go to TRT clinic just for steroids. I think that that's what most people think it's for, just like the internet isn't just for porn. Like some people might be having a revelation right now. They might be saying wait. It's primarily for porn. It's primarily for porn. Like some people might be having a revelation right now. They might be saying wait. It's primarily for porn.

It's primarily for porn. Yeah, that's a better way of saying it. But it's my understanding, there's a lot of different drugs and I don't wanna make this whole podcast about different drugs, because there's like so many. But there's like nasal sprays and there's all kinds of stuff that maybe could help with the connection of your testicles to your brain

that doesn't include you having to take testosterone for. There's all kinds of stuff that you can, there's get-arounds, right, if someone just doesn't want to hop on testosterone. I think that the best place for people to start in that situation, and I think it's a great place for people to be in terms of saying, I want more testosterone, but I'm not ready to take the plunge on TRT and shutting down my natural production. What can I do? And I think one

of the downfalls that people go for is they go for something more risky than TRT itself. So they go, Oh, here's this random research chemical on the internet that I found off some dodgy site. I'm going to take that instead because it's not going to shut down my natural production. It's like that's not a good play. But I think what a good play is saying, how can I nourish and support my body as well as possible? And then like you said before, how long is this kind of intervention going to take?

If you've been living like a dumpster fire for 10 years, you might need more than 10 weeks to be able to actually get an outcome from an intervention. So people need to be patient. But I think the best thing that people can do is focus on nourishing the human body with what it needs, which is essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and if people aren't getting enough from the diet, omega-3 fatty acids as well. I think nourishing your body with that, with sunlight, with good sleep, and then with good home-cooked nutrition, whether it's got a bunch of plants or a bunch of meat, I mean it should be a mix of both, food that you cook yourself. And I think that if people focus on looking after themselves in a

way that they would be making the most testosterone they could, which just means looking after yourself from all angles, and give that you know at least six months, maybe even 12 months. If you're doing terribly and you can't get out of bed in the morning, okay, maybe a year's a bit long. And, you know, sometimes if you're in a situation and you're like, I'm really far off track, I'd love to be able to get back on track myself, but I need some help because I'm not going to be able to do it.

That's a call that someone should make in a conversation with their provider who doesn't have the interest of the clinic's financial gain ahead of your health's interest. So you want to have a conversation with a provider who's not making a commission ideally, or is at least having this conversation saying, hey, I want what's best for you, not the bottom line of, you know, whatever's being sold. And unfortunately, a lot of clinics run on that model, which is a real shame, because people think that speaking to someone who cares about the health, but they're speaking to a salesperson. So the work arounds, I think should focus on being like, how can we prime the body to

be able to prime itself for reproduction, essentially, which is saying, how can I get myself into the best possible biological state that I can? And if I can't get to that point on my own, because of how I've lived my life up until now or due to factors beyond my control or stuff that's already happened that we can't get to that point on my own because of how I've lived my life up until now or due to factors beyond my control or stuff that's already happened that we can't respond to anymore. Then if it's like the bazooka in the back pocket, you don't want to have to use it, but if you have to use it, you don't hesitate. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health.

All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. I couldn't agree with her more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tanned. A lot of us just wanna look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have, high cholesterol or these various things,

it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing, they can look at your blood work as you're going through the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing. They can look at your cholesterol. They can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that.

And there's a few aspects too, where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shades of doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coordinators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that boom, you could be at the right levels, including working with your testosterone.

And there's so many people that I know that are looking for, they're like, hey, should I do that? They're very curious. And they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk, but that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health because you can just basically live your life a little stronger, just like you were

maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys. When you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per deciliter of test, you're good, bro.

Even though you're probably feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what type of things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to, to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like you just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things.

Somebody is actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation, sometimes it's TRT, and sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels, head to MerrickHealth.com and use code PowerProject for 10% off any panel of your choice. Have you seen a lot of supplements that are just like a little bit more over the counter? Have you seen supplements or anything like that be able to really help some people when you see

that they have just poor health markers in general from their blood? Yeah, so there's a few that work well. Most of them are bullshit. What are the ones that are bullshit that you think? Okay. The popular ones that people, yeah. The big one that I think is bullshit

that people need to go onto a website called examine.com and read this for themselves, because it's not a long article, it's in layman terms, is Fidozioagrestis. Bro, go ahead. So Fidozioagrestis is a Nigerian shrub. It's not really a botanical medicine, it's a shrub. And it's something that if you take it, it will cause your testicles to swell up.

They have a cytotoxic response. And as part of this cytotoxic response, it would be like if I punch you in the shoulder and say, I just gave you an endorphin release, or I just gave you some natural opioid production, like you owe me for that. So what it's doing is it's basically causing toxicity to the point that it's making the testicles swell up.

But the danger of this is because it gave the rats testicular cancer, it will never be studied in humans. It failed animal trials. So we can't just go, oh, okay, that means that if it gave the rats cancer after like eight weeks or 12 weeks, then just take it for six or seven weeks and you'll be fine. Like that, I don't know what the laws are here about kind of promoting supplements, but I think that there's something wrong with that. So that's not a good strategy. It's a bad play. Now, if in the future it comes out and it

shows that it's safe and there's nothing wrong with it, then that's great. But I don't recommend taking things that give rats cancer that haven't been studied in humans if your goal is to improve your health. Like that's just, that seems like a bad play. I don't know if it's because I'm Nigerian, but man, like I don't take Fidogea all the time, but I know that if I want to have a strong orgasm, Fidogea.

And I don't know why it does that, but it's like, it's crazy. So I don't know if you've heard that from anybody else. Well, that's the thing, and that's like people who take it go, it's not placebo. I feel something when I take this. I know a few guys too that are just like, I want it. I know some dudes, so I don't know. So I don't know if they're all Nigerian as well, maybe that's a factor.

But it's the same thing. I mean, if I have a few shots of whiskey, I don't know if they're all Nigerian as well, maybe that's a factor. But it's the same thing. I mean, if I have a few shots of whiskey, I'm great socially. There can be scenarios where it's like, well, something might have a benefit, but could also be a net detriment. But at the end of the day, it's a risk to reward ratio that we kind of have to make the assessment for. And I think looking at things like high quality bioavailable multivitamins, like the one that Thorn makes is a great product.

You know, clinically dosed omega-3 fish oil is fantastic. Even just guys aren't getting enough protein. So whether that's from a good quality whey protein, I can see you've got your steak shake in the background there, essential amino acids, meat, you know, whatever people need to do. But nourishing the body with nutrients, I think is the key. The other supplement which has become controversial recently, you know, whatever people need to do, but nourishing the body with nutrients, I think is the key. The other supplement which has become controversial recently, that's very interesting is ashwagandha.

And ashwagandha has got a huge amount of data on it, particularly from the form KSM 66, which is the patented version. So ashwagandha is a root, It looks kind of like a cross between like ginger and a weird looking sweet potato. But it's a root. And in Ayurvedic medicine, which is traditional Indian medicine where it's from, they actually ferment it in milk.

And they ferment it in milk to basically break down all the anti-nutrients. Kind of like if you eat a raw sweet potato, it'll destroy your stomach. All roots are full of stuff like that. So KSM 66 has the most research on it. People can check it. I don't sell KSM 66, I should,

but you can check it out on their website. They have really good infographics where they kind of summarize the interventional human studies that they've done. And the application that I think is interesting for ashwagandha, and I'll give the caveat to it as well afterwards because some people listening to this will be freaking out that I'm not interesting for ashwagandha, and I'll give the caveat to it as well afterwards, because some people listening to this will be freaking out that I'm not mentioning the caveat,

but the benefit to it is that because it essentially has the same mechanism of action as Valium does, it works as a natural calming agent. If you're in a situation like I mentioned before, where that LH level is suppressed due to stress, they've done studies showing that 300 milligrams twice a day in men who have that stress suppression of LH

will increase the LH levels and increase the testosterone levels. So it works directly on the root cause in that scenario, which is stress. The problem though, is that because it's quite a strong sedative, some people think that it's to do with the serotonin actions, but the study for that is incredibly flawed. If you are not a high stress individual and you take it,

it can make you very lethargic. It can make you very zapped. It's kind of like if we all popped a Valium before the podcast this morning, it'd probably be a pretty boring conversation. So it can be something that if people don't need it, it can definitely be a problem. And that's why, you know, I think it's important if people are just wanting to start with just

general supplementation, essential nutrients, high quality diet, sunlight are the things that people should start with. And then going beyond that, I think it should be based on blood work interpretation. The main thing to kind of answer the other question that you had is what supplements have I seen have the most impact on the blood? The two is high dose omega-3 fish oil. So if we look at the research on fish oil and Andrew Huberman's done some great summaries on this, the clinical dose of combined EPA DHA per day is two to four grams. So a good quality fish oil supplement has about 500 to 750 milligrams per soft gel. A cheap crappy one might be like 200.

So what we want to do is take the amount of fish oil that's the equivalent of eating about half a pound of salmon a day. That's about a good amount. Like if you like, okay, like I don't like fatty fish, but I said, okay, if I liked fatty fish, how much fatty fish would I want to eat per day to get a good amount of amigas? Yeah, about half a pound, maybe a pound if I really liked it, something like that. You're looking at about two to four grams of EPA DHA per day. Most people are taking far less of this.

The effect that I see on people's triglycerides is massive. You get triglycerides right down into the gutter, the very bottom of the reference range with high dose omega-3, and that tends to correlate when you run a blood with high dose omega-3 and that tends to correlate when you run a blood test for the omega-3 index. Getting the omega-3 index up to like 11, 12, 13 percent, most people are at like 5 or 6 percent if they're not supplementing, that seems to have a huge impact on the health of the heart. So that's one thing I've seen.

The other one I see is that in people who do have issues with their livers, usually it's from alcohol, but it can be from being overweight, oral reduced glutathione is what I see work very well. People say that glutathione doesn't work unless you inject it. The regular version of glutathione doesn't work, but in hormone replacement therapy, when we use oral hormones, we ideally like to get them in a form where they're called micronized, which means they're so tiny that your stomach doesn't see it, your liver doesn't see it, and then it gradually absorbs in the gut. It's like a more accessible version of taking it as a rectal suppository. People aren't going to do that, but in terms of bioavailability, pop it up there, bioavailability is fantastic.

So if we can have something that is reduced to a form that it gets into the gut orally, it means one, people actually take it, but two, it has much greater bioavailability. So there's a patented form of glutathione called Sertia, S-E-R-T-I-A, and that form has been studied to have very good oral bioavailability, And that twice a day for people with chronic pain, people with liver issues, that seems to drastically improve liver panel markers as well, especially GGT, which is a marker for toxicity,

as well as bringing down CRP, but most importantly, just making people actually feel better. So you being in Lithuania, by the way, I mean, vitamin D is something that's pretty important. So do you like, for people that aren't able to get much sun, do you suggest a supplement? Do you use any type of devices? What do you think about that?

Yeah, I learned about seasonal affective disorder a few years ago when I had my, not my first winter, my second winter. The first winter I was like, oh cool, it's snow. Like, I mean, I grew up in Australia. I was like, this is cool. Like you get to light a fire and wear some warm clothes and then the sun comes back out for a few months and then it gets dark again. And it's like, oh shit, we're doing this again.

And I remember asking my wife, I think it was the second year and it was maybe like January and I said, when does the sun come back? And she's just like, never. And that's the mentality that people have there. So growing up in Australia, you take the sun for granted. You know, anyone who grew up here in Sacramento, you take the sun for granted. When it goes away, you realize how important it is. So for people who are living somewhere sunny, go outside, get it from the sun because there

are so many more important things you get from the Sun nutrients circadian rhythm signaling It feels good to get as much of it Basically, you want to get as much Sun on your body as you can as often as possible without burning Basically and you build up a tolerance to it you build up melanin so you can handle more Sun But for people who live in dark countries, I do recommend supplementing with vitamin D at least throughout the winter months countries, I do recommend supplementing with vitamin D at least throughout the winter months. Vitamin D has a half-life of nine months, so you can bank it. If you spend a huge amount of time in the sun in summer, you don't need to take vitamin D in winter.

I mean, we've adapted to that, and you can get vitamin D from the food as well. But it makes a hell of a difference if you take the vitamin D in the darkness, just in terms of how you feel. So I personally take 10,000 units a day in the dark months, and then I take 5,000 units a day in the lighter months just to basically, you know, build it up and keep the stores active. But right now, traveling, I'm going to Australia after this, so I'm not taking vitamin D with me because I'm getting a good amount of sun.

But ideally, you want to get it from the sun. One of the biggest mistakes I see is people work inside, So they go, oh, my vitamin D is low, so I'm going to take a supplement. It's like, no, no, you're going to go outside and get some light breaks throughout the day. But yeah, if you live in a dark country, 5,000 to 10,000 units of vitamin D, sometimes people need more than that,

makes a hell of a difference for how you feel, as well as getting sick less. I mean, I didn't get sick once last winter. CBD kind of came and went. It was like, you know, every influencer was talking about it for a long time, but you were telling me some interesting things about it. Can you share that with people? Because I think there's a lot of people that might be in pain that maybe could benefit

from some of what you were sharing. Yeah, it's been replaced by Methylene Blue now. So yeah, these things kind of come and go. So I've been working with CBD for a long time. I became very interested in CBD when I was younger, one, because I love smoking weed. So it was in my peripheral. But two, I had a couple of disc herniations in my back.

I wasn't interested in taking large amounts of opioids all the time. So I found CBD probably, what am I now, 32, maybe 10 years ago. So CBD is something that my clinic in Australia actually makes available for all our TRT patients. I think there's an amazing synergy between CBD and TRT. And I think that CBD should be something on everyone's radar. I think it could be something that's in a lot of people's medicine cabinets, either for daily use or occasional use.

Again, I don't sell CBD, but CBD, the best way I can put it is that it's not a panacea. It's not a miracle cure. It doesn't, it literally doesn't cure anything. What it is, it's like a healthy glass of wine you can have at the end of the day that's good for you. That's a pretty, that sounds pretty good. So it's not intoxicating like DHC is, but it's relaxing. And what it does, it works very interestingly in the body.

So the body has something called an endocannabinoid system. So we make our own cannabis-like molecules. We actually have receptors called the CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors, which is quite interesting. And what happens is your body naturally makes something called anandamide, which is like your body's natural version of CBD or THC. It's like your natural endocannabinoid and it regulates a bunch of processes in the body. It kind of acts like a thermostat.

It keeps things in balance, whether it's your mood, your core temperature, your digestion, your immune system, everything. So your body breaks this down by something called FAAH and this then gets metabolized out of the body into something called arachidonic acid, which is like an inflammatory molecule. I think it was trendy in bodybuilding to use arachidonic acid for a bit. Yeah. So what CBD does is it comes in and it reduces the breakdown of anandamide into arachidonic acid. So what it basically does is it reduces the activity of your natural inflammatories and it increases

the activity of your natural anti-inflammatory. So what it's acting as is something that you can take at the end of the day, that you take it after dinner or you take it before you have a shower and then maybe you watch a movie in bed with some blue light blockers on or something and then you feel your eyes Get heavy like it kind of kicks in for you

It's not something that's going to be like a chemical brick to the head that will sedate you I mean those things are never good for you, but it can be something that helps people fall asleep stay asleep feel more relaxed It's not for everyone some people don't like how it makes them feel some people say it doesn't do anything for them But it's great to have something at the end of the day that helps a little bit with pain. It really helps with training recovery as well, particularly if like martial arts guys, they get home, they have their CBD, they're just super relaxed because you come home after sparring and your nervous system's like, I'm on. You know, you can't come home from sparring at eight and fall asleep at nine because you're jacked up, you know, being in a combat situation.

So it can be a very useful thing to shift into that parasympathetic state. I'm not sure what the conversion is in freedom units in pounds, but in kilograms, I like to look at about a quarter of a milligram to half a milligram per kilogram of body weight. So for most guys, we're looking at decent sized guys, we're looking at anywhere from about 20 to 50 milligrams of CBD in the evening up to 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight If needed I find beyond that it doesn't really do much and you but it cost you twice the amount of money So diminishing returns a really good brand that I don't have any affiliation with but I've used for a long time It's called MDOCA you can get that in Europe and

The US as well and it's completely THC free. And you said it could be amazing for arthritis. Yeah, so they make one called CBD-A, which is a raw version of CBD. So when people see CBD oil or CBD gummies or whatever, it's implied that it's been what's called decarboxylase, which means it's been heated. So just like if we had some weed like bud here,

if you ate it, it doesn't do anything You have to smoke it. So when you when you have cannabis bud This has got THC a in it and then when you heat it it becomes THC which is psychoactive So CBD a is not relaxing like CBD is it's actually a bit stimulating but it works like a natural healthy version of ibuprofen so it it works like an NSAID, like a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. And having something like this for someone who's got constant joint pain that you can go, hey, you can take this every morning, it's good for you, it's going to give you energy and it's going to relieve the inflammation, that can be super effective.

So endocas sell that as well in a 50 milligram milligram capsule and it can be a game changer for arthritis. That with the high dose Omega-3 together, that can be extremely helpful. So Mark, you have been loving wearing these Paloovas for a long time. Why is it that you like these shoes that look like this? I'm trying to get my feet to be jacked. I think it's funny how sometimes people will,

when I wear these shoes, they're like, oh, those are different. And I'm like, well, maybe you should blame God because this is the human foot. This is the way that it looks. But Paluvas are awesome because it's gonna allow you to train your feet and train your toes and allow for that toe spread

because you got the five finger toe thing going on. It's like a, like put on a glove for your feet. It feels amazing. It's like walking around with toe spacers. You know, we've been working on our feet for a long time now. You always hear the benefit of people talking about like these tribes who have gone without shoes forever, and they have this toe space and have these amazing feet.

And these shoes will allow you to just passively get that back by walking around. You don't realize what a disadvantage you're at when your foot is all clumped together from the football cleats or soccer cleats or whatever else you were wearing when you were young. And so it's nice to be able to splay your toes. In addition to that though, one thing I love about Paloova is the fact that

it's not a regular barefoot shoe. I do love barefoot shoes as well, but it also has appropriate padding. And when you, you're stepping on some crazy pebbles and rocks and different things, like when I'm out on a run, uh, some terrain is a little different than others, I don't have to be worried that I'm going to get some sort of stabbing, crazy thing happening to my foot because it has an appropriate amount of cushion underneath the foot.

And guys, Paloova has a lot of different styles on their website. I think one of the newest styles they just came out with, which is a little bit more of a rigorous do, is the Strand ATR. It's not these. These are the Strands, but the ATRs have a little bit more, if you wanna go hiking with them, you totally can.

Those are amazing. If you go out, throw those on and go sprint on a field, and your feet feel so strong, grabbing the grass and being able to actually grab the ground with your foot feels amazing. I'm more of a chill guy with my Paloova, so I like the Zen slip-ons, but that's the thing. With Paloova, there's a lot of different options.

So if you head to paloova.com and use code power project, you'll be able to save 15% off your entire purchase. And they also have toe socks. Their five feet of your toe socks are no show. So check those out too. Now, how about cannabis? Because like it's very popular amongst young people. Now some people feel that there's no issue.

Some people feel like it's horrible, right? How does that affect testosterone? Should it be something that people are thinking about? It's something that people should definitely be thinking about. Recreationally, I love cannabis more than the average person. And if it wasn't bad for you, I'd be stoned right now. So I've looked into it a lot out of personal interest.

Look, I think if Snoop Dogg quit smoking weed, that's a bad sign, right? Because people often go point to him and go, oh, he's fine. It's like he quit. So THC is something that can be very medicinal in the right situations. It has some absolutely incredible therapeutic properties in incredibly high doses for cancer, as well as in incredibly low doses for sleep.

It can be microdosed for sleep and it doesn't cause problems. The issue with THC, one is that it appears that THC itself, not just smoked cannabis, but THC appears to be estrogenic, which is not ideal when we're dealing with a world that's full of these estrogenic chemicals as well. But the main problem with THC, so that system I spoke about before the endocannabinoid system, it's kind of like if you're natural and you're not taking any testosterone and then you take a shot of Tren or something, your body's going to sense that and shut down your natural production. We know that with steroids.

The problem with THC is if you come in with a high dose of THC, your body senses that and it reduces your production of these endocannabinoids. So you have your internal cannabis based system as well. Your body basically senses and exogenous external oversupply. And then your body goes up, I don't need to make anymore. Just like if you take, you know, exogenous testosterone.

So this is not really a problem as a once off thing, you know, you smoke a joint on the weekend, maybe you come home on a Friday night and have an edible and eat a healthy pizza and watch some Family Guy, but not a problem. But if you're doing that every day in high doses, the problem is that your natural system will then shut down and you'll start to deal with these low-grade long-term consequences of chronic THC use. And for a lot of people, it's not something they're aware of until they take time off it.

So I get guys who are smoking, you know, cannabis every evening and they're like, it's not affecting me badly. I'm like, well then why are we speaking? But the challenge I always give to them is go, okay, well, if you're not addicted to it, take two months off, that shouldn't be a problem, and reintroduce it after two months and tell me how it went for you. And what happens is they take two months off it, they feel better and better and better and better and better. Then they start smoking again and they go, oh, that's what that was doing.

Because their memory goes to shit. They wake up in the morning and you can still get up and go to the gym with discipline, but they're not bounding out of bed to go. They're not sharp. Their memory recalls not as good. Their verbal acuity is not as good. All of these things that you can kind of get away with being a four, five, six out of 10 with some of these things and get through life, but you can't, again, I guess you're not, you can be an outlier. Absolutely. But most people cannot regularly get intoxicated with THC and still be healthy, happy, and thriving outside of

those scenarios. It just, you can't have your cake and eat it too. And if you could, I would. When it comes to sleep, the application that I see for THC is that we've got over the counter sleep aids. So things like, I'll put melatonin in that category as well, but things like glycine, taurine, theanine, ashwagandha, magnesium, valerian, all of these things. And all of them work well in some people, and in some people some work better than others.

But there's a cohort of guys who will say, hey, I can throw down 20 of these natural sleep aids and I can't get to sleep unless I take like Valium or Benadryl which people should take or like Ambien or you know, something like this something is actually a proper sleep aid and Where I see micro dose THC coming in is for guys who are like I need something but I don't want to take these pharmaceutical medications because they Basically just brick you to the head. You just basically go unconscious fate hours. You don't actually sleep. So using a tiny minuscule amount of THC orally so that it has a longer half life, you know, in flaming the lungs. And I'm talking like one to 2.5 milligrams fractional amount, the equivalent

if someone had a joint of going like, like that's it. But that on top of the over the counter sleep aids can give that a little bit of magic and that can be the thing that allows people to fall asleep when they need something beyond what the natural stuff is doing for them. So that's the only real application I see for regular THC use. Recreational use would be like, you know, for someone with a low tolerance, we're talking like 10 to 20 milligrams and then for like high tolerance 50, 100 milligrams. So yeah, we're talking a real, real microscopic amount.

Gotcha. And the minimum dose for somebody that you're like that, you know, they don't want to totally give it up, but they also don't want to be using it chronically. I think that that's more of a frequency thing. I think tolerance would kind of work out the dose for that. And I think the frequency that works well for people is like once a week. I think once a week can be, and that way it can be something that's meaningful. Like it's a bit like a Friday night thing

or a Saturday night thing. There's some like, you know, rest and relaxation to it. And you know, I think that that can be, I think unwinding, I think consciously unwinding can be really therapeutic for some people. So, you know, I think if people are, you know, taking, you know, 10 to 30 milligrams of ideally THC orally, otherwise vaping it, but preferably orally, I think once a week is a much lesser evil than going out and having five to 10 standard drinks and all the things that come with that. But if that's someone's vice,

and that's where someone's, you know, they look forward to that, they enjoy that, it's not getting in the way of other aspects of their life. I think that's fantastic. But I think if you go beyond that frequency, you can kind of start to get into like a bit of a roller coaster territory. And the less often you use it, the better the experience tends to be as well.

Yeah. I got a hypothetical for you. Let's say we took our natty friend, Seema, over here, and let's say that his testosterone is naturally 700. Let's say that we inject him with testosterone for a couple of weeks, and his testosterone levels are 700. Will he perform better, worse, same? Will he notice strength gains, muscle mass gains? Will there be the same level? Will he perform better, worse, same? Will he notice strength gains, muscle mass gains?

Is that even possible? Will there be the same level? Yeah, because it would be a very redundant process. But yeah, you could. Yeah. Balance itself out at some point. Like if he took what 140 milligrams or something, he would probably end up in some sort of reasonable range 700, 800.

Yeah. The thing I wrote in my book is that 140 to 150 milligrams will put the average guy into the top quarter of the reference range. So yeah, in the US and the units you guys are using about 780. Yeah, I'm just trying to like paint a picture of like, is injecting it, is it somehow maybe more powerful than your even your own production of it? So this is a question that gets debated a little bit between myself and my colleagues

because there's two sides to this. One side, my friend Memo from Marik Health, who's one of the kind of masterminds behind the clinical practice there, he brought up a long time ago when we spoke about this that when you shut down your natural testosterone production, there's an enzyme called, it's called steroidogenic acute regulatory Acute Regulatory Protein,

but it gets abbreviated to STAR, which sounds cooler. So when STAR gets, so STAR is induced by luteinizing hormone. So when you shut down luteinizing hormone, this production of this hormone gets reduced, and this seems to be a very important molecule that takes the testosterone that's circulating in your bloodstream

and puts it into the mitochondria, into where the receptor is. So it's like a transportation unit. So some people have theorized that the lack of the production of this is why when people take HCG they feel better, because it brings us back online, but why some guys also need to take their levels higher on TRT to get good symptom resolution.

So let's say if you had two guys for example that had a total testosterone of 1500 but one was natural somehow and the other ones on TRT, the hypothesis there would be that the natural guy would feel better because that hormone is working better in his body because it's made through natural processes. The other side of the discussion is that because the testosterone is handled exogenously, you're getting a more stable level of that over 24 hours. So if we measure your levels in the morning naturally at 700, that might be a morning

peak for you, but then you have lunch and you train, like, you know, your levels go down when you train because you're exerting yourself. So that's a very different net amount of androgens over 24 hours. So in practice, it seems like it's about equivalent. And I think both of those things are present and I think they cancel each other out, is what I've seen. What about for someone like myself who's like older, let's say that at 25, my testosterone was naturally 700

and that today, my testosterone is 700, utilizing a little bit of stuff. I mean, is the idea to kind of get you to feel like you did when you were young or to have you feel, I guess, superior to that? That's a good question, because I wouldn't want to go back to feeling how I felt when I was 21.

I felt like shit. And a lot of the guys who start TRT at my age, they're going, I don't want to go back to how that felt. That was horrible. But other guys who are in their 40s and 50s who are like, hey, I want to go back to feeling how I felt when I was 30. It's a very different scenario. Um, I think what we always want to be doing is giving ourselves an age and

health appropriate amount of testosterone. So if I have a healthy 21 year old athlete and then an 80 year old guy who's, you know, maybe overweight and drinking, they are not going to have the same testosterone level on TRT. They wouldn't tolerate it. This guy would not tolerate the level of this guy when this guy's doing his best. It just wouldn't make any sense. So I think what we want to do at all times on TRT, whether you're 20 or 80 or in the middle, is we want to find the level that makes you feel your best, but at the same

time, objectively makes you healthier. So we want to subjectively make you feel good, but we want to objectively make sure that you're actually getting healthier. Because, I mean, we could all do a bunch of cocaine now and feel fantastic, but we're not going to run our blood work and look terrible. And same with anabolic steroids.

I mean, you could take a gram of combined gear and get the right ratios between the different compounds and you could feel like King Kong, but you do that for a couple of decades and you'll fall apart. But we look at the blood work and it would look like trash. So what we wanna do is go, how can we take, if we take your level of testosterone

from here to here, we wanna make sure that your blood work, all the markers that we wanna go up, go up, and all the markers we wanna go down, go down. But if we take you from here to here, we might find that those markers move in the wrong direction. So I think what we always want to be doing is finding the level that makes you feel better,

that makes you objectively healthier, and then everything else with that, I guess that North Star in mind, kind of works itself out in the wash. Kind of almost sounds like sometimes we're like with, you know, TRT and some of these things and even bodybuilding to some extent, sounds like we're trying to like do something to like a spider web. Like everything's connected, right?

So as soon as you go to touch it, everything else moves. What are some other things people should look at when they're thinking about like performance, like they want to perform better, they're on TRT, maybe they want to do, maybe you can explain sports TRT, but they're on TRT and they want to be a little bit amplified. What are some of the other things behind that that they should look at?

Is it their growth hormone, is it their IGF-1? What's maybe like, is there like a trifecta of three to five things that they should be kind of glancing at? Yeah, so moving on from the habit-based stuff, which I think is all important, but from more of like a hormone blood work kind of standpoint, the stuff that there's a guy named Dr. Neil Rousier who runs a practice called World Link Medical. And he's made a really good case for in the recent years, actually for a long time now,

for optimizing not just testosterone, but every hormone in the recent years, actually for a long time now, for optimizing not just testosterone, but every hormone in the body. And what I've found working with younger men is that younger men often don't need to optimize all the other hormones because they haven't declined with age. But once a man's getting into his forties or fifties, if you've got some degree of age related decline in testosterone, you're probably going to have some decline in thyroid. You're probably going to have some decline in growth hormone, you're definitely going to have some decline in melatonin, pregnenolone, and DHEA. And one thing that Vigorous Steve has actually pointed out that he was right on that I actually formally was incorrect on is that the use of certain anabolic steroids also seem to

shut down and reduce the levels of pregnenolone and DHEA as well, which are very important in the brain. So it's important that, and again, I'm going to go back to the car analogy and I don't really know shit about cars, but other people do. So I use cars to explain things. So this analogy sounds stupid. You kind of get what I mean. But if you serve as a car, if the entire car, you know, check engine lights on, it's driving like shit, you need to take it to a mechanic, you can't just go in and supercharge the engine

because what will happen is that not only will supercharging the engine in isolation cause a problem, but you've now created a bigger deficit between the engine and the rest of the parts of the car because now you've got this super 10 out of 10 engine, but the rest of all these issues now that maybe you were getting away with this engine is now going to stress these issues even more. And this is the challenge of basically dealing with humans, not robots, is that humans are a very, very complex series of interconnected systems. And then that system is also sentient and makes choices and decisions.

And that's even more challenging to deal with. So when it comes to optimizing hormones, it really depends on how someone's approaching it. I think if someone's approaching it from the standpoint of, hey, you know, 40, 50 years old, looking at my blood work for the first time, wanting to go on HRT, a good reputable clinic. I've got a partnership with a clinic called Victory Men's Health in St. Louis, but otherwise Marrick, like you said, they do a great job on this. I actually trained their staff a little while ago in this approach as well. So I can definitely vouch for them knowing what they're doing.

My friend, Dr. Adam Hotchkiss, he has some great blood panels on Algo DX. He set them up really well. He's a big advocate for this approach as well. But you want to check all your hormones. Like testosterone is trendy, it's sexy. Selling a guy testosterone is like selling a thirsty guy in the desert a glass of water. Everyone wants one. If it didn't shut down your natural production, it would be a two minute conversation.

It would be like, try some tests. So it's very important that if we're going to be looking at it from the context of an aging male or a male who's abused anabolic steroids before, that we're looking at all the hormones because if other hormones are deficient, not only will that create issues with tolerating the optimal amount of testosterone, like if you're a hypothyroid and you put optimal testosterone in, you're not going to metabolize it properly. You're going to have issues. So, and as well, if you're low in pregnenolone and DHEA, if you jack your testosterone up

to a healthy level, you're going to become overstimulated. You're not going to be able to sleep properly. You're not going to be able to focus your mind. So when we hijack this system, it's a really complex system to hijack. So we need to make sure that whoever's going to hijack it has hijacked a bunch of these systems before successfully. And I wish it was just as simple as TRT, but just like menopause treatment for women isn't just as simple as just one hormone. I mean, we understand it well in women, they need the isn't just as simple as just one hormone. I mean, we understand it well in women.

They need the overall production of all hormones in balance. Men need the same thing. It's just that we tend to just blast a bunch of testosterone in and hope for the best. Curious about this. We hate to bring him up in this way again, but he's a great example. Eugene Teo, we had him on the podcast before.

And he mentioned how his free test was around like 400. But he's really well-built, feels amazing, does great in business. And it made me wonder, you know, I think you, Marc, you mentioned also Sean Baker, someone with fair, right? Yep. How, like, if someone sees their test and they see low free testosterone,

but they're like, I think I feel fine. Should I be feeling better? Like this number does is low, but I don't know. I don't feel like I have a problem. What then? Yeah. So this is, I actually had a conversation with a personal friend a couple of days ago where he sent me his labs and I'm like, bro, I've known you for a long time.

I'm like, you are one of the fittest, leanest, healthiest individuals I know and this level is horrific. And the questions I asked him, I said, did you take two days off training before you got the blood test? And did you get it done fasted first thing in the morning? And he said, no, I did a workout the day before and I got it done at like 2 p.m. after lunch. And that will have your testosterone levels, if not more. So it's very important when we're looking at blood work that we're looking at it fasted

first thing in the morning on a good day. Like I've had guys do blood tests like a few days after running an ultra marathon, like, and I'm like, bro, you paid for this out of pocket. So you want to get blood work done on a regular Tuesday, you know, just a normal day that reflects your normal habits, you know, not the week after having a big bachelor party on the weekend and stuff like this, just a normal day that reflects your normal habits. You know, not the week after having a big bachelor party on the weekend and stuff like this. Just a normal Tuesday, a normal Wednesday morning. You want to drink a nice full bottle of mineral water

before you go in. Like I just tell people to make it easy. Like get a bottle of like Pellegrino or something like that. Drink the whole thing. No supplements, no zero calorie energy drinks. I know black coffee doesn't break a fast, but black coffee will jack your cortisol up

on your blood test. So water, blood test. You don't go for a walk in the morning or do a fasted workout. Wake up, water, blood test. And we also want to make sure no alcohol 72 hours prior and no hard workouts 48 hours prior. So, you know, doing a bit of mobility, stretching, yoga, going for a walk, you don't have to sit in front of the couch for two days. But we want to get a blood test done that represents you fasted first thing in the morning on a good day. And if that level is low, don't hesitate to retest it.

We shouldn't, no one should be making a testosterone diagnosis off one blood test. Unless you're in a circumstance, like I said before, the FSHLH is elevated and the testicles are damaged and stuff like that, those exceptions. But if someone's feeling good and their levels are low, we generally want to repeat the blood test under those positive circumstances. And a lot of the time we'll see the levels double or even triple. Is testosterone also a good idea for women looking for a hormone replacement? Yeah. I speak on women in a very limited fashion because I like to stay in my lane.

I don't understand anything about women at all. I'm in the same category. Exactly. Yeah. So, shout out to my wife. So, when it comes to women, testosterone for women is extremely important. I liken testosterone to women, testosterone for women is extremely important. I liken testosterone to women like progesterone for men.

We need a really small amount of it, but it's really important. And testosterone is very important for women and it does decline with age. I do wonder if women are impacted from the negative environmental factors like men are. I don't know enough about it to say. I can't say that dealing with hormonal women is a career path that I would like to go down. Hormonal men are interesting enough. So, but from what I've seen, a typical injectable testosterone dose for a woman seems quite easy. It works out to be about one to two milligrams a day. So yeah, seven to two milligrams a day.

So yeah, seven to 14 milligrams a week, I think on the lower end is more common. But if a woman needs hormone replacement therapy, she needs testosterone just as much as she needs the other ones. So she needs it just as much, but she just needs a much smaller amount in terms of milligrams.

So equally important, but much lower dose. And every day. I think that I look at it like that just in terms of, uh, just an easy number for people to catch onto. But typically for an injectable for a woman, they'll make it in like a 25 or 50 milligram per mil. So it's easier to dose. And then yeah, you'd be looking at two to three injections a week, subcutaneous probably.

What's kind of new, what's coming down the pipeline? Because I think blood work is like, we're just scratching the surface with it. People are just understanding how to read it really well and be able to help people and to be able to knock out a lot of health problems that people have. Is there anything kind of new on the horizon, like new drugs or new things with blood work or new tests that people should be thinking about or looking into?

So, I was speaking to my friend Memo before from Marek about this and I said that because someone asked me on like an Instagram Q&A the same question and he agreed that this is likely going to be a big thing coming up. So, when a pharmaceutical company makes a drug that actually makes it to market, it's not like a research chemical like people are buying online. It basically goes through a period where that company has it under patents for eight years. It's basically so that they can recoup their costs, aka make profit, before it becomes generic.

So a good example was, it was only a few years ago that Cialis, Tadalafil became generic. Up until then, it was like 20, 30, 40 bucks a pill. Now it's like a dollar or $2 a pill because now that the Cialis was the brand name for it. And then once it goes generic, every company can make it like ibuprofen or paracetamol. So it's more interesting to see what's going to come off patent because that's going to then be up for grabs for people to use. I think the future of DRT, and I will go on record saying this because I think it will age very well, at the moment in all Western countries, but very commonly in Australia and the UK, they use a long-acting testosterone injection.

So three to four injections a year. It's testosterone, undeconouate. The marketed brands are called Nabito or Reandrin. So it's like a four mil shot in the glute. And it sounds great, right? Four shots of, four shots a year to optimize your testosterone levels. Problem is it works out to be about 80 milligrams a week and it doesn't last for three or four months a shot.

It basically, you go on like a roller coaster and then you crash out. So it doesn't work, but in practice it sounds great. Um, when they invented sustenance, that was so that you could do one injection a month. It didn't work, but it sounded good. So I think what will happen is if we can take a medication like testosterone, undecanoate, that's got a half life that I think is four to five times longer than CP and eight in an ad today, it's still 200 milligrams per mil. If you could take that home with you and do one injection a week and have the same stability as doing a daily injection, and it's the same price as Cipionate and Enanthate, there is no reason

not to use that. So I think that's going to be the future is people being able to do one shot a week to be able to have the same stability as guys doing every day or three times a week injections at the moment. And in like the health enthusiasts and fitness enthusiasts space, doing a couple of shots a week or three shots a week of TRT with an insulin syringe in the shoulder, it's not a big deal. For general population, it is. A lot of guys do struggle with that, whether it's because of the needles, remembering the

schedule, it can be a real challenge for a lot of guys to do that. So if we can offer people optimal treatment outcomes with one injection a week, I think that would be a game changer. The other one that's been the more recent thing that I think is going to catch on at a more widespread rate, I've been advocating for this, I've been running seminars and doing lectures on this, is this trans-scrotal testosterone cream. So instead of doing an injection, you take about the amount of cream that you'd put toothpaste on a toothbrush, so not a huge amount, and you put that on the underside of your bowl

sack twice a day. Now back in the day, creams didn't work. That's why we did injections. I mean, if there was a better option than injecting, we wouldn't inject, just basic comfort factor. So previously the creams were only like two to 5% and the bioavailability was pretty crap. Now the creams are 20%.

They're made in these forms that have really, really good skin permeation. And we put it on the scrotum because the scrotum skin is much, much, much thinner, which allows four to eight times higher absorption. Plus you're not going to transfer it on people unless you're rubbing a ball sack on them, which people don't generally like.

The testosterone transfer is probably the least of the problems with that. So now that we can get equal or even potentially greater outcomes from a topical cream than injections, this is very attractive to a lot of people in terms of compliance. Some people really don't like the needles,

even though they're small, but it metabolizes differently. So the difference is that when you inject an ESTA, the testosterone, let's say, cypionate, goes into your liver, and the liver takes a while to cleave that cypionate. It kind of like bottlenecks it, and then that gives you a slow release into the body.

That's good. What the cream does is it goes straight into the bloodstream. So it's just more like your natural production. And what we find, one of the biggest struggles that we have in TRT is treating the guys who are metabolically unfit. The guys who are a little bit overweight, not doing enough exercise, maybe drinking a little bit,

because you have to meet people where they are. And, you know, a TRT is a great treatment for metabolic syndrome, but the problem is that metabolic syndrome, which is caused by low testosterone, also causes all these side effects on TRT. Being overweight, under-exercised, and overfed, and over-alcoholed is the main issue for side effects on TRT. What we find is if the guys use cream,

who are in this category, these guys who are a little bit overweight, a little bit unfit, if we use cream, we tend to be able to avoid those side effects. And the cream gives you a much greater conversion to DHT and less conversion to estradiol. And what it seems to do is that it creates a hormonal profile of a healthier man. So previously guys were given things like estrogen blockers or other medications to fix these side effects on TRT, or told to lower their dose, but now by using a cream, we can avoid the need for injections and then

also reduce and eliminate side effects in the most side effect prone patient population. And it's the same price as injections. So when we have that as an option, that's very exciting and all the best TRT clinics are now offering both. The clinic that I run in Europe, we actually only offer the cream for logistical reasons, shipping injections into other countries is a nightmare. But if we had to offer one or the other, we'd pick the cream because it's a fantastic option.

So cream is the thing that's coming now. And then in the future, I think those long acting injections are gonna be the thing. I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas DeLauer. And Thomas is somebody that's an animal with working out. You got a chance to work out with him.

I worked out with him. And he's kind of always on the front lines of like, finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that Transcriptions was the first company to put out Methylene Blue. And now look at Methylene Blue, it's so popular, it's everywhere. It's one of those things.

If you guys listen to this podcast, you know I'm very iffy with the supplements that I take because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You got to be careful. The great thing about Troscriptions is that when people want to get Methylene Blue, usually they'll go on Amazon, they're going on these other sites. It's not third party testing. It's not dosed. A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing of it.

Trust Scriptions, they have third party testing for their products. It's dosed so you know easily what exact dose of Methylene Blue you're getting in each troche. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not gonna be anything in it. It's safe. You can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you want or you can just swallow it

They have two different types of methylene blue They have one that is I believe dosed at 16 milligrams and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16 I feel is very safe. You can also score the chokes and you can break them up into smaller bits. And in addition to that, on top of the Methylene Blue, they have a lot of other great products as well.

They got stuff for sleep, they got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I gotta say, I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before jujitsu, and the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with my,

with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling, and it's like, cool, that means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to, and my recovery's better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott Schur, we had him on the podcast, and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends

methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. And they're seeing some profound impacts. And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those of you doing red light therapy are those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight, it might be a good idea to try some Methylene Blue

before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity it is that you're gonna do outside. And this stuff is great, but please, like first off, they have that stuff for staying calm, they have stuff for sleep, but remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing and it's gonna make things so much better

If you're doing everything else, too, and I think this is just a little different too than just adding some magnesium to your diet I think this is a little different than yeah, you know treat these things appropriately make sure you do some of your own research But if you're taking medications, it takes SSRIs, you better talk to your doctor first. Don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it'd be good to double, triple, quadruple check and make sure that you're safe.

Troscriptions has a lot of great things that you need, so go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. It seems like something new is always coming out for weight loss too. You had like Ozempic, Wigovy, and bigger Steve

when he was on our show a while back. He talked about Red Is True Tide, which is another kind of version of that. Can you speak upon that? And is there anything new or different? There's probably like maybe three or four different ones that might be coming out in the near future. Yeah, I have a bit of a different take on these

and I have a lot of colleagues and good friends who are big advocates of these injectable GLP ones. So I just have a kind of different perspective on them. I don't think that they're wrong. I just think that there's a different approach. Now, if someone is morbidly obese and the levels of obesity you guys have here in the States, I mean, Australia and Europe have nothing in comparison to that. When people are really, really big and really, really struggling, these medicines are a godsend

for them. I mean, because there's very little else they can do. But in cases of guys who were just a little bit fluffy and are wanting to lean down a bit more and literally wanting to have the cake and eat it too, in terms of they're just wanting to be able to be 80-20 with things but get the 100% result, I kind of think that these injectables are a little bit heavy-handed. And I revert back to metformin, which is the tried and true weight loss drug. It was developed in the 20s.

It's been around since the 40s, so it has the most research out of any pharmaceutical in the world. And these GLP-1s, basically you're injecting a analog of the hormone that tells you that you're full, which works very well if your problem is overeating. Metformin works a little bit differently, but it naturally increases the secretion of that thing. So it does work by the same pathway. So I kind of look at it like, if we're looking at like a spectrum of strength, you've got the injectables right up the top, and then you've got the low dose

of the injectables in the middle. But if people want something that's milder, but way more affordable, like way more affordable, very, very available, a low dose of metformin a couple of times a day ideally in a sustained release format a couple times a day Yeah, okay. Yeah, and my friend Jay Campbell's written a fantastic article called the definitive guide to metformin where he goes through all this It's all cited. It's available online to people so really help you with like glucose uptake and things like that, right? Yeah, basically if you're insulin resistant, it makes you non insulin resistant while it's circulating in the body.

So it doesn't cure it permanently, but it basically, it almost forces your body into a fasted state in terms of energy metabolism. It puts you into what's called the AMPK metabolic state. Would you say a natural form of that might be berberine or is that too similar? Okay. Very similar. So if people want to find something that's more on the natural side, taking some berberine for similar idea might be a good idea. So if we extend that spectrum right down to like very mild

then we've got like berberine, dihydro berberine and then metformin low dose, metformin high dose and then the injectables. The reason why people wanna use the sustained release metformin is that when you're naive to it, it can trigger an effect that we affectionately refer to as thunder pants. It can basically mimic food poisoning, we'll say. So unless you enjoy that, having the sustained release version just basically means you don't

peak with a high amount so it keeps it stable. And then starting with a very low dose and building up, but people also report those same digestive side effects on the semaglutide and all of these things as well. So that's just one thing that people should be conscious of is you start low, go slow with all of these medications. But I think from my perspective at least, I'm kind of biased against pharmaceuticals when they're not needed,

is to go what's the minimal effective dose I can use from these artificial adjuncts? And how can I meet the medicine halfway in terms of my diet and exercise strategy? And I think these medications should just be used to maybe take the edge off an overaggressive appetite or make things a little bit easier, not just destroy your appetite with a nuclear bomb. And then you don't learn the skills of being comfortable being a little bit hungry or being able to leave food on the plate or learning about macros and things like this as well.

I think there's probably a good population of people that have gone to get some TRT and they end up with some type of cookie cutter approach and they're feeling really good maybe or but there's something off. Right? So I know you've probably dealt with a lot of that and you've probably fixed a lot of guys in those situations. How does somebody know if they need to reevaluate what they've been doing with whatever company they've been doing it with? Yeah, that's a, unfortunately, that's a very good question

because it's something that comes up a lot. I wish it didn't. What I was saying before we started was, what I was saying to Mark was that from a business standpoint it is much more profitable to have a hundred guys on three medications and three hundred guys on one medication in terms of less efforts, less overheads, less dealing with more potential interactions and so on and so forth. So the more medications a clinic can prescribe to an individual patient, the leaner their

model is going to be. The problem is that this is not a sales strategy which should be done with medicine and sick people. This is the strategy that should be done for McDonald's, you know, the burger and the fries and the coke. So I understand how this happens because a lot of clinics open to make money. They see an opportunity in the market. They want to profit.

They're not really primarily interested in helping people. It's a real shame and it seems to be much more of an issue over here in the States. When I landed in Vegas last year for the Olympia, there was an ad for TRT on the radio, which like blew my mind. I was like, I was like, how is this a thing? And then the guy who was driving my Uber, he's like, yeah, I'm on TRT. And I was like, I'm like in Australia, And then the guy who was driving my Uber, he's like, yeah, I'm on TRT. And I was like, I'm like, in Australia, there's like six clinics in the whole country.

I think there were more TRT clinics in a 10 mile radius of my friend, Ali Gilbert's house where I was staying than the entire country of Australia and all of Europe combined. So yeah, it was a big wake up call because when I went and spoke at the Olympia, it was almost like mind blowing to some people in the audience talking about microdosing testosterone injections,

doing it more frequently, questioning the use of things like HCG and aromatase inhibitors and stuff that I thought was rudimentary from a few years ago turned out to be quite important for people to understand, which kind of blew my mind in terms of how big this industry is and how far behind it is at the same time. So the cookie cutter protocols are kind of scary. And what they'll be is that a clinic will just have a set testosterone dose they start people on,

and then the fries and the Coke, which is generally the HCG and the anastrozole. And this is something that guys need to be wary of because every TRT protocol needs to be individualized. And I will say that there are definitely templates though. If you take a hundred guys and start them all on TRT, you'll find that chunks of them are on the same protocols because they have a lot of things in common. And when a clinic starts a TRT protocol,

it's a process of we're throwing a dart at the dart board and we're trying to hit the ring around the bullseye. If we hit the bullseye in the process, great, but the process of refinement is you get a blood test done and then you move it closer to the center and then closer to the center again and so on. So there's some templatized things that pop up in TRT, but it has to be an individual approach.

And the most important thing, I think, for patients to be wary of is that you can basically look at the blood test that you're getting and make sure it's comprehensive. So make sure they're evaluating every system in the body, not just what your testosterone number is. Because ultimately when we're looking at that blood test, we're not trying to discern, can we sell you testosterone? I hope we're trying to discern why do you feel like shit and is your cognitive bias that it's coming from testosterone true?

And if it is, can we find that there's something else in the body going on that we can fix and resolve to prevent you needing this treatment? That's what a TRT onboarding process should look like. Problem is that sometimes that's not profitable, it doesn't end in a sale, and it takes a while. So good clinics will operate that way. And quick side note, I've got a free TRT FAQ on my website. If people open my website,

advancedfundamentalhealth.com, download it at the back on the last page. I've got all my recommended providers for every country, and people can check them out. You guys probably recognize most of the clinics on there as well. So it's very important to find someone who is going to give you the personalized treatment that you need, otherwise you could end up worse off than before you started. Yeah, there it is.

What are some of the charts that you brought in? Were you going to be a teacher today and take us to school? Well, so when Andrew came to Silverback, because he presented as well, he was kind enough to take the time to watch my speech. And when he invited me on this podcast, he said, you have to bring the slides. So I brought the slides. So this is- Take us through, yeah.

Yeah. So if people want the full speech, you can just search Dave Lee Silverback 2024. It's on the whole thing's on YouTube. But basically I'm very interested in the behavioral psychology effects of hormones, both in terms of high testosterone and low testosterone. And I think a good place to start is if we have a look at the graph here on the vertical axis, we've got the difficulty of life. And then on the horizontal axis, we've got age.

So if we go to the next one, this, unless you have a particularly traumatic childhood and things are horrible, but for most people life should go like this, which is that it's pretty cruisy when you're young, you know, things start to get difficult as you hit adolescence. Life kind of, you know, peaks in difficulty when you get to like 30s, 40s, 50s, depending on your trajectory, because you're trying to develop mastery of something, whether it's mastery of a skill, mastery of self. And then, you know, you develop that skill, you build the castle, you sit on top of the house, and you know, things get a bit easier as you go on. That's how things I would hope look for most people. So if we go to the next one, these are your healthy test

Austrian levels. So you make none when you're very young and then you hit puberty and it goes up like a freight train. Your testicles get that signal for the first time and the world changes and then it very gradually drops off as you get older. So if we go to the next one there, if we plot these two things together, you can see that gap. That's where basically testosterone is buffering towards the challenges of life. So as your levels start to go down, they go down as life gets easier.

So this is a pretty good scenario. The problem for my generation and the younger generation growing up is that we didn't really have these healthy testosterone levels and this can be a problem. So if we go to the next one, I put this one in pink. So if we look at unhealthy testosterone levels and this can be a problem. So if we go to the next one, I put this one in pink. So if we look at unhealthy testosterone levels versus healthy testosterone levels,

the timeline is the same, right? You still hit puberty at roughly the same time, but you can see one peaks much higher and one peaks much lower, but it follows the same trajectory. So you still get your testosterone peak at the end of puberty, it just peaks significantly

lower than it did before. And one thing that was very interesting for me when I went to my 10-year high school reunion in 2019, it's quite a big all boys school. So they take like a big photo of all the year 12s who are graduating at the time. And when I compared the 2019 graduates, my year, which was 2009 versus 1999 and 1989, we're looking at 17 year olds a decade apart. And if you had a fight with the 1989 guys versus the 2019 guys, it would not have even been close. It was like looking at full grown adults versus children. You know, I got to find something.

Yes, I agree. And we all know what's true. I mean, if you look out in the street, you can see it. So if we go to the next one here, this is the scenario that my generation is dealing with, is that that gap between the testosterone levels and the challenge of life is a lot smaller, and you spend a lot more time with the challenge of life

being overwhelming relative to the testosterone levels. And testosterone doesn't make life free or easy. It's not like winning the lottery, but it buffers the stress and it gives you the skill set to be able to handle challenge, push outside your comfort zone and ultimately overcome. So if we just go to the next one where I've kind of plumped them all together, you can see there's a pretty drastic difference in that gap. Right. And if we just transition to the next one there, I've kind of said, you know, these are the good times and then on the next one, bad times. And then if we go to the final slide, we can see the amount of time that we're in that

buffered state is a lot smaller. And then this is the problem is that guys are getting to 35 and 40 years old and they haven't mastered anything because they've been so stressed and overwhelmed and avoidant their whole life. The trajectory of where they've ended up has been really depressing and disappointing. And then they end up feeling guilty because they think it's because they were lazy. So I think it can be really psychologically quite challenging for people, but ultimately the proof is in the pudding in terms of guys are getting to this point where they're getting

to 35, 40, 45 and they're not proud of what they've built. And I think that that can be a big cause of depression and anxiety. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. That's really well put together. How do you train? How do you eat?

What are some habits that you've kind of worked on, and what are some things? Because you mentioned when you were young, because you mentioned when you were young and you mentioned that you were in a band, but I think you mentioned you were like very thin and stuff like that, so. Yeah, I got into exercise because I wanted to look good on stage,

but also mainly because I was singing and I was getting out of breath. So I had to learn how to improve my cardiovascular system. That's something you never think about, but whenever I see a performance, I'm always like, how is this guy, he's playing the guitar too, and he's running around the stage,

you're like, how the hell he's doing all this? Well, I was doing the screaming vocals, so that's basically using your lungs as bagpipes. And yeah, I got into swimming and high intensity interval training on the elliptical and the rowing machine, and that did wonders for me. Oh, and tabatas as well, tabatas were great.

Smart thing to do, especially swimming. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that was all well and good. And then I decided I wanted to get huge, like everyone else does. And I just benched because the guy who I was training with and absolutely lovely guy, he was a friend from school, but he was a rower.

So he always wanted to train chess because his back was like a Christmas tree. So I was benching a hundred kilos before I even learned how to squat. And I was, you know, squatting three before I even learned how to squat and I was, you know, squatting three plates before I learned how to stretch. And then that all came to a, that all came to a mess in my mid twenties with a bunch of spinal injuries.

So these days now I've done a lot of my programming from a company called Muscle Nerds, which is run by Luke Lehman, who was quite close with Charles Poliquin. A lot of stuff I see from him really resonates with Ben Patrick, knees over toes guy, who you've done a lot with. That stuff for me was life changing. So I do a lot of my training now. I like to exercise every day.

Is it optimal for muscle growth and hypertrophy? No, I like it because it makes me feel good. So I like doing a little bit every day. So every morning I get up, I go for a run. I go for it, do a little row on my ergo machine in the basement. And then I do, you know, usually just one set of a full body thing every day.

And then some mobility work and go for a big walk. We live in a nice, you know, peaceful town with a lake. So it's nice going for walks, but I like doing a little bit of resistance, a little bit of cardio and a good amount of walking every single day. Even though you got some great help from muscle nerds, I'm sure it wasn't one thing that moved the needle for fixing your back. It was probably multiple disciplines, multiple habits probably.

It was the whole approach that muscle nerds as well as Ben talk about, which I imagine came from Charles, which is this idea of getting strong through the stretched ranges of motion. That was absolutely massive for me because when you grow up just sitting and like I didn't do any sport growing up and that was like, I wish I could go back to my teenage version of myself and just slap him in the face and say, go and play sport. It's because you need to move while you're growing. It's good for you.

Yeah. So, um, working on a lot of posterior stuff was really helpful, but just changing the mindset of like, I was training like a bodybuilder for someone who wanted to perform like a gymnast and it just didn't make any sense. So understanding that it was about learning how the body worked and how the body moved and then getting stronger in the areas

that were compromised around my injuries, that just made a whole bunch of sense. And I remember I was in, I was in one of those stupid hotel quarantines during the, uh, the, the pandemic saga and I was stuck for two weeks in a hotel room. So I couldn't, I couldn't move. And that's when I found, um, Ben's podcast on, on, on, on this podcast. And I watched like, I probably watched all of his videos in one day, like all of them. And I was like, I had never been itching to get to the gym so much in my life. Like I was doing things like the Y extension on the 45 degree. That one's incredible.

Was the first time I'd done like reverse hyperextensions, the osteograph split squats, the seated good mornings. It makes you feel so good. I was like, this is, this is the stuff that I should have been doing instead of all the bench press and bicep curls. But I think you have to go through that process and learn the hard way. I'm a big believer as someone who has worked a lot with men is that we need to touch the stove and realize it's hot so that we don't burn ourselves again in the future.

And if you'd gone and told me all this stuff when I was younger, I would have said, fuck you. Like I'm going to do it anyway. So I learned the hard way, but yeah, at the moment I like moving every day. I love having like, I've got a GHD, a eco bike and a rowing machine in my basement with like just some adjustable dumbbells and a pull-up bar. And I like moving the body kind of like a adult version of being a kid on going on the playground at lunchtime like kids like going like rolling around wrestling like monkey bars

I like doing that I like taking my body through a full range of motion every day doing a few little sprints every day Doing a whole bunch of low-grade movement and that just feels good Where can people find you So I am at advancedfundamentalhealth.com. You can also find me on Instagram at imdavele, I-M-D-A-V-E-L-Double E. And I've also got a private group on school

called the TRT Academy, it's $19 a month. And I do two Q and A's in there every week. So people can submit their questions in advance and I go through and answer them. I'll also mention I have three ebooks out on my website. The first ebook is called TRT 101. It's an instruction manual on how to do TRT. So all my intellectual property, all my approaches I've put in there so people can follow it. It's kind of like the instruction manual that should come

with TRT. Beyond TRT is a second one. That's got everything on pregnenolone, DHEA, thyroid, fertility, estrogen, and HCG. So all the topics people are wanting to learn about. And then TRT 102 is my guide to philosophy. So all the stuff we spoke about with the brain. So they're 29 Australian dollars each, but if anyone would like a copy and can't afford it, please send me an email and I will send it to you for free. Thank you so much for your time today, appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. Strength is never weakness, weakness never strength.

Catch you guys later, bye.