32 Natural Ways To Increase Testosterone (Without Getting Injections Or Hormone Replacement)

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From seal fit, Kokoro, Spartan, Agoji, and the world's toughest mudder to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, gut hormones, brain beauty and brawn to deliver you this podcast, everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Well, howdy, howdy ho.

I gotta talk in my low manly man voice because today's podcast is all about testosterone. I was invited down to the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine to give a talk on all the ways that you can boost your testosterone, whether you're a man or a woman, via natural methods that might not involve bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Even though I'm not against that, I just think that there are other things that should be included or especially if you're, if you're younger, tried first. So I get into exercise strategies, supplementation strategies, lifestyle strategies, everything you need to know about how to increase testosterone naturally. On today's show, it was kind of fun getting up there and giving a talk to a bunch of straight faced physicians and making dick jokes. So that's just a preview of what's to come.

Thank you. Well, let's see. Yeah, well, welcome to the penis talk. I don't have my kettlebel today, so I had to wear pants normally. That's how I roll those. Just the kettlebell. Hopefully everybody's having a good morning. You guys learning some things. I think this is the first conference I've been to where I. Well, I've never seen this many jacked doctors on steroids. It's crazy. Lots of buff MDs walking around. No, but it's really cool. The expo looks like it has some really, really great stuff. So I want to start with how I kind of got into all this in the first place. Because I'm like, I'm not a playboy running around the world trying to figure out how to make my dick bigger. But what happened was Men's Health magazine approached me towards the end of 2017, actually, and they wanted me to go on this three month foray to kind of take a deep dive into everything that a guy could do to enhance his sexual performance. And my background is in exercise physiology and biomechanics with some studies in human nutrition pharmacology. And so I kind of understand to a certain extent, not as much as many of the doctors in this room, some of the biochemistry of this. And so I found it fascinating. So I went out and did everything. Like they had me do frickin like tantric sex and reduced ejaculations and stem cells multiple times and prp. They had me do like gas station dick pills. I mean, you name it, everything. Like I got like this penis pump. There's like the Cadillac of penis pumps and got my ball sucked into it, which maybe if I have time I can tell you more about that. But I just did everything and kind of researched along the way like what works and what doesn't when it comes to enhancing male testosterone, libido, sexual performance. It was actually I didn't get on the COVID of the magazine, fittingly enough for a magazine about how to make a small dick bigger. They put Mark Wahlberg on the COVID So that's hopefully one of the only pop culture references I'll make all day because I actually don't know that much about Mark Wahlberg, but I hear he's a great guy and I'm sure his dick is just fine. Okay, so what we're going to go over today and I know we don't have tons of time. I'm going to hit a lot of stuff and, and hopefully leave some time for questions afterwards. If I don't get to all the questions, I'll give you guys a URL at the end. We get all the slides. I'll probably be able to my booth later on after. I'll just, I'll boogie out there. If you guys have more questions, we can chat around a cup of coffee out there. We'll go over strategies, actually, specifically workout strategies and exercise strategies because that's big for optimizing testosterone nutrients, basic nutrients. Honestly, like what I would do if I was going to create created testosterone support formula, some of the things I would put in it. I don't have any formula for that type of thing, but I want to cover some of the stuff I've studied on that herbal add ons biohacks. A lot of people are interested in everything from red light to acoustic sound waves, all these things and whether or not they actually work. Mistakes that impact sexual health and then some of the ways that I like to test and track this stuff. So we'll boogie straight in to, to this workout Strategies to optimize testosterone, which actually do not include making love to a vibrating foam roller in your living room. But that is what I do each morning. I want to start, actually I want to start with the low hanging fruit, this whole exercise lifestyle piece. Because sometimes I think we forget about the low hanging fruit. It's like plant medicine. Right now everybody's interested in their MDMA and, and going in their 38th ayahuasca retreat and microdosing with psilocybin. I mean, I'm of the opinion that a more stoic route would be a little bit more advisable starting off. Right. I think everybody who wants to go off and do a deep plant medicine journey should go fasting and go isolate themselves camping in the wilderness for three or four days. And I bet they would probably discover themselves and a very similar way that they would have if they'd have gone out and done plant medicine. I think everyone should start with that in the same way. I think before you go running around injecting stem cells into your dick or doing all these expensive procedures, we should just look at some of the basic things, some of the low hanging fruit. So we'll cover a few of them here. The first is some very interesting studies on sprint length and testosterone. And this idea that brief spot sprint spurts can actually upregulate androgen receptors and also upregulate testosterone both acutely and chronically, to a limited extent. Growth hormone as well. Does anybody know the length of time necessary for a boost in testosterone for a repeated series of sprints? Like how long you would need to sprint on a bicycle or a rowing machine or anything else? I was an ex phys major and we would do these ungodly hard 30 second, they called them wingate pretty protocols. Right. For power analysis on the bike. And those are 30 seconds. Anybody know how long for these studies on enhancing testosterone? Lower. Lower? Yeah. Who said six seconds? Boom. Somebody's been on PubMed. Okay, yeah, six. Six seconds. That's all it takes. So six seconds. And usually the work to rest ratio, I mean if you're consulting with a patient or you yourself are doing a protocol like this, it's just a brief series, 4 to 6, 6 second sprints, usually a 1 to 5 to 1 to 10 work to rest ratio, very long recovery periods, very short sprints, that's one exercise tactic for testosterone is just basic, very short sprints. Basically the idea is you're using just the creatine phosphate system. Once you dip into the glycolytic energy system, you don't see that same hormonal response. So very brief sprint efforts. If you're designing a workout protocol, the next is to lift heavy stuff. And we also know that this upregulates androgen receptors. As far as how to actually do this, one of my favorite methods, and there's actually some really interesting studies that look at longevity, at sprint performance, at overall functionality, and fighting off frailty with the use of a hex bar. I think that just about everybody should own a hex bar, especially as they age. It's a perfect way to lift heavy stuff. I always have one loaded up next to the room that's next door to my office. Also kettlebells, fantastic for that. But hex bars, kettlebells, I mean, we know that there are certain things that are correlated with longevity that also are kind of correlated with fertility. For example, grip strength. Grip strength is one fantastic parameter to track for longevity. We know grip strength dynamometer is a great way to track anti aging. We know walking speed is another parameter. The ability to be able to sit down and stand, stand up. I actually, I literally sit down and stand up every day 30 times. And I have a lot of my clients do this. You just sit down, both legs in front of you, stand up. And there's actually a really interesting study that looked at markers for aging and mortality. And the ability to just be able to sit down and stand up was a big one. But lifting heavy stuff, full body exercises, you know, deadlifts, squats, anything along those lines works long rest periods. I alluded to this before, but this is specifically related to weight training. If you are prescribing an exercise program to a guy who wants to increase either testosterone or libido, this idea of concurrent strength, endurance training, CrossFit, Spartan training, most of that flies in the face of building testosterone. Instead, long rest periods, at least 122nd long rest periods after a weightlifting set appears to be the sweet spot. That or more for enhancing testosterone. That does not mean that. And this is my pet peeve. If I'm at the gym, you know people, you know guys slumped over sitting on the bench, playing Candy Crush, reading a magazine, staring slack jaw to espn waiting for their next set. Like I'm a huge fan of either doing supersets right back to back sets where you have bench press and while you're recovering from the bench press, you have them doing squats or doing functional movements like cat cow exercises and opposite arm leg extension and yoga moves or dynamic stretching things in between each of the sets that fill in those rest periods. So you're still getting a lot of density in the training routine, but long rest periods also appear to be very effective. I've got six different ones I'm going to give you. This is a workout, actually, that was a couple years ago. Nick Delgado, I think he's here. We actually had some Venetian working out before one of the UFC fights, and he was taking me through this forced rep workout. This is another strategy they've done some really good studies on for again, increasing receptor density and increasing testosterone, increasing growth hormone. The idea with this is that you go through a weightlifting set, but towards the end, towards the last two to four reps, you actually have a partner who is assisting you through the movement to enable you to be able to do a full forced rep through partial range of motion with a weight that's heavier than you'd normally be able to handle because you're already fatigued. So if you don't have the ability to work with a partner, there's also this newer idea of what's called variable resistance training. I had a podcast recently, this guy who designed something called an X3 bar. It's like an elastic band system, and I use elastic bands for this a lot. When I travel, I'll do an elastic band set to failure and then move through point, partial range of motion with the band. Same thing, same concept. Force reps is what they're called. There's another type of training protocol that's very similar by Dr. Doug McGuff, called body by Science. I'll tell you that in a second, or I'll tell you about that in a second. But basically, this idea of doing an entire set and then moving through partial range of motion at the end of the set, that's another strategy that appears to have a really good hormonal response. The next is using your legs. That's actually on a Vasper machine. Have you ever used one of these Vasper machines? Very cool. You're grounding, earthing. You have blood flow restriction on all four limbs, and then along with that, blood flow restriction is ice or cold. So you're essentially trapping a lot of lactic acid in the tissue. And when you do that, very similar to what's called Katsu training, you see an increased growth hormone response afterwards. So, very cool machine. But of course, it uses the legs. And any type of weight training, movement, any type of leg day, is incredibly beneficial for testosterone. I mean, you see a lot of guys, especially who lift weights, get jacked, but then they kind of have toothpick leg syndrome going on and as a result, they're not actually hitting the areas that have the most androgen receptor density. So squats, deadlifts. Again, doing things like working with a hex bar, Doing things like using a kettlebell for the hamstrings and the glutes. Anything that incorporates lower body, specifically lower body strength training, not lower body. Chronic cardio is very effective for this. And then the last one would be speaking of the devil, avoiding chronic cardio. I mean, I competed in Ironman for about 10 years, and that was the lowest that my testosterone ever was. As a matter of fact, I saw a steep rise in my own blood testosterone values after I quit racing Ironman. I mean, I was doing everything to try and stave off a lot of the loss of libido and function, like the holes in the bike saddle. And I was trying to eat as many fats as possible. But I still saw a pretty steep decline in testosterone from chronic cardio. The theory is that, number one, when you're constantly running from a lion, the body wants to kind of down regulate fertility because we don't want to bring children into the world in a time of stress when we're riding a bike down the highway for four hours a day. But then the other reason is that the body will actually cause problems. Catabolism of your muscle as a way to be able to maintain a lower weight. Once you start doing all this chronic cardio, so you see a loss of muscle that goes hand in hand with a decrease in hormones as well. So avoiding chronic cardio, that's another big one. If you start to work these strategies into a strength training program or into an exercise program for your clients or for your patients, this is exactly what it should look like. Very brief, short sprints with long rest periods. Very brief, high intensity, heavy weightlifting sessions with long rest periods, using the legs a lot, having a partner and doing forced reps or using machines that allow you to do forced reps, all of these work very, very well for increasing testosterone. Those are some of the exercise strategies. Okay, so if I were going to design, like I mentioned, like a supplement to enhance testosterone levels, I would hit a lot of the basic stuff that I think gets under emphasized you because we like to talk about a lot of the sexy Chinese herbs, right? Eurocoma and tongkat ali and horny goat weed and tribulus. And a lot of these things work more to enhance libido and blood flow to a greater extent than, say, testosterone or other hormones. But there are things that we know actually fill in the Basics. Magnesium is one with both magnesium and then also zinc that I'll mention most of the stuff. Studies that show magnesium or zinc to increase hormone status or specifically in men to increase testosterone, show that it works in heavily exercising athletes or very active individuals who are sweating a lot. There's not a lot of evidence that magnesium and zinc supplementation will assist with testosterone levels in the absence of physical activity and heavy amounts of sweating. But nowadays when a lot of people are doing sauna, a lot of people are exercising, a lot of people are sweating. In many cases these are two. Magnesium and zinc, notoriously missing minerals that can assist quite a bit with the natural testosterone response. Another one is vitamin D. Vitamin D. I think sometimes it's a horse that gets kicked to death, right? I think there's a lot of people who are risking arterial calcification or some amount of potential for vitamin D detoxicity by taking 10,000 units a day. But in smaller amounts, vitamin D has actually been shown to up regulate androgen receptors and to cause a favorable hormone response. It's also a pretty potent sports performance enhancing aid. I think the problem is that in many cases, and it's always my pet peeve, when I look at a multivitamin on the label and I see this, it's vitamin D3 in the absence of some of the co factors necessary for its absorption or necessary to, to reduce some of that risk of calcification. Does anybody know what a couple of those factors would be? If you read the Magnesium miracle or Kate Blue's book on vitamin D, what would it be? Vitamin K2. Yeah, vitamin K2. And what's the other one? They always went along with vitamin D, magnesium. So vitamin K2 and magnesium should always accompany vitamin D supplementation. And if you're trying to create a stack for enhancing testosterone that has magnesium in it and vitamin D in it, I would also get consider including vitamin k, like a 2000 to 3000 international units of vitamin D3 and like 100 to maximum of 200 micrograms of something like a vitamin K2. It's a really, really good blend. Okay. Zinc I talked about, actually I caught some flack for talking about this. The last time I was on the Joe Rogan episode I walked in with like my black ant extract, which is actually one thing that I use that I find is excellent pre sex excellent for libido and zinc. Zinc, like magnesium, is something that in athletes and in heavily sweating individuals has been studied for increasing testosterone. There's another one very, very similar to black ants. I Recently discovered some really good research on this one. We know that shellfish are pretty high in zinc, but clams, there are some supplements now where they're taking like powdered marine clams and offering that as a really potent zinc supplement. Now, of course the problem with this is zinc can toxicity, the fact that zinc can throw off some of the zinc copper ratios in the body. So you do need to be careful, again, especially in people who aren't very active. But if a man is taking into account some of the exercise recommendations that I just gave, then I think that magnesium along with zinc, especially if they are sweating, those are smart supplementation strategies. So I like multivitamins that have zinc in them. I like black ant extract, you can get it in powdered form or takes your form. I like clams, these are all examples, clams or clam extract of things that can help to boost testosterone. So again, we're just going after the basics here. Dhea, that's a tricky one. It's banned by usada, it's banned by wada, it's banned by most international sport sanctioning bodies, which is tricky. Like in the realm of Spartan racing. I race professionally right now in obstacle course racing. And one of the top pro athletes just got kicked out and banned from the sport because he was going to Walgreens and he was buying what he said or what he thought was dha, right, dha. But he was instead getting dhea. It's a very simple over the counter supplement you can get at Walgreens, CVS, et cetera. So you need to be careful with athletes finding out that DHEA improves sports performance or increases hormonal status. It does at as little a dose of 25-50mg per day. But you do need to be very careful. I find that this is another one that's sneaking into a lot of supplements, including like cognitive enhancers, nootropics, et cetera. And if you're working with athletes, you want to make sure you're aware that even though this is effective for testosterone, another one you need to be careful with, creatine. Creatine is one of the most studied safe supplements known to man. For staving off sarcopenia, it's a known nootropic. The dosage is about 5 milligrams per day. For a basic creatine monohydrate, there is no loading that's required. That's all a myth from the bodybuilding industry. There's no fancy mixes that are required for creatine. Myself, most of the people I work with, we all take 5 grams of creatine a day. What's the most creatine, kind of like vitamin C orally that you could absorb at any one time? Does anybody know it's like one and a half, two milligrams. And the problem is a lot of these supplements, they're giving like 4 or 5 milligram creatine monohydrate portions. So I recommend using a preference powdered form or using a smaller dose, like one and a half to two milligrams. And you take two to three doses of that during the day. Creatine is also very well absorbed in a warm solution in a warm medium. So if you want to maximize creatine absorption because it is very potent as an ergogenic aid, and for testosterone, you would take 1 1/2 to 2 milligrams powdered in a little bit of warm water or in a tea or in your morning coffee and take your creatine that way. So you just want to make sure you're using creatine the right way and not overdoing it. As a matter of fact, I used to be a bodybuilder and bodybuilding is one of the most horrible things you can do for your testosterone, for growth hormone, anything, right? I was like a, I was like a sex symbol. But all I could do was just lay around on the couch in between weight training sessions like a giant slab of meat. I had no libido, I had very low testosterone, I couldn't get it up. But all I was pretty much doing was creatine and a high protein diet. Now, I don't necessarily endorse that route, nor do I endorse maintaining less than 3% body fat. But I do get a question, speaking just to dive down this rabbit hole a little bit about macronutrient ratios, I address some of the basics. Zinc, magnesium, creatine, vitamin D, some of those others. But another basic variable that's often missed is your basic macronutrient ratios. For the ideal diet, there is no such thing as the perfect diet. But in most situations, for most of the guys, especially who I'm working with, a sweet spot for protein. And we cycle a little bit. On active days we go less. On more active days we go more. Because I like the idea of protein cycling and mtor cycling and feast famine cycles, but it's about 0.5 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Those are the protein ratios. Closer to 0.55 is better. 0.5, 5 to 0.8 grams per pound of protein. There's no evidence that you get increased nitrogen utilization once you go past 0.8 grams per pound. The next variable that I shoot for is about 30 to 40% of the diet being comprised of fats, which, as you know, are excellent as a hormone precursor. In many cases, people who have like a PPAR gene issue or familial hypercholesteremia or gallbladder issue or their APOE 3, 4 or 4 4. I'm not recommending saturated fats and lots of butters and coconut oil. I'm more recommending monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, Mediterranean style fats. But ultimately with the protein being 0.55 to 0.8, the fats are 30 to 40%. And then everything else is filled in with the carbs. And it has been shown that a very low carbohydrate diet, which, you know, I followed a ketogenic diet, very low carbohydrate diet, both with high physical activity and low physical activity for long periods of time. I've been experimenting with that diet since 2012. And the number one thing that it seems to really hit on in addition to thyroid is testosterone. And so in most of the active males that I'm working with, the way that we tackle this is they do carbohydrate refeeds nightly. Typically they're doing 75, up to 200 grams of carbohydrates at the very end of the day. And then they're slipping back into primarily moderate to high fat, moderate protein intake the rest of the day with intermittent fasting cycles on each day. And that creates a really beautiful scenario to keep glycogen levels restored to maintain hormonal status, but to not have wide fluctuations in glycemic variability during the day. So that's kind of the macronutrient piece and how I piece it together for a lot of the folks that I work with. Oh, and then the last basic one, I didn't talk about this, but boron is also very interesting at about 10 milligrams of boron per day. And raisins are a good source. Nuts are a good source. You can get some from fish, you can get some from dairy products, you can get some from wheat products. You can also supplement, of course, with boron. But that's another one that has some really good research behind it in terms of it literally working on hormones, not necessarily libido or sexual performance, but specifically hormones. So now we've got a really nice little stack that you can put together. It surprises me how few testosterone supplements there are out there. I mean, here's low hanging proof for those of you who are business minded that just include these basic variables, right? Vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, boron, creatine. These things would be the base of a really good testosterone supplement formula in my opinion. So then we can get into some of the slightly more fringe add ons. Maca is one. Maca's got this wonderful nutty taste. The red form of maca has been well studied for its effect on prostate cancer. It can upregulate receptor density, it impacts testosterone, it can impact libido. And so maca, I almost would add that to the list of basic nutrients. But it is a little bit more fringe, a little bit less research behind it than some of these others. But that's one that I really like is maca root. Specifically in people who have been on antidepressants like SSRIs. There's some really interesting data on maca root helping with those people if they have hormonal imbalances due to use of antidepressants. So maca would be for somebody who's on pharmaceuticals for antidepressants. It seems to kind of stave off some of the impact on hormones. Another one is cacao or cocoa. And a lot of people are familiar with the idea of flavanols and nitric oxide. And I'm a huge fan of daily dark chocolate. Hooray. Or cacao or flavanol. So supplementation, especially for any guys who want to enhance sexual performance, right. This is not going to enhance testosterone much at all, but it will increase nitric oxide. I actually have, I'm on this new kick where I'm drinking cacao tea every morning. I can give you guys a recipe. You want my recipe for cacao tea? It's amazing. This stuff's like, it's almost a replacement for coffee, which I can't say that too loud because I, I own a coffee company and I can't let it out that I'm drinking cacao every morning instead of coffee. But I'm drinking cacao a lot now. I get these bags from Amazon. It's called my cacao super dense. It's like cacao nibs. There's like cacao, I think it's like the leave in there and then a cacao powder. But it's called my cacao M I cacao. And what I do is I take a couple tablespoons of that and I use a little Nutribullet and then you get ghee. Coconut oil would work as well. That's lot a kind of a fatty medium, a little bit of salt. Because everybody knows the key to a good hot chocolate. And my 10 year old son taught me this is salt. You got to put salt in hot chocolate. So you got ghee, you have your cacao, you have your salt. I do a little bit of butterscotch toffee stevia in there. And then typically I'll top that off with a little bit of tea. I like to use a chaga tea. Right now I'm putting a couple packets of like the four sigmatic Chaga tea in there. I blend that up for a minute. If you want to have like Christmas in a cup every single day, that's amazing for your nitric oxide levels. That blend is just like, it's thick and you can almost eat it with a spoon. I'm addicted obviously, so Cacao Eurochema, that's another one. It goes by Long Jack Tomcatnalee. This seems to not only increase fertility, but it's one of those ones that has a really good impact, kind of like fenugreek does on libido, creating that positive cycle, right? Like, and a lot of us realize this, right? Once our libido goes up and we start to have more sex, it creates this positive feedback loop where you get increased testosterone from having more sex. You have increased blood flow, you're using your genitals like a muscle. And so it creates this nice positive feedback loop. And this is one that's got some really good studies on it for libido, not so much blood flow, but simply increasing actual sexual, sexual arousal. Fenugreek acts very, very similarly. I love this as just a basic ayurvedic herb. I mean like cumin, fennel, coriander, fenugreek. All of these are bitters or digestif. So they can kind of enhance the first phase insulin response if you use them prior to a meal. But fenugreek in particular is also fantastic for libido and has some really good studies behind it for that. You can literally take a lot of these things like the coriander, fennel, fenugreek, keep it in like a black pepper grinder on your countertop, which is what I do. And you can just sprinkle a lot of these herbs or grind a lot of these herbs onto your food on your meals during the day. So that's another one that I really like. It's got this nice. Actually here's Something funny about fenugreek. It has like this kind of like maple, it's got like a licoricey maple flavor. But it actually, and don't ask me how I know this, but it actually guys, makes your semen tastes like maple syrup. So for those of you it does. I'm not kidding. For those of you who are not Canadian and you want to surprise your partner one of these days, have a bunch of fenugreek because it actually does like give you slightly sweet semens. It's very interesting. So there's another benefit for it. Pycnogenol, pine bark that acts on, acts very similarly to cacao in terms of its flavanol like effects effect for nitric oxide. It's another one that's got some good studies behind it. Very simple to get in supplement form. And again, hopefully this gets your wheels turning. Those of you who are entrepreneurial, business minded in here about things that you could use to create like some kind of a libido or testosterone enhancing supplement. But this is another one that's got some really good data behind it. And you know, when you look at a lot of these things, you know, I'm going to talk about other therapies like red light therapy and acoustic sound wave therapy, a lot of these things and many physicians are doing this now. You know, I recently interviewed one guy, Judd Brandis on my show and he's a, he's a gainswave practitioner in the San Francisco, San Jose kind of the Bay area. And you know, he has a supplement and kind of a protocol that he prescribes to his patients after they've been through that therapy or a P shot or PRP to increase blood flow. And it really works nicely hand in hand. A lot of these, these things that, that are flavanols or nitric oxide precursors. So these can be kind of adjuncts to some of the more biohacking type of things that you might have in your practice. And then tribulus, Tribulus significantly enhances sexual drive. It's actually, it's known as the goat head weed, which is kind of cool because it actually looks a little bit like a goat head. I actually raised Nigerian dwarf goats and it's funny actually the, they have kind of that look and tribulus is known as something that can increase your actual libido. Very similar to something like fenugreek for example. So with a lot of these fringe supplements that seem to work, they're either working to increase blood flow or they're Working to enhance libido. And these are some of the ones that have actually been studied that have been shown to work. Okay, let me go ahead and throw off my testosterone estrogen ratios real quick. That's actually how I lounge around at home, by the way. I like to read Grey's Anatomy on my giant sheepskin rug on my bed. I'll eat a giant greasy turkey leg and then go take a bath and red wine while I'm getting fanned with giant leaves and fed grapes. That's just, that's how I live my life. Now we're going to get into some of the things that you can use as biohacking strategies to increase testosterone. This is a really interesting one. Electrical muscle stimulation. No, not in the balls, but. But specifically in the areas where there's high androgen receptor density, which specifically would be, as you know now from the exercise talk. Legs. Right, the legs. Electrical muscle stimulation. High intensity electrical muscle stimulation, particularly on the legs, has some good data behind it, mostly in rodent models because they, they didn't do a lot of heavy shock therapy in humans. But I actually do protocols now. There's a lot of devices out there like the Compex and the Mark Pro. There's one that I like though. It's called a new fit. It's a DC current. It's a DC current that allows you to literally get the muscle to produce a multi hundred pound contraction without producing skin burns. And especially in someone who's immobilized, who has joint pain or who wants to be able to get this effect. I mean, it's the sorest I ever get. I only do this twice a month. I do a workout with this new fit. I attach all the electrodes to my legs and go through a series of squats and lunges. But electrical muscle stimulation for androgen receptor upregulation has some really good data behind it. So that's one that I like is ems. That's something you could add to your practice as an offering or something that you can recommend to clients or patients. This is one that has gotten a lot of press recently as well. This idea that somewhere in the range of 600-700nm of light shown specifically on the testicles seems to impact Leydig cells in the testes. And specifically in the very same way you may seem like the Biolite out there can do the same thing for neural tissue, increase C oxidase activity in neural tissue. You can do the same thing in the testicles by using red light therapy at a Specific wavelength you don't want to Exclude exceed about 820 nanometers or so, because then you get kind of this heating effect that can damage sperm, that can lower testosterone production. But brief four eyes of red light therapy, about 10 to 20 minutes, appear to be very effective. And here's something interesting. I didn't realize this. You're no doubt familiar with this idea that we want to limit blue light and artificial light exposure not just to our eyes, but also to our skin, because we have opposite and specific protein photoreceptors in our skin that respond to light. Like, there's those fascinating studies where they shine the light in areas of high blood flow like the back of the knee or the inside of the wrist. And when it's blue light, it's actually been found that that disrupts sleep cycles even if the eyes are closed. Right. So this is why, you know, when I go into my hotel room in the Venetian, when I check in before I go to bed, I turn off all the lights and then I just go unplug or cover anything up with black electrical tape that's producing light because you sleep a lot better. Well, guess what else has photoreceptors that seem to interact favorably with red light? Your balls. Your balls are actually an eye, guys. And you have Opsin, you have photoreceptors. So you not only have the interaction with the mitochondria, but you have the interaction with these photoreceptors. And that's why there seems to be such a positive effect of red light therapy on testosterone. So that's an interesting one. That's another one that I do just about every day. A lot of different ways to do it. You can use your imagination. So the next one is cold thermogenesis. And there's that. It's kind of funny. There's this company now, they sent this to my house. It's called a Primal Jet pack. And it's literally an ice pack for your balls. It's almost a little bit gimmicky because it's just like an ice pack. And it says, put it on your balls. And that's. It's great marketing. But when you look at a lot of these old Russian and Finnish power lifters, there's this strategy of increasing growth hormone, increasing testosterone by icing or keeping the testicles cold. And we know the whole idea about the hot tub and getting in the hot water decreasing sperm count. But it turns out that frequent forays into cryotherapy or cold thermogenesis can not only cause an increase in growth hormone or an increase in testosterone, but it can also result, result in increased vascularization to the crotch. So this idea of using cold therapy and also avoiding like tight fitting garments, sleeping in a cold room, sleeping combat style, using, you know, I use this thing called a chili pad, which circulates water at about 55 degrees underneath my body while I'm asleep, which is great for entering your deep sleep cycles where a lot of repair and recovery occurs. But it's also wonderful for testosterone. So paying attention to temperature is also important. And this idea of ice therapy or icing the balls is also really good. Especially somebody who sits a lot, somebody who spends a lot of time on an airplane, somebody who has to wear like pants and underwear. I'm very glad I don't have a job where I have to wear pants and underwear a lot of the time and I can keep my balls cold. But this idea of using this as a therapy seems to have some efficacy behind it. Then there's pemf, Pulsed electromagnetic fields. Now the most interesting data on pulse electromagnetic fields. We know a lot of people. I was just checking to make sure it wasn't there so I don't look like a hypocrite. I just have this producing a bunch of dirty electricity in my back pocket, my microphone pack. I don't know what that will do. But cell phones have certainly been shown to reduce sperm count and sperm quality, as has microwave radiation. But by exposing the body to low intensity density, basically like a low frequency long wavelength pulsed electromagnetic field, or pemf, it can actually reverse a lot of that damage. So this is something that you can use as a way to undo a lot of the damage that a lot of guys are doing nowadays by walking around with their cell phone in their pocket or by getting exposed to microwave radiation or by, you know, by working at their desk by having the WI fi router right now underneath the desk. It turns out that PEMF is a good strategy to reverse a lot of this. So this is another kind of biohack PEMF mats. You know, I have a PEMF mat at home. I have one. This one right there is called the pulse center. It even has a square pad on it, very high frequency. And I can sit here, I'm reading, but you can sit on that stool and literally just kind of like suspend yourself over it and just blast yourself with PMF for 10 or 20 minutes.

So.

And you also get a little bit of. I found a sexual performance enhancing effect. Not as powerful as what you get with this stuff. The acoustic sound wave therapy. Has anybody in here done the acoustic sound wave therapy like the Gainswave? This was actually part of what Men's Health magazine had me do, is they had me go check out what happens when you do like the 20 minutes of blasting your dick with acoustic sound waves. This is all based on originally the concept of breaking up kidney stones using acoustic sound waves. You know, it turns out that you can actually improve vascularization. You can break up old blood vessels, build new blood vessels with about a 20 minute treatment. And a lot of people are doing this like on a monthly basis. And it's a proven treatment for erectile dysfunction, but also appears to have a sexual performance enhancing effect. Both my wife and I have done this protocol and then combined it with a lot of the flavanols and the blood flow precursors that I was talking about earlier. Very cool. One, two combo. The other thing that I've combined this with was a penis pump. Like, a good Gainswave practitioner will recommend to you that you use a penis pump for about 30 days after this. And when I went in there and did my protocol, they gave me like the Cadillac of penis pumps. It was like this digital penis pump. And I was super excited about having my own digital penis pump because I've never had a penis pump before. But I'm also very productive.

Got.

I didn't want to just like sit there holding my penis pump and having it do its thing while I'm just like, you know, watching TV or whatever. I wanted to work and I'm an author, so I wanted to type and, you know, replying to emails, working at my desk and, you know, I put my penis pump on. I figured out if I like kind of angled it just so on my desk, I could work hands free. And I remember I was doing this, I was like 10 days in and I heard this sucking sound like. And my leg left ball got sucked into the penis pump. And I looked down and it's turning like purple. And I kind of thought that I had just castrated myself and I managed to rip the rubber gasket out and pull it out of there. The idea is that the penis pump actually works. Just don't go hands free with your pump. But that 1, 2, 3 combo of the GainsWave plus any type of nitric oxide precursor plus some kind of a pump works really, really well. And I've done that treatment, I think eight times now. Very effective. And that's another one that I really like. They have a booth here too. They're out there somewhere. Platelet rich plasma injections, you know they'll do this. A lot of times they do acoustic sound wave therapy. You can get this as a standalone treatment. I've done it. I've done both this and stem cells. I have to say I probably noticed a little bit more from the stem cell injection versus the P shot. But obviously for a lot of people the P shots more affordable in your practice if you're not yet doing stem cells. A lot of people are not doing stem cells, but they are doing prp. I noticed good results with the prp. And again this is something that can be combined with acoustic sound wave. It's also been something that has been studied and particularly in cases of erectile dysfunction or peyronie has been shown to have a little bit of an effect in reversing that. So I think it's a good treatment to offer. The stem cell piece, which I've also done, I did this at a couple different clinics. The Lanoux Clinic in Spokane. I had the US Stem cell clinic ship my fat derived stem cells up to there. And we did a treatment there, just a basic nerve block and then an injection. And then when I was under sedation at Dr. Harry Adelson's clinic in Salt Lake City, we also did a protocol there with bone marrow aspirate nexosomes and prp. Probably in terms of inducing like erection after erection. Literally like I was a 14 or 15 year old boy for many, many days after the protocol with what I think, even though I'm not using a tape measure, is a noticeable increase in size. Nothing seemed to actually compare to these stem cell procedures. I know they're more expensive, I know they're a little more fringe. My dick for about three days looked like it had been run over by a semi truck. It was all black and blue and my wife was really nervous. But ultimately the stem cell thing, I think it really works. And I've done a lot of stem cells now and it moves the dial for sure. Now then there are, there are habits, common mistakes that people make that affect testosterone and fertility. So the first one, in case you hadn't guessed already, is underestimating the nasties of plastics. Anybody read the book Estrogeneration about phthalates and parabens and PCBs and how readily these wind up in the urine of males who just use something like this in their shampoo or their conditioner. Like it gets absorbed very rapidly and very unfavorably, affects testosterone to estrogen ratio. So this is one I feel like I'm preaching to the choir a little bit. Everybody's nodding. You guys know this one. Make sure that if somebody's taking expensive Tribulus Terrestis or anything else, they're not, you know, washing their supplements down with a, with a bottle, from a, from a, with water from a plastic bottle. So that's one. Another one is chronic cardio. One very interesting study, this was done in obese men over 10 weeks. What they found was that by simply increasing level of physical activity without introducing any special gym routine or exercise routine, but by instead simply getting rid of a sedentary lifestyle, there is a direct increase in testosterone. So this idea of hacking your environment, standing workstations, standing up, moving pomodoro breaks, figuring out ways to inject low level physical activity into the day constantly is a very, very effective method. Especially if you're working with people who have like 8 to 10 hour workdays who are sitting a lot. This is another one that has an impact on testosterone levels. Probably part of it also has to do with the fact that when you're sitting a lot and you're inactive, what do you get more heat in the crotch, right? So by moving, you're actually getting a little bit of airflow as well. I think that that actually has an impact as well. Eating too often. You know, this concept of intermittent fasting you actually do see, especially with longer fasts, you see a decrease in growth hormone and a decrease in testosterone. But what a lot of people don't realize, if you look at a lot of these things, studies in greater detail, after the refeed, you can literally see hundreds of percentage points rises in a lot of these anabolic hormones. You know, it's just as we know, the body responds very well to press pulse cycles, right? You exercise and you recover. You eat protein, you don't eat protein, you feast, you fast. And this idea of intermittent fasting or alternate day fasting or fasting, mimicking diets or water fasts, accompanied by a return to a refeed appears to give you almost like this stair step periodized effect on growth hormone testosterone. So if you have a patient or a client who's complaining that they're concerned they're going to lose their libido or their hormones are going to drop because they're fasting too much and they're not eating as many rib eye steaks as their carnivore diet neighbor, the idea is that you actually can get a really good effect with fasting, especially in a post workout style. I discussed this when I interviewed Mark Sisson on my podcast. Waiting for one to two hours after a workout to eat also has a favorable impact on growth hormone and testosterone levels. So rather than finishing up the workout and dropping everything to go suck down your maltodextrin and fructose and whey protein, you actually wait for an hour or two post workout. And that actually has an effect on hormones as well. Emf. I already talked about dirty electricity and electrical pollution a little bit and the use of PEMF to avoid that. But just making sure that guys that patients are aware that the phone in the back pocket is a bad idea. Yeah, there's cases like the defender shield case is one that I use that blocks EMF to a certain extent. But you need to be pretty careful with exposure to dirty electricity. The way that we. My office is set up, is Everything shielded with Cat 6 metal, shielded Ethernet cable. There is no wire, there is no Bluetooth. There's very little dirty electricity and people who really want to take things to the next level. You can even hire a building biologist to go around your house with a meter to actually measure and see what levels of EMF could be being produced that could potentially be harmful. There's also a little device you get on Amazon called an acoustometer. And this is what I have. So any new fangled device or sleeping scenario anywhere else, I'm out. I can test with the acoustometer and actually see the amount of EMF that that's producing. And it's very, very interesting. Like I remember one test I did, I tested my body and the EMF was almost like nothing. Then I tested my phone and the EMF was like way above 6, like off the scales in the acoustometer. And then I held my phone in one hand way over here and had my son test my hand over here. And all of a sudden my body was serving as an antenna and my own EMF levels were jacked up. So it's pretty crazy how much you actually get exposed to simply by holding your phone or having it in touch with your body. Okay, this one, I'm sorry guys, but ejaculating too much. It's this ancient kind of. This is one of more of those like ancient wisdom type of things that doesn't have a lot of studies behind it decided that you give away your jing, you give away your life force too much and you might wind up with a decrease in testosterone. And when you look at a lot of these ayurvedic charts, and I'll link to Some of them, if you want to look at them even more in the resources webpage that I'll give you at the end of this talk. I actually have a few of them pulled up here. So for example, in your 30s, it's three to four times a week, 40s, two to three times a week, in your 50s, one to two times a week, in your 60s, once a week, depending on your health. But this idea of reduced ejaculation frequency, a lot of guys swear by this for increasing testosterone. When I wrote that article for Men's Health magazine, I did it, I noticed a, a big increase in libido upon using like reduced ejaculation frequency. I mean, it's very simple. You can read a book like the Multiorgasmic Male, which I think every guy should read, if you want to have great sex, especially tantric sex. And you can actually do like a power breath where you're kind of squeezing the muscles almost like a Kegel contraction, and then drawing the breath back up the spine. And then the other thing that you can do until you've taught yourself how to do this properly, is you send, simply put, a lot of pressure onto the perineum, you know, that soft spot between the anus and the genitals. And you can actually hold back some of the ejaculate that way as well. But this competence of reduced ejaculation frequency is another tactic that a lot of guys are swearing by. Unfortunately, this is how I felt every single time that I did it. When you're lying in bed at night, because I'm a married man, a lot of times the time that you find to have sex is at night. After the day is over, I would just lay there feeling like I needed to go to the gym and bench press. So understand that it can produce a little bit of pent up aggressiveness too. This is how my wife and I have breakfast. I stand, boxes my pink underwear, she eats a banana and stares lovingly into my eyes. I think I'd just come down from reading Grey's Anatomy on my bed on my sheepskin rug in this photo. But anyways, I actually already alluded to this. I don't care the horse to death. Ignoring the power of sex, right? We schedule sex, we calendar sex, and sex creates a positive feedback loop where more sex increases libido and increases testosterone. And you can have sex frequently without necessarily, as I just alluded to, ejaculating, you can still orgasm, you can still have a good time and you can still create this positive feedback loop. But this is another one. Simply ensuring that your patients and your clients are scheduling and making time for sex in the same way that they'd schedule or make time for workouts. It seems like it'd take a lot of the romanticism out of sex, but I'm talking about scheduling, you know, big, hot date nights or periods of time where you actually isolate partners so that they're together and you simply make it happen. I think that's important and often under emphasized. And then, as we learned from south park, gluten. Any of you saw the south park episode? Know that gluten makes your dick fly off and fly around the room and explode. So just be careful with. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know of any data behind gluten, but that is a really funny cartoon if you've never watched that one. Okay, I want to finish with a few quick ways to test, the way to track and test. So blood is okay. I mean, most of you are smart enough to know. I know many of you are practitioners. All you're getting is a snapshot of testosterone or DHEA or estrogen when you do a blood test. I mean, you can do a simple blood test, but I really don't like it because it's a single one time snapshot. I mean, you know, for example, I know my cortisol is naturally elevated in the morning. I know it's even higher after I've had a cup of coffee. I want to see my rhythm throughout the day. And this is where something like a salivary panel can come in. I like a salivary panel because you're getting multiple readings throughout the day of actual bioavailable free hormones. But what it doesn't show you. What does a salivary panel not show you? It will show you free. It'll show you bound and unbound. But what will it not show you? Downstream metabolites. Right? Like, what's it getting broken down into? How fast is cortisol getting broken down? How fast is testosterone getting broken down? Like the urine panel, which is four to five urine collections for hormones. And I think Dutch actually has a table out there if you want to go dig deeper into what they're doing. It gives you the downstream metabolite. So I'll give you an example. I had really rampantly high cortisol for a very long time, especially when I was like racing and I was an endurance athlete. And it baffled a lot of practitioners who expect me to have chronic fatigue or adrenal fatigue or low cortisol. I was doing stress. I was doing meditation practice. I didn't feel like I was hardwired. I didn't feel like I had high cortisol. But every single time I'd test, I'd have very high cortisol. Well, it turns out that upon finally doing a Dutch test, my cortisol metabolized were very high. It wasn't that I had adrenal glands that were producing just crap, tons of cortisol. It was that that cortisol was not getting broken down at a very rapid pace at all. In my case, the reason for that was because I was following a ketogenic diet, participating in endurance sports, and I had thyroid downregulation. Well, one of the ways that you break down cortisol metabolites is by having adequate thyroid activity. So for me, it turned out well. I learned from a urinary pain panel that what I should go after is not the adrenal glands and excess cortisol. What I should instead tackle is the hypothyroid piece that's keeping the cortisol metabolites from getting broken down. So I like a lot of the, a lot of the deeper insights that you can get when you're doing something like a urine panel. So that's my favorite way to test for a lot of this stuff. Hey, thank you guys. That's my giant penis talk. And I will be. If you want a good cup of of organic coffee, I'll be out at my Keon coffee booth out there for about the next half hour or so. And then I'll be at the Gains Wave booth. I think around three. I'll be out there for a while. So if you guys have more questions, I love to chat about this stuff, so come chat. Thanks for coming.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@the BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every.