DO THIS For Developing A Youthful Hormone Profile

Do you want a youthful hormone profile? Tell your body to build muscle. All right. You know, it's funny when I talk about, uh, resistance training and strength training on, you know, cause obviously I wrote, uh, with the book that I wrote, the resistance training revolution. One of the things that people find the most fascinating is the effects that strength training has on your hormones. Now studies will show that it consistently raises testosterone in men, balances out estrogen, progesterone in women. You get nice insulin response, growth hormone, cortisol becomes healthy response. And what it does is it looks like the kind of youthful hormone profile that everybody's after. So the question is always like, why does strength training do that? And it's because when you send a signal to your body to build muscle, that's the, that's the step before the muscle built building actually happens. Your body's telling your hormones to organize themselves in a way to build muscle. And so it looks like a youthful hormone profile. So the second question is, why do we have that hormone profile when we're youthful, your body's building and growing when you're youthful, when you're now, is this in the context of, uh, you're doing all the right things to build muscle for you to have this youthful type hormone profile? Or is it just simply, if I am training to send a muscle building signal to my body, i.e. lifting weights, I'm going to get the benefits of that. Well, don't you still have to have all the other, you have to have everything in alignment in order to be effective in building? Yeah. I mean, you could send a loud muscle building signal and get no sleep. Right. So that's my, that's my point. So it's not like, Hey, all you do is go lift weights. No, but it is, it is the key, right? Because when your body says a big rock of the, yeah, because when it says, when it, when it's like, okay, we need to build muscle, what it does is it starts to organize its hormones in a way to do that. And so that's why you see this raise of testosterone. You know, the other thing you see in men, which is, I think even more important than the testosterone raising is the upregulation of androgen receptors. Right? So these are the receptors that testosterone attaches to. So, and in studies, they show that it's not so much testosterone levels that'll dictate how much strength and muscle a man will build, but rather how many androgen receptors they have. So like a guy with high testosterone, with low androgen receptor density, isn't going to do as well as a guy with lower testosterone with more androgen receptors. So when you lift weights, your body opens up more of these androgen receptors, making it more sensitive to testosterone. Why? Again, because your body's like, okay, we need strength. We need muscle. Let's organize things in a way to promote that. And the only time in your life, one of the only times in your life, when this is just happens for you is when you're, you're a teenager, when you're growing, like you go from the age of like 15 to 19. If you're a guy, you don't need to lift weights to build muscle. Just kind of starts to happen. Now, is it, is it always beneficial to have more androgen receptors or is there sometimes, is there, is there sometimes a drawback to that? Is it all positive having more? If it's natural, if it's natural, yes. I'm of course, I'm assuming there could be an extreme case, but I'm, I'm not aware of what that would look like. But what that would mean is more drive, motivation, energy, fat loss, muscle building, you'd have better insulin sensitivity. So lower risk of things like diabetes, diabetes, lower rates of dementia and Alzheimer's, which the, this has all been, you know, connected to. And then in women, by the way, you know, we talk about testosterone. We always talk about men. Testosterone plays a very important role in women as well. And of course their bodies have much less of it, but low testosterone in women causes the same effects that you see in men, low libido, low drive, higher body fat, less muscle, you know, less energy. So, you know, these beneficial effects from testosterone happen for women as well. Now, what's not going to happen for women, there's their testosterone levels aren't going to go so high that they get, you know, masculinizing effects. That's not going to happen from lifting weights. It stays within the kind of healthy range or whatever. Yeah. I just think like in terms of like muscle building being the fountain of youth, when you look at the gym and you see like somebody older with like a decent amount of muscle, you can see it all the way from like the youthfulness in their skin too, as well. It seems that like, you know, not only are they strong and able body and their movement and everything looks, you know, more youthful, but also it seems to carry over into, you know, the other system. You said a fountain of youth. It's a hundred percent right. If you, if you're older, okay. When I was a trainer towards the end of my career, I started really, I got a lot of clients that were in advanced age and yeah, yes. If you improve your health generally, and you're older, you're going to see improvements in age related, you know, disease and chronic pain, a lot of stuff. But man, strength training, there was nothing. There was nothing that I could do like getting them a little stronger, build more muscle that would have more of a positive impact. It was dramatic. The impact that, you know, adding four pounds of muscle on a 65 year old was like, we would instantly see, you know, blood sugar better. We would instantly see blood lipids get better hormone levels better. They feel totally different. It was the overall look is so different than say somebody who's just been driving the cardio button the whole time too, with the oxidative stress and like what that does, you know, to their skin and their youthfulness. Now, how, how much of this do you think is attributed to the actual muscle that they end up building and how much of it is based off the behaviors that they put in place in order to build that muscle, right? Because if you, if you are adding four to 10 pounds of muscle on your body, there's some things that you're doing right. Like you're, you're eating adequate protein. You're probably getting enough rest and recovery. You're lifting weights consistently. So I wonder how much of the, the healthy hormone profile that you see is directly attributed to the actual process of building muscle, or it's also connected to a lot of the behaviors that are in place in order to do that. It's both, but in there's interesting studies done on, for example, on the severely obese where they'll have them gain a little bit of muscle and you'll see these really wonderful improvements in insulin resistance in older men with low testosterone, they give them testosterone shots, right. To get their levels up to a better, you know, healthier, higher range within range. No, they don't work out. They're not doing anything else. All they did was send a hormone signal to build muscle. And what do you see? You know, reduced risk of diabetes. They gain a little bit of muscle. Um, they start to burn more body fat. You see improved cognition, um, better blood flow, all those different things from the muscle that comes from the testosterone signal. So it's both. It's definitely both. But, but as you get older, one of the interesting thing that happens that is really starting now get connected to age related disease and chronic illness is just the loss of muscle, which then is loss of bone and you see all these terrible effects. So yeah, if you want younger hormone profiles, like get your body set up to build muscle as it does it, it shifts everything in that direction. I can't think of a more effective single thing you could do. That's going to do that for you. Um, that's natural. That doesn't, you know, you don't need to take exogenously or whatever. Um, so yeah, it's one of those things that nobody talks about really, because we, we compare like exercise benefits, different forms of exercise, but the hormone changes that you get from strength training are head and shoulders superior to when you compare head to head, right. To other forms of exercise. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here, or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.