Why Biohack Testosterone Naturally
Roadman today, I want to talk about ways you can boil hack your testosterone. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long-chevages? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roman, welcome back to another Roman Cycling Podcast. Thank you for joining me. This is a topic that's, I'm sure at one point or another, you've googled this topic. We all know that testosterone is associated with increased performance enhancement. So there's two ways to get testosterone naturally produced or doping. And we've seen mad high profile cases through the years. Mokes notably Lance Armstrong's case where he used testosterone effectively in seven Tour de France victories which he duplicitly stole from competitors and we can get into the merits of that on another podcast whether he still would have won them if he wasn't doping because everybody else was doping if they weren't doping. You know it's a nuanced debate and it's not one for today. Today I want to talk about how to boil hack your testosterone naturally. These are things you can do without supplementation, things in your everyday routine. You know I'm big on routines, bullish on routines and I think they have the power to completely change us and there's a great story. My mom's from Cork and so I grew up with sort of a lot of rural anecdotes and parables and one of them I'd often hear is about the farmer who'd go in through the fact, into the farm gate and he'd roid the same sort of patty trodden every day as soon as he went inside the gate on his tractor. There was a pass woven out with the pressure, the tractor tore us through the years. And he drove that pass and he ended up at the same destination, the same stops along the way each day on his round. But if he went through the gate and he just made a quarter of an inch torn on the steering wheel. By the time he got to the end of his 200 acre plot, he'd be in a completely different destination. Tomorrow the story being, if we can can make just a quarter inch turn on the steering wheel. Just a small change in our routines, we can end up in a completely different place. So that's what I'm asking of you today, to make small little changes in your routines. To boost your testosterone levels, and it's worth boosting. If you go online and you look for internet forums, and you search around for testosterone, it's one of the most duplicitous businesses out there. There's forums, there's sites dedicated, there's supplements dedicated, there's even courses, someone are good, someone are bad. I like digging around, pub meds and I like reading research papers and that's kind of what I do and you're watching Netflix on Friday Saturday night. That's how I get my jollies and there's hundreds of stories out there, some credible, some not so credible and that's why I've tried to dig through and get you the tangible best of I can. Before I do, Rob, a quick note on the beer phone over on patreon.com it's forward slash Anthony underscore watch if you're getting some value from this like I'm giving you ways to boil hack your test restaurant if that's not worth a point of beer road man come on give me a beer going into the weekend and Anthony patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch is the beer phones and it's a modulus on this if you think I deserve a beer you can go and you can buy me one over there and the link is in the boil. Before you can boost your testosterone, there's things that we need to talk about, like an adequate fitness training system, like the one we put our clients through, that's gonna help your testosterone because we're building it specifically waste that as one of the boil markers we're looking to increase in mind. The same with solid nutrition plans, sleep and stress management, there's some of the things I'm gonna be talking about today. You might remember back leaving Sir what the testosterone is and it's a derivative of cortisol and sorry cholesterol and we've all been taught that cholesterol is bad. I remember back in the day when he was less distrust of a tartar figure and someone in a white coat with a stethoscope around their head. They were to be trusted and even going in and listening to my dad who needed to go down cholesterol, they told us, stop eating eggs, stop eating meat, and we had coach Joe, the Stephan Iwan last day, and he was talking about a similar experience of trusting those white coats and the recommendations they gave. And that was what we knew about cholesterol at the time, and I'm sure it was all good intention, but we know a lot more about it now. And testosterone is a very positive thing that's derived from something that we had historically been told is quite negative. Stostron isn't just in men, everyone thinks it's only a male hormone, but it's also present in females, but I think it's about 10x more in males than it is in females.
Sleep, Leanness, and Lifting
The stuff that it's responsible for, it's stimulating the growth, painous scrotum, increase in body hair, facial hair, impacts muscular density, it incrucs muscular volume mass and it gives us the ability to lose fat. We know that there's a decline in testosterone after the age of 30. So every year testosterone levels fall at about 1% per year. And that's not great news for those of us, me included, who are the wrong so in authority. So what I want to talk about is how can we address that? The number one thing, and folks, these don't overlook these things because they sound simple. The number one thing is sleep. Matt Walker's brilliant book on Huy We Sleep. He talks a lot about this and Matt Walker actually has a podcast now as well. And he speaks about testosterone quite frequently, a brilliant, a torrent of text on testosterone. Testosterone is released when we sleep. So when we have broken sleep, when we have the stored sleep, we're not getting full blackout sleep, we're not getting into our proper sleep zones, we are reducing testosterone levels. It's a great study in the Journal of American Medical Association. I found that one week of sleep deprivation, that's sleep deprivation is classed here as as five hours are under noise, it decreased testosterone production by 15%. That's a massive figure and a lot of people will go at least a week on five hours. If you have a stressful week coming up and working, you might think you're getting ahead of yourself by sleeping less, but that's the damage and the devastation you're doing to your body. Interestingly, testosterone, it's love diminishing marriage on a return, meaning that up to a point you get more testosterone from sleep, but then it diminishes. So 10 hours seems to be that sweet spot for diminishing marginal returns. Also, being lean is a huge advantage. So this is another advantage to doiling in on your nutrition. So it's estimated that body fats between 8 and 14% is optimum for testosterone production. So being lean is going to give you that higher testosterone score. Weight training is another one that's going to give So if you're not adding currently any strength training into your training routine, I highly recommend you do it. Strength training and gaining muscle reduces body fat, which can also lead to testosterone. So it's a double-edged sword. It's the act of strength training and often because the strength training is getting this leaner, we're getting the benefit of being lean as well. Now you know I'm forever beating the drum on stress and cortisol and that's the next one I want to talk about. So we've had strength training, we've had the benefits of being lean and sleep and now it's managing stress because chronic stress levels leads to elevated cortisol and cortisol fucks up your testosterone production. And cortisol, think back to what cortisol is. Cortisol is a stress hormone. Cortisol is what gave us that get up and go to get away from predators, dangerous animals. We're not meant to be in a constant stage of producing cortisol. It was meant for a short break to get us out of trouble, to get us to push through the overnight hike, to get to our destination so we didn't die. But we're not used to being in cortisol for months on end. That's not the function of cortisol. We need to reduce cortisol. I'm working on the roadman blueprint. I'm working on it like I worked on my college thesis, the effort and the work on the amount of experts I've pulled in for this Roman blueprint. It's breathtaking. It should be out in a couple of months. I'm still working on it. It's been a bit of a project creep. The more I got into it, the more I realized how big a project it was. But you'll be hearing more about it as it's closer to launch. But one of the cornerstones of it is it's controlling cortisol levels because controlling cortisol levels, it's the key to testosterone and I'll get into it in the Roman blueprint. It's the key to a lot of other pieces to this. And to keep the balancing work, family, relationships and training. So a couple of ways that we can reduce cortisol levels to get us that extra bump in testosterone, it's meditation. And an app I use is waking up by Sam Harris, which I love, it's guided meditations, headspace is another one. And the act of breath work is brilliant as well. And you're not sure what breath work is. You can do something as simple as, like box breeding. So you breathe in for tray, hold for tray, out for tray, hold for tray, and repeat. Do five minutes of that. It's shown to drop quarters or levels. You wanna drop back to the last podcast and listen to coach Joe Dostefano. He talks about heart rate variability and how breath work can completely change your state. And the other one is fasting. A study found that fasts between 12 and 56 errors improved testosterone response, 180% in lean men. Fasting is something I try and do at least a couple of times a week. My protocol for fasting, it's 16 hours fasting and 8 errors feasting.
Fasting and Hydration for Testosterone
Feasting used, likely it's just, I think people got hung up on that acronym, Fast and Feast. The, or acronym, the, the, the, the, a iteration of fasting and feasting. I don't think it's meant to be taken quite literally. And you're not meant to feast for those eight errors. But for the 16-hour fast, you're on zero calories. So you can have water, you can have coffee, but no fields that have calories in them. So you, how I practically work it is, I have my evening meal at seven or eight o'clock in the evening, wake up the next morning and I skip breakfast and my forest meal is lunch at around two o'clock. And that gives me a 16-hour fasting window. And then I eat from two o'clock until eight o'clock or whatever bedtime. And that's me done. And I might do that multiple days in a week. It's absolutely brilliant. a full podcast on intermittent fast and it's working on back to listen to talk about the processes that actually occur like cellular autophagy. It's like a cellular clean up. The last thing that's going to absolutely fuck up your testosterone production, it is dehydration. So we all know hydration. It's absolutely essential for our sports. It's essential for being active. You need to be pushing those fluids and newly carrying a bottle with you all day. So, mild dehydration. I'm talking one to two percent here. It's It's going to raise cortisol levels, which is going to fuck up your testosterone production. So if you're sweating a lot, if you're out training and you're not replacing those fluids, you are ruining your chances of producing testosterone. So the importance of drinking water with electrolytes in it cannot be overstated. So you're looking at water and if you don't have electrolyte tablets, adding something like a Himalayan salt or Celtic sea salt to it yourself. levels of dehydration, the bigger the effect is going to be on raising your cortisol and the adrenaline hormone and that is going to lower testosterone production. Folks, I'm going to recap that one because there was a lot of spitting shit at you and it was like a fire hose going off in your face in reverse order. You need to be on top of your hydration. Fasting is a good idea. Moderate that stress through meditation, add in strength training, get lean as fuck and sleep properly. and there are the ways you can biohack your testosterone. Rowmen, thank you for listening, enjoy your weekend and hit me up on that beer fund on patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch, head on over to Instagram as Rowman dot cyclin. If you're enjoying the podcast, if you try these hacks and are working for you, share it in your Instagram stories, tag me on it. I love hearing those stories, slide into the old DMs, tell me how the training is going and you follow me over on Twitter as well, it's Rowman. Rob, man, we're a little community. We're keeping this going. We haven't let a total sponsor on this. It's our little group. It's our little cult that we're building together for people that are trying to improve their life. True so I can get a little bit happier, a little bit healthier, true so I can. So do help share this word any way you can, whether it's drawn into WhatsApp groups, to review on the podcast. Do your little bit for the community if you're enjoying it. Rob, man, ride safe and I'm gonna chat to you real soon. Okay, stop what you're doing. It's Anthony again. I want to talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey. I'm laying down a challenge for you. It's called the eight week challenge. So for eight weeks, I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself. Whatever that is. For eight weeks, I want to take you under my wing and I want to personally build for you the customized training plan on our analytics platform. plan it's gonna be laser focused on your goal and I'm gonna navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments so don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling and I went off and taught a really big businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling but I knew after a bit the training alone it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system it needed a 360 overhaul so for For the first time ever, I want to share with you this exact system I use to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like I'm going to give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I use, the cookbooks and recipes I use, and even the motivational audios I listen to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week, or check out the link in the bio, click that. for more time at roadmancycling.com forward slash eight weeks. Chatty all soon.