 Hey, are you a guy in your 20s with low testosterone? You're gonna want to listen to this. All right. Our next caller is Elliot from California. Elliot, what's up, man? How can we help you? Well, I've got a question about testosterone levels. It's kind of a lengthy one. So if I start rambling, feel free to cut me off. But I recently got lab work done and my test levels came back at 320 nanograms per deciliter. For reference, I'm 25. I train regularly. I eat fairly clean and I get about seven and a half to eight and a half hours of sleep. My general practitioner says I should focus less on the numbers, more on the symptoms. This is difficult meat for me, though, because that's more qualitative than quantitative. That being said, couple symptoms are lower libido than years of recent past. Body fat and strength are both going up gradually. To me, this is kind of a paradox. I get incredibly tired early in the day. Usually I'm asleep by 8.30. But again, it's hard for me to tell if these are true symptoms, though, due to not having an accurate way to measure over time. And then on the quantitative side of things, I've looked at a few studies, but not many stratified data by age, which kind of sucks. I found one study that took a convenient sample of 10,000 men. And from that, I fall around in the bottom decile. Being someone who likes to optimize things as much as I do, hearing that I'm in that bottom decile, this age sucks. If you were in my shoes, is there anything you would do to get your test levels up or do you think being on the lower end of normal is adequate and thanks again? Yeah, that's a good question. What a nice way to present that question. Yeah. Thank you for all that information. First off, I do want to be clear. None of us are hormone experts or doctors. So we're going to talk from the fitness and health side. I'm just hormonal sometimes. So things that can typically affect testosterone, not enough fat consumption, calories too low, lack of sleep, stress. There can be environmental factors. Testosterone levels have been declining generally in men for a while now. I mean, I tested very low about six months ago myself, but I'm not 25. So again, speaking just from my experience at your age, first off, what I would do if you're looking for advice on hormones is I would go to a specialist. Right? So your general practitioner has very minimal knowledge when it comes to hormones, especially testosterone. Testosterone has been demonized for so long that doctors are just, they tend to stay away from it. That being said, though, his GP gave, I think, pretty good advice to him, which is don't focus so much on the number and focus on the symptoms, which is the same thing that Dr. Rand would say to him too. They do, but here's the thing. 320 is you're right above what's considered the bottom part of the range. Right. So the GP may not recommend testosterone therapy because of that. But also because you're aged. So there may be other things you can do to jumpstart your testosterone both behaviorally and maybe, you know, medicinally, there may be things that you can use to kind of jumpstart them. If I were you, I would, and I wish I did this earlier, I would go and speak to a expert in this particular space. We work with regenerative sport and medicine. They're really good. I think the website is mphormones.com. So you can go on there, set up an appointment and talk to them and see what's going on. Elliot, are you in our forum yet? I'm not in the forum yet. It's free, at least for now it's free. And it's unbelievably valid. In fact, Dr. Rand spoke for the first time. So what we set up with them, this is what, this is for our audience because this is becoming such a popular question. We set up a free private forum for people that have questions around hormones twice a month. Dr. Rand or Dr. Todd get on there and do live Q&As. We keep them recorded on there so you could actually go on there right now and watch the last one. He went for two hours answering questions and very, very detailed. And the more information you can provide him, like that question was so good. If you gave him those, like that exact question, he would be able to give even better advice than what we could give you. And I, I'm with Sal, I recommend that you go talk to somebody like that who is an expert in that field and can answer all your questions and potential concerns. So go take advantage of that. And if you guys are listening to the podcast right now and you have similar questions around this, this is why we created this forum is so you guys could get this free information. Yeah. And there's, it's much more complicated too than, and this is what I've just learned in the last, you know, a few months. It's more complicated than just the total testosterone free testosterone is more important. And then there's androgen receptor density, like some, you know, you could have one guy with a number of testosterone that's lower than another guy, but he feels so much better because he has more androgen receptors that are available for that testosterone. So that's why they say focus on the symptoms. Let's talk about the stuff that, that we now can advise you on. Okay. So let's talk about your workouts for a second. Let's start there. What do your workouts look like? How many days a week are you lifting? How many days a week are you doing cardio? What does that look like? Right. So lifting four to six days a week and a modified push pull legs routine and cardio. I know you guys are going to yell at me for this one, but only a couple times a month and not just be either stair master or walking in an infine for about 30 minutes. You said a couple of times a month. Yeah. Yeah. Not a lot. That's fine. I don't care about that. So, okay. So let's have you lift full body three days a week. Let's go there. Okay. That's Yeah. Give him anabolic. Yeah. I'm going to give you maps and a ball of follow that program that three day a week, two to three day a week full body workout in my experience with the clients that I have worked on who have monitored their hormone levels. Typically is the most effective at getting testosterone levels to move up. Now, here's some good news. In my experience, I've worked with clients who've come had low testosterone or low ish testosterone and through lifestyle, we've been able to get it to improve by a good 30 to 50%. So that's a pretty big jump. Yeah. That's huge from where you're at now. So, so that's something you could do. And then you could also try, you know, things that are a little bit more fringe like red light therapy. There's definitely science that supports that. If you're not getting enough sunlight, especially that's something to consider. You could get, I don't know if you got your vitamin D levels tested. If that's low, then you're taking D3 and zinc to try to supplement that as is. Okay. Good. Supplementally, herbs that can help. Ashwagandha has been shown to raise testosterone and men with low testosterone. It's a bit temporary though. It's not this like long-term permanent effect, but for workouts, I would start there. I would go away from the four, six days a week, go three days a week full body that at the very least, even if your testosterone levels don't, you know, go up, it'll work better with what you're working with. So you'll see probably better gains anyway. And then talk to a hormone expert. It's like, you know, if I had, you know, really, really, if I needed knee surgery, I wouldn't go to my general practitioner for that. You know, I would go to a specific surgeon that focuses on the knees. So don't rely on your general practitioner. What comes to hormone advice? Again, especially testosterone, so demonized. They're so afraid of even learning about how to utilize testosterone with people that need it that the information you're going to get is going to be, is not going to be very good. In terms of our wheelhouse, if you're checking all the boxes of, you know, lifting weights and getting adequate rest, getting adequate sleep, you're getting sunlight, your nutrition's dialed in, you know, those are the things that you can manage and see, you know, where that leads you. You're still struggling, definitely go seek, you know, a specialist at that point. Yeah. But we're going to give you maps and a ball look for free and get in that form Elliot. What we'll do. Appreciate that guys. One final question on apart from the three days of lifting, is there cardio strategy that you would recommend most or program? I mean, if you're looking for lots of endurance and stamina, yeah, you probably want to do it a few days a week. If that's not really that important for you, I would just monitor your just daily activity. Well, how active are you at work sedentary sit in front of the four screens all day? Okay. So probably helps. Yeah. If you went on a walk for 15 minutes after breakfast, lunch and dinner, you, that would be enough. That would be good enough. Okay. Okay. Good to know. Thanks. Thanks for all the input. No problem, man. Thanks for calling. All right. Take care. You know, I don't want to get on a soapbox here, but it is going to. Yeah, I am. Did you see how you did that right? I know. I don't want to do this, but I'm going to hold the, this hormone issue in men is starting to get to a really interesting place. Bro, it blew me away. It blew me away when I first started talking about on the show the amount of DMs that I was getting from 20 year olds. And these weren't just kids that are like looking to take steroids. These are kids that Witten got their blood work done, was concerned about how low they are. And I, I did not see this when we were in gyms. When we were training in gyms, it was, this was not a common question. This has become one of the number one questions I'm having with people in my DMs right now. And I would have never seen that coming. This is, this is not, but this is not our opinion, by the way. This is well documented. This is, we've documented this now since the 19, I think 70s, this gradual and consistent decline. So it's much more common. So what does this mean for you? It's accelerated. What does this mean for you? If you're watching or listening, if you have symptoms of low testosterone out of nowhere and it's not going away and you're doing all the good, the right stuff, then you might want to talk to a specialist at least get tested and see what's going on. Now here's the other side of that. If you're listening and you feel great and you have no symptoms, I think it's still a good idea to get tested. So you have a baseline because let's say you're feeling good. Everything's great. You get tested. Your test comes back. It's, let's say 700 nanograms per deciliter and you're like, okay, awesome. And then let's say 10 years later, you feel like total garbage can't figure it out. You go get tested. It comes back at 350. You know, oh, that's really low for me. I tested before at 700. So it's a good, I wish I got those baselines when I was in my 20s. I told you that Katrina, Katrina's mom made all of her kids do that. I thought it was like one of the smartest things. So smart. Yeah. She said, when you guys, and they tell, like do it when you feel great. Don't go, don't go wait to go get tested. Cause you don't know what the, what it compares to. If you are a person who's like, oh, I'm fine. I'm optimal. Okay. If you're fine and you're optimal, go get your blood work done. So you have a baseline to refer back to because in 10 years from now, when the inevitable happens and you're not perfect, you can now give that to your, your therapist and say, listen, this is, this is where I felt amazing. This is where my levels were. And where am I at now? And how can we get my, get me to there? Yeah. And the part to me that was really revealing when you really learn and dive into this is again, the stigma around testosterone. Like if your thyroid is borderline and you have all the symptoms of low thyroid, doctors are typically okay with giving you a little thyroid. If you're, obviously if insulin's, you know, down, they're going to give you insulin or estrogen or progesterone, they tend to be pretty open to that. But testosterone has been so demonized, which is interesting because it's one of the safest hormones that you could administer. It's so demonized or so afraid. So even if you're like one, you know, 0.1 above the lowest, you know, measure on that scale, they're really reluctant to talk about it. That's because nobody goes and takes 10x to thyroid medication. That's why. That's exactly what, if people were taking 10x thyroid medication. You mean like as a performance enhancing drug? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's 100% potential for abuse. Yeah, exactly. The potential for abuse is extremely high when it comes to testosterone. But you know what, even along those lines, if you took 10x of any hormone, you would kill yourself. That's my point. My point is, if you were, you know, it gets demonized, but the irony of that is something like thyroid medication, which is readily prescribed or prescribed all the time, if someone went out and did 4x that, and so that all the fear around testosterone is the 4x 10x. That's right. If you take, if your doctor gives you your testosterone and you says, hey, take 200 milligrams a week and you go take a thousand, you know, but you now fall in a different category. But if you stick to what he tells you, it's just as safe as a thyroid. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's hard to hear this from young men because that's a really tough situation. But there are other alternatives. I have had clients in their 20s like this and they didn't want to go on testosterone. And so what they did is they went on other medications to kind of jumpstart testosterone along with some lifestyle changes and they actually had some pretty good stuff. Well, I don't think, if you're in your 20s, I don't think your, your first or even second or even third option should be testosterone. You should try and look at all the other things that are affecting it first. Otherwise, you're just masking the root cause of why, why you have that. If you're not naturally producing it at that point, I mean, that's something that should be a little bit alarming. Right.