Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2707: Boost Your Testosterone Naturally

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Boosting Testosterone Naturally RAISE your testosterone 20-40% naturally backed by science. (1:38) 6 Ways to Boost Your Testosterone Naturally #1 - Lift weights. (8:45) #2 - Prioritize sleep. (12:05) #3 - Optimize vitamin D. (18:36) #4 - Optimize zinc and magnesium. (20:34) #5 - Lower cortisol. (22:43) #6 – Supplements. (24:00) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promo:  MAPS 40+ 50% off!! ** Code TESTOSTERONE50 at checkout. ** Visit Eight Sleep for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump Listeners! ** Use the code MINDPUMP to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra. The best part is that you still get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don’t like it – – Shipping to many countries worldwide. ** Mind Pump Store Why do Gen Z and millennial men have lower testosterone levels? Androgen receptors and testosterone in men—Effects of protein ingestion, resistance exercise and fiber type Mind Pump #1547: The Hidden Benefits of Lifting Weights Sleep loss dramatically lowers testosterone in healthy young men Low Testosterone Linked to Vitamin D Levels Ashwagandha benefits, dosage, and side effects - Examine How Much Ashwagandha Should I Take for Testosterone? Tongkat Ali benefits, dosage, and side effects - Examine Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, raise your testosterone by 20 to 40% naturally, all backed by science. We only use science-backed information for you for this episode. By the way, along with this episode,

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That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. All right, the data shows you can raise your testosterone by 20 to 40% naturally. We went through the studies. We broke it down. We picked the most effective ways, the ways that are likely to raise your testosterone. In some cases, by as much as 40%, we're going to get into it if you want all those wonderful benefits of higher testosterone.

Let's get into it. Now, do you think this is somebody who is at current baseline or suboptimal, and then this is how to increase by that? Because if you're already peak testosterone, which very few people are, naturally, you're probably not going to get a lot from some of the things you're going to talk about. You'll actually, so it depends on what we get to. So like nutrient deficiencies. Where you're deficient, yeah.

Yeah, that's different. Although when we get to those are so common, you'll probably see a rise. I was going to say not only that, but you also wouldn't be at baseline if you were, if you're deficient in those things. That's right. But like you said, general testosterone levels have declined. And man, this has been a trend that we've been tracking. I say we, the medical community has been tracking for decades now. It's actually a long time. And one article I read said that a 20-year-old's testosterone today is what like a 60-year-olds was in the early 1980s. And they're attributing more environmental causes is like a bigger than they originally thought. Yeah, and it's multifactoral. Yeah, there's a lot to it.

Yeah, it's like inactivity. So obviously less strength. Could be diet related. Nutrient efficiency seem to be higher in certain cases. So it's probably multifactorial. But what we do have. Do you not think, sorry I interrupt you, but I mean, just we did an episode recently and you talked about this. And I just, I think that a lot of lower testosterone was would probably be related to the video gaming for hours and pornography would make you, because you would lose sexual drive.

Yep. If you, if you played a lot of video games and you were on porn every day, I would think that that would, because you wouldn't have this desire to go out and try. Unless you're winning a lot in the games. But, you know, lack of sunlight inactivity, lack of, uh, lack of, uh, competing for mates. There's some data that suggests that that'll cause rises in testosterone. Yeah. So it's all got to play a role.

Plus, I don't know what the data shows on this, but I would imagine high, just because of the way that the reward centers of the brain are modified, not in a good way, especially with pornography consumption, that there's probably a correlation between high users of video games pornography and also a bad diet. There's probably a correlation there.

Sure. where you've got a combination of all those things. Yep, exactly. Yeah, great point too, Justin. You're probably not eating chicken breast and rice while you're gaming for hours or whatever. Yeah, you're probably eating garbage. Crappy energy drinks. Yep, you're not getting good sleep because you're up late watching your computer screen or your gaming console.

You're not active, right? You're not exercising. And so testosterone is very adaptive. So here's the thing about testosterone that's interesting is it reacts. it reacts quite strongly to lifestyle and environment. I mean, I could pull up a lot of studies that'll show what happens to a man's testosterone in the short term. So these are like acute changes when a man wins a basketball game or when he's in a room with other men and there's a pretty girl in the room. You'll sometimes see spikes in man.

Or if he asks a girl out and he gets rejected, what happens to testosterone? right um they've even show there's even studies on chess like chess players who win you'll see the winners have a spike uh sleep um you know will affect your testosterone so it's a very it it can be affected strongly by um just your lifestyle um in very short term and then also long term ways and so well if it could get affected by lifestyle then what if we were to modify our lifestyle right to raise it and um amplify it by the way there's a another part to this that a lot of people don't talk about because we measure testosterone levels. So we can see your total testosterone and what's called free testosterone because of the

sake of this podcast, we'll stick to total testosterone. But just, you know, to go just a bit deeper, free testosterone is what your body uses because you can actually have a lot of testosterone but have it be bound up. This is unbound. So it's not usable. But we'll just stick to total testosterone levels. So we look at testosterone levels, but what we don't look at, and you can measure this, it's just much more difficult. Blood test is easy to see your testosterone. But you can also measure what your testosterone attaches to your androgen receptors.

And we can look at androgen receptor density, meaning if you increase the amount of androgen receptors that you have, your current testosterone becomes more effective, essentially, because there's more places for it to attach. In fact, there was a study years ago that tried to correlate testosterone levels to strength gains in men following a strength training program. Now, all the men fell within range, so it wasn't like they had super low, you know, super high. They had men that were all kind of normal, but there were men on the higher end of normal and men that were on the lower or medium, moderate end of normal. And the stronger correlate to strength gains was androgen receptor density. Testosterone was correlated, but it was the androgen receptor density that was a stronger correlate.

So why am I saying this? Because the data that I pulled up for the things that we're going to talk about, I looked up, not only does it, how does it affect testosterone levels, but how does it affect androgen receptor density? Oh, wow. So all these positively impact that also. Both. Okay. So you can get like a double whammy, right? So imagine if you were, I mean, I'll use clean numbers so it's easy.

You boost your testosterone 50%. which isn't going to happen with most things. But let's just say you did. And you increased your androgen receptor density by 50%. Well, you've essentially doubled the power of your testosterone. I don't think it's quite that clean, but you get the picture. So they're both really important things to look at. Now, is it possible for some people to increase their testosterone, but not their angrogen receptors?

And so they, and is this an example of people that may have reported like, I took this and I did that and I didn't feel any boost? Is that what we're most likely seeing? Maybe, but I looked up specifically ones that both were tested. But I think what happens when your testosterone levels go up is your body does increase its receptor density through that process. But like, I think acute spikes in testosterone, which are short term, I don't think they have that effect. I think you just get this kind of spike and then it drops, you know, for a day or two or something like that. So, but yeah, that's a good question, Adam. But I specifically went and looked up like, what are things that raise testosterone and can increase

androgen receptor density? And then what do those numbers look like? What do we see in the data? Yeah. So we'll start with the first thing, which is strength training. So strength training, first off, strength training is the most effective way to increase androgen receptor density. The muscle building process, part of that process is increasing androgen receptor.

density. It's actually part of the adaptation process. So when your muscles want to build, one of the things that it does, or one of the things that your body does is it increases the amount of androgen receptors that are available so that now the building process can occur. In fact, there's some studies that with some people where they don't see a high, a huge boost in testosterone, but you always see a boost in endrogen receptor density, which is, again, pretty awesome and much more correlated to muscle growth. So I pulled up the studies so that we could see. And this is what's pretty cool. Strength training causes an acute spike in testosterone. We've known this, right? You know,

what exercise causes the highest, you know, spike in testosterone. Squats. Yeah, we see that, right? Squats, dead lifts, compound lifts. You know, this is short term, but we see the biggest spikes in those exercises. We'll see a 20, 30 percent increase acutely. Generally, though, overall, when men engage in appropriate strength. training, the data supports about a 17% increase. The androgen receptor density goes up by 20 to 30% though, even more. In trained muscles. Interesting.

And that's because they just test the muscle that they train. So they'll have people do squats. Then they'll test the quad over 12 weeks through muscle biopsy, and they'll see this huge boost in androgen receptor density. Now, when most of these studies are conducted, is there a similar type of protocol as far as the training volume or regimen because there's a bit of a caveat to what you're saying right now is that, you know, lifting weights absolutely can do great things for hormones. But you do it right.

It could also be adverse, right? So it could also have negative effects if you're overtrained, which a lot of guys typically do. It's like, I'll sleep when I'm dead and it doesn't matter. I work to a 12-hour day. In fact, I mean, you see people every day, somebody in my feed does a post of, yeah, you know, got no sleep last night, but the trainings showed up anyways, you know, they're crushing their workout. It's like, you know, and I think that's okay once in a while. But if you chronically do that, you're going to actually, you're going to see negative effects on testosterone. So I'm assuming

that when they do these studies, they probably are applying two or three times a week of training. Typically, it's three full body workouts. Is it typical prescription. I would say, like, we know this is trainers. How do you know if your strength training program is appropriate? Well, the best measure is, are you getting stronger? So I think if you're doing it and you're not getting stronger, there could be a lot of reasons why you're not getting stronger. But if it's due to the workout routine, then you know that the workout routine isn't working. So, but if you are getting stronger, you're doing a lot of things right. And your workout routine is appropriate. If it's inappropriate, you won't get stronger, is my point. You can't overtrain and get

stronger. Yeah. If you train appropriately, you will. So if you're getting stronger, I think you can pretty confidently say, this is probably doing positive things. to my testosterone and my angiogen receptor density. Okay. Next, we have sleep. So this is a pretty big one. One bad night of sleep in one study I found lowered testosterone by 30%. One five hour night.

One five hour night of sleep. Now, is it typically? They're not even having them stay up all night. Is it typically a kind of a cliff and then slowed down to that? Like the first really bad night of sleep, you have a huge 30%. And then if you have a second or third. What's the recovery? Does it, does it, does it?

Does it taper off or does it continue to drop at that rate? It can't possibly. Over time with people who report chronically poor sleep, you see a consistent 20% reduction in testosterone. What's cool, though, about this is I pulled up a chart that showed five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours. It was more testosterone with each one. So even if you're like, well, I get seven hours of sleep,

you're still probably not optimizing your testosterone because you're not getting eight. So even that one hour, makes that kind of a difference. So, you know, prioritize it, essentially. By the way, androgen receptor density down to 15 to 20% with chronic porcelain. Is it the only way to test that to really, like, biopsy of the muscle tissue?

Oh, that'd be so cool to know. I know. Like, yeah, where you're at with that in conjunction with, like, raising testosterone. Yeah, no, I mean, people who's consistently strength, train over time have really, really dense, just have a lot of endger receptors. You just kind of factor that in.

Now, with sleep, what's interesting about it is it's actually not that for most people. Some people have some really difficult to solve issues, but for most people, it's actually straightforward how you fix this. It's, you know, don't be on electronics right before bed. Don't go to bed. You know, make sure your room is dark and cool. Don't eat right before bed. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every morning.

That's it. For most people that salt. Definitely sun up, sun down. I mean, as close as you can. Yeah. It's simple, but it's not easy to be consistent. No. It's like one of those things that theoretically you're like, that's it.

Just go to bed at the same time, get up at the same time. But unfortunately, life and habits and all these other things are involved. And it's probably when I think of the things that I personally wrestle with the most in my own personal lifestyle is that I've got a really good balance. nutritionally where I never let myself go way out of bounds and keep myself and she there. I fluctuate from volume and intensity of training. It's always in and out. It's like a really nice relationship

there. Sleep is probably like I can't I can't be honest and say I've even strong two weeks of like what I would say perfect. I've done two weeks of perfect diet. Two weeks of perfect training. I've done two weeks of almost anything in regard to it. Yet sleep

is one of the most impactful and I probably can't say I've had 14 perfect days the cumulative backup of stress that you have to account for that's like carries with you when you don't get the recovery of the sleep and then now that's going to impede on your energy and everything else and so yeah it's it's a tough thing once like sleep is a big factor to the to the whole cycle of like being able to now recover and adapt and then go forward and progress well what i have done is i've gotten older what i have done even though i don't think i've ever mastered the sleep thing is i have modified my train

training and diet in relation to that, which is something I ignored when I was younger. When in my 20s, you train hard no matter what. You train hard no matter what. In fact, many times I would push through those rough workouts, probably trained way too hard or indulge in the cravings. I'm so aware of what a good night or not so good night of sleep is, and it will dictate what my training intensity looks like or at all, depending on how bad the sleep was. And that I've done.

And I feel like at least I'm working with my body instead of against it. And that's made a big difference. Yeah, you know, it's interesting about this. This is largely a modern issue. As entertainment options have exploded, sleep quality and duration has dropped. Yeah. So it's like there's so many things to do now late at night. So much entertainment.

So many things to watch. You could bring. I remember when I was a kid, I wanted so bad. I love TV when I was a kid. Who doesn't, right? But when I was a kid, I loved TV. And I remember all I wanted for one Christmas was a portable, remember these to make those portable TVs that were like this big,

but you'd have to put the end. And you couldn't pick up any station. And if I did, it was like one. And there was definitely nothing on at night with the one station that I could pick up, right? Now you have your phone, which follows you everywhere. And I have every TV show. Like literally, anything I want, available at any time and this is the main reason why you know if you go back not that far

what people did first of all tv had nothing on at night you had the news and then that was done and what people did is they read they would sit in bed and scrambled cinemax and they would read a bed well i would like to even see sal comparison of your phone versus tv even i think your phone is even worse and so uh you know i know they're both admitting the blue light, but a TV that's, you know, 10, 12, 15 feet away from your room or wherever you're at versus this little tiny screen that you've got 12 inches from your face. And how much more stimulating is social media with a swipe, click, swipe, back and forth? So I would be willing to bet that even TV didn't have as near of an impact as what the cell phone

has and just social media has in general. Yeah. So, you know, that's got to be the thing. I think just know this, you know, I think telling yourself, ah, I'll turn it off. You have to have hard and fast rules, I think, with some of this. Like, it's off. Like, you know, 8.30 at night or whatever, 9 o'clock at night, it's off. It's not going to come on because that's such a negative effect on your sleep. And when you do improve your sleep, by the way, you know, Justin, you said this, it's not just your testosterone. It's your recovery. It's your strength. It's your injury risk. If one bad night of sleep will increase your risk of injury the next day for a workout by like 50%. That tripped me out. And it was one of those, I started to, like, correlate that. I could see that with my

clients. Like, when they got real poor sleep, like how. They hurt themselves. They hurt themselves. Absolutely. So, so be consistent with this, huge impact. The next one is optimizing. There's a nutrient, vitamin D. Here's what's crazy about this. I looked up a study. I'm like, I don't even want to look up studies on people who are deficient, because I know what difference that makes. You're deficient. In any nutrient, you supplement with it makes a big difference. I found some studies. They took men. They gave them 3,000 I use of vitamin D a day.

They didn't even, they weren't even taking men who were deficient. They just said, here's 3,000 IUs of vitamin D a day. 20% increase in testosterone. Wow. Androgen receptor density up also 20%. Wow. From vitamin D. Probably because a good percentage of people are deficient,

but a great percentage of people are suboptimal. Yeah. So you might not have so little vitamin D that you have. like these really bad deficiency symptoms, but you're probably not optimal. And so again, in this study, they just gave people 3,000 IUs, and we saw boost. I wonder if you were to compare the 3,000 IUs to somebody is,

like, let's say a protocol of one hour of sunlight. Oh, I'm sure that would be way better. Right? Because I think circadian rhythm-wise, getting the vitamin D through the sun, so you're going to get all those benefits. And I would imagine that would be even better. than supplement you get the vitamin D plus all the other benefits yeah of being outside so i mean to me it's like uh bare minimum take that vitamin D but even better get outside because that's another thing that i think

that we just don't do enough of anymore i know i'm guilty of that um and i've seen a difference at this house that i'm at now where we have this i haven't had like a real backyard that gets a lot of sun in the pool and like i've already felt such a huge difference from that um and so you know trying to make that effort to get out there every day and spend an hour or two in there, I think, would be as beneficial or more than you. I 100% agree. The thing with vitamin is so easy. Right, right. Yeah, you just take a pill. So it's like you have that by your side in case you don't do that. Try and make yourself get out there from the worst-case scenario. You take the vitamin D. Next up is to optimize zinc and magnesium. In fact, there's a supplement that got really popular

in the 90s. Mm-hmm. It was called zinc magnesium aspirate. So ZMA. ZMA is the name of the supplement, and it got really popular. In fact, the creator of it was, what's that guy's name? He had that lab that was making the designer steroids, and he was giving it to athletes, the clear. You guys know who I'm talking about. Balco? The founder of Balco, created the company Snack, S-N-A-C.

What's his name, yeah. Z-M-A was, is one, it's still. ZMA is still a very popular supplement. Well, you remember, do you remember why that he, what was so, I know he got a lot of bad rap because of the whole steroid and the balko thing, but he was an incredible trainer. Yes. And like he had, he had, he had all these professional athletes that he was so detailed and he tracked sleep and diet and hydration and a little data point.

And the ZMA made such an overall impact on all of his athletes. That's what blew that up. and he had the data to show it. And so after that, it went gangbusters. ZMA is one of the few supplements that I took, Victor Conte, that I've taken, yeah, Victor Conte, that I've taken, that I notice a difference. And you'll say, ah, it's just zinc and magnesium.

I mean, I'll show you, here's a study here. 30 milligrams of zinc a day in everyday regular dudes, 20% increase in testosterone, 20% increase in androgen receptor density. Super easy, super inexpensive to take. And again, many men are maybe not deficient, although deficiencies relatively, it's more common than you would think. It's, they don't have optimal amounts.

And these nutrients are lower in foods than they used to be because of modern farming and that kind of stuff. So yeah, you optimize those things and you can get a boost in some case, like I said, 20%. Both in the androgen receptors and in testosterone. Next up, lower cortisol. When we say lower cortisol,

generally what this means is reduce stress. Okay, how does this apply to the person listening to this episode? I think it goes back to what you talked about when it comes to overtraining. There's a lot of men out there that are trying to be fit and they're doing tons of cardio. They're doing the strength training. They're in a calorie deficit and they can't figure out why they have no libido, why they're not building muscle, too much. It's too much stress on the body.

You take a guy like that, you cut his volume in half and suddenly he sees all the incredible gain. And that's because the stress was just overwhelming his body. Couldn't adapt to it. And so you, you know, they'll often refer to this as a lowering cortisol. But really what it is is if you have too much stress in your body, start to develop what's known as an inverted cortisol pattern where cortisol is supposed to come up in the morning, give you energy and kind of taper down at night so you could sleep.

But with chronic stress, overapplication of, say, exercise plus work, plus poor diet, plus not getting good sleep, what happens is cortisol is low in the morning. so you need tons of caffeine to get yourself going. And then it spikes at night. And then you find yourself wired but tired. Yeah. And you can't get good sleep. And then melatonin doesn't get produced in quantity that you need.

That's right. Which takes us to two herbal supplements. I looked up what herbal supplements have the best data for testosterone? There's two of them that came up. Ashwaganda and Tonkat Ali. Both of those are the ones that have the biggest impact. both of those in the data Aschamagana has more data supporting it

but both of those will show a relatively consistent spike in testosterone over time like consistent about 20% and angiogen receptor density up by about 5 to 10%. Now does that hold because I felt like when I did that it like went up I felt the difference

and then either one I adapted to that new level and didn't notice it anymore or it almost like went back down to baseline. The longest studies I found are like six months. Yeah so that's decent, but I don't know. You know, and when you're right, Adam, like, you're taking an herb that has an effect. I would imagine because you're taking something that your body will adapt to it.

Yeah. So I don't know if it's a long-term approach, but I think in combination with what we're saying, you know, like I said, like imagine if. What helps manage your stress? It does. It does. And Ashriganda has also been shown in studies to improve athletic performance, muscle, and strength. So it's not just, sometimes you'll see raising testosterone, but does it translate into the gym? It's also a calming herb too, so it helps you sleep at night and things like that too.

So if it helps all that, like, I mean, I remember when you put me on a stack like this when we were, we were trying to go and raise my testosterone level naturally. And I definitely felt it. I remember, especially the first few weeks, I felt the difference in it. Then it just felt like it kind of leveled off. Nothing, like going through this list that you're talking about, for me, nothing was bigger than the actually lifting weights. I've just, I could really tell a difference when I went and had a school. or a deadlift day. And again, appropriate.

I didn't go crush the weights. It was like, at that time, I was very low energy, didn't have a lot of drive. And so, but if I just got in there and did like three or four sets of squats or deadlifts, it was like 24 hours later, I felt like this. And I'd fill in my libido. I'd feel it my energy. I'd fill it all the way across the board. That was the biggest one.

Of course, prioritizing sleep. Anytime I get into sleep, I just, I feel better. But lifting weights was surprisingly one of the most impactful things that evolved. Well, see, what's interesting about what I'm talking about is, A lot of men watching and listening to this right now could benefit from like two or three of these or maybe all. So it's not just one, right? So lift weights appropriately, prioritize sleep. If you need to optimize your vitamin D, probably also need to optimize your zinc.

Throw a little ashwaganda at that, some Toncat Alid. Now you have this protocol that could cause a significant change in your hormone levels, how much muscle you're building, your libido, fat loss, insulin sensitivity, all those things, because again, rarely is it just one thing. Usually it's multiple things. And so people watching this, try all these things. Everything I'd named here is either free or cheap and can make a profound impact on how you feel. We also, now we do have a strength training program that I would say is probably one of the

more appropriate ones for raising testosterone. It's MAPS 40 plus. It's very appropriate strength training, similar to MAPS Anabolic with some modifications for people who, you know, need to do some modifications to things. like squats and deadlifts, but it's really a muscle building routine. Because of this episode, Maps 40 plus is going to be 50% off. So if you're interested, you want that strength training side taking care of with the workout, the videos, the sets, reps, everything, go to Maps 40 plus, so Maps40.com.

Use the code testosterone 50, testosterone 50, testosterone 50, you'll get 50% off. We also address a lot of the lifestyle stuff that you talked about in this episode, too. It's programmed in there. lifestyle, diet, all that's amazing. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance,

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