Today we’re talking about the very relevant and important topic of boosting testosterone in the face of all the obstacles and toxins modern life poses.
Research has revealed that the average testosterone level of today’s male has been dropping at a steady rate of around one percent per year from generations past, and in this show, you’ll find out what the cause of this is, and more importantly, how you can avoid it. I discuss the effect all that artificial light and digital stimulation (especially after dark) has on our bodies and hormone levels, as well as what causes certain men to develop an excess of breast tissue.
Even though it seems like the average, modern male is turning into a flabby, floppy Mr. Softie, you do not need to go down this path, even though it is a slippery slope. From sleep to exercise to relationship conflicts, every part of our life affects our health, and this show will give you all the tools you need to boost testosterone naturally.
TIMESTAMPS:
The average testosterone level of today’s male is dropping at a rate of around 1% per year from generations past. [01:52]
We are exposed to environmental estrogens by being surrounded by electromagnetics, using mobile devices, and being exposed to plastics. [03:27]
Many lifestyle behaviors have an impact on the declining testosterone. [04:11]
If you take testosterone through exogenous means like shots or pellets, and then do not make healthy lifestyle changes, you’re not going to get results that you want. [07:30]
Optimizing healthy lifestyle practices is the best way to promote male hormones and minimize risk factors that surround us. Sleep is number one. [11:05]
We have to optimize our evening sleep habits, and that starts with a mellow, dark, quiet, calm, relaxing evening. Plan your downtime to lower stress. [13:20]
Number two is junk food. Get rid of processed foods and look for the most nutrient dense foods. [16:32]
Relationship conflict, anger, resentment, arguing, and nitpicking are huge testosterone killers. [21:59]
Doing the wrong kind of exercise is a testosterone depleting situation. Have some extensive low- level movement every day. A work block of 30 minutes is plenty. [26:00]
LINKS:
- Brad’s Shopping page
- Estrogeneration
- Podcast with John Gray
- Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
- Huberman Lab
- Body by Science
- Cardio Doesn’t Exist (YouTube)
LISTEN:
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B.Rad Podcast
Brad (1m 52s): OK, here we go. MOFOs with the breathers show about how to boost testosterone and avoid the slippery slope downhill that we are seeing play out in modern life.hat is the epidemic decline in the average male testosterone level. This research came out way back in 2007. It’s only getting worse, but back then the Massachusetts male anti-aging study delivered the most disturbing finding that the average testosterone level of today’s male is dropping at a rate of around 1% per year from generations past. I’m not talking about testosterone declining as you get older. And that natural decline that occurs if you’re healthy can be very small, but of course, you’re going to decline over time. What we’re talking about here with this research is that today’s 40 year old. Today’s 50 year old. Today’s 60 year old is way less of a man than his dad or his grandpa was in generations pass at those same ages. Brad (2m 40s): So this is suggesting that 1% a year we’re talking about since the 1980s that a 40 year old has 25% less testosterone, 30% less testosterone than the 40 year old did back in the eighties. Ditto for the 50 year old, the 60 year old. This is not just America is research from all over the world. There’s another prominent study from Denmark with the same conclusion that this is a global pattern. There’s other research from Israel that the average sperm count of today’s male is something around 50% lower than in generations past. As you can see on Bradkearns.com, the MOFO page, the modern male is turning into a flabby floppy Mister Softee, and we have to do something about it right away. Brad (3m 28s): We have to take action. Otherwise we will drift down this slippery slope. I talk about this a lot on social media with tips and tricks and tidbits and identifying some of the major factors. You’ve probably heard a lot about the estrogenic compounds in our environment. There’s a great book by Dr. Anthony Jay. I think it’s called Estrogeneration. He talks about the various ways that we’re exposed to these environmental estrogens for the first time in history at an accelerating rate. Things like the electromagnetic fields are also involved. The use of the mobile device has been believed to have an adverse effect on male hormone levels. Brad (4m 12s): And then the consumption of food and drink in plastic is one of the big ones. That’s so easy to turn around and just refused to consume food that’s in plastic or drink a fluid that’s served in plastic. And I know when you’re on the road and you’re stopping off at the gas station, you’re hot and thirsty. You have to go get some plastic water bottle and drink it a once in a while. That’s going to be fine. But as a rule you want to strive to not have plastic touch things that you consume or things that you put on your body. As far as the estrogenic compounds that are found in personal care products, laundry, detergents, things like that. So if you can kind of clean up your modern environment, that’s great, but even more direct and impactful are the lifestyle behavior patterns that are contributing to this declining energy declining testosterone. Brad (5m 7s): So I picked out four of ’em to talk about on this show. And of course, with the MOFO mission, I offer up 10 assignments that you can take on to optimize your life in every direction and prevent this decline, this modern decline in testosterone. And in fact, boost your testosterone naturally all centerpieced around the wonderful supplement male optimization formula with organ. MOFO. And that is a compilation of animal organs, freeze, dried grass fed super pure, incredibly potent, and it will reenergize your body at the cellular level and provide the proteins peptides, enzymes, co-factors, and molecular bio directors that signal a natural increase in testosterone production. Brad (5m 54s): It tells you to go make a little bit more testosterone. You get a nice boost there. But in the presentation, the marketing of this supplement, I really feel strongly that it needs to be an all encompassing lifestyle approach. So, Hey, that was a nice little commercial threaded into the content for MOFO, but we really want to emphasize that a great supplement will be a big boost. It’ll give you a little edge and maybe the motivation to carry out the other assignments in the MOFO mission, but we have to get the lifestyle factors dialed in. Otherwise you’re just wasting your time, your energy, your money. Look no further than the extreme increase in popularity of anti-aging medicine and males and going and getting testosterone supplementation or testosterone replacement therapy is a huge market segment. Brad (6m 43s): There’s all kinds of content and people talking about the wonders of going in and engaging in anti-aging medicine. And I’m not going to trash that outright or make a blanket statement. These things can be very helpful, especially for a small percentage of people who have some endocrine dysfunction and require that a replacement therapy. But for the most part, if you are not optimizing all your other lifestyle factors, your expensive anti-aging regimen is going to go to waste. And in the direct case of increasing your testosterone through exogenous means through getting testosterone shots or pellets or whatever you’re doing, rubbing the cream on, what’s likely to happen. Brad (7m 30s): If you are not a healthy guy, if you’re not engaged in healthy lifestyle practices, if instead you’re inflamed, you’re carrying extra belly fat, you’re not active enough. You’re not doing the right workouts. There’s a phenomenon known as aromatization. And this is where male hormones are converted into estrogen, especially if you have an excess of them. So if you go in and get your testosterone shots and then go back to your sorry ass, pathetic flabby, soft life, where you’re not active, you’re not eating the right foods, aromatization is going to occur. And you’re just going to make a, you’re just going to increase your estrogen levels rather than the desire to fact of throwing down some extra testosterone. Brad (8m 14s): This is evidenced by the condition known as gynecomastia. On the street they call it bitch tits or man cans. And that’s when you start to actually develop breast tissue from an excess of estrogen caused by aromatization. The extreme drug users, abusers, bodybuilding scene, and athletes who are indiscriminately taking extra testosterone, anabolic steroids, this will often happen to them too, because they’re throwing off their endocrine balance. So extremely. But I’m talking about the people that are doing testosterone replacement therapy under a doctor’s care, giving themselves. Brad (8m 55s): what’s supposed to be optimal and safe levels, but they’re not carrying out the extra lifestyle practices they’re going to be in trouble. So please keep that in mind when you’re reading the glowing reports and the amazing stories of people succeeding with testosterone replacement therapy. It should be considered, in my opinion, should be considered the last straw or the last place to turn. As you have optimized all the other lifestyle practices. And who knows, maybe I’ll be doing a show in 12 years or 17 years, or whenever saying, Hey, look, here’s my deal. I’m living the dream life. I’m doing all these great things. And now I’ve decided to go over to the other side of the curtain and here’s how it works for me. Brad (9m 37s): And isn’t that wonderful and isn’t that great. But right now I have the opinion that the benefits are probably minimal when you’re optimizing all other lifestyle factors. I’ve shared with you, my blood test results for my serum, testosterone are pretty favorable. They’re up in the 700 to 800 range, and that would be in the 95th percentile for people my age. It’s actually a good level for a male of any age. So I think I’m doing everything right in my lifestyle. I’m being the best I can be. I certainly wish I could be way more bad-ass and putting myself in a whole nother category of high-performing athlete, who recovers quickly never gets sore, never complained about a breakdown, burnout illness, and all those things that sometimes creep into my life. Brad (10m 25s): And so I’m going to say that I’m not as, as a fit and energetic as I was 30 years ago and that’s part of life. And I could probably address that with an abuse of the anabolic steroids right now, just like certain athletes are probably doing in Masters’ competition in certain sports. And of course the athletes in the major sports who are clearly using and abusing steroids, that’s great. They’re getting immediate performance benefit and possible complications or considerations compromising their long-term health. Brad (11m 5s): So outside of that discussion, what we’re going to do in this show is try to optimize the natural lifestyle factors that promote male hormone optimization and minimize the risk factors that are floating all around us. So I picked four to emphasize, and the first one is sleep. So this is basically the starting point from which all other lifestyle optimization goals and efforts flow downstream from. And if you are not optimizing your sleep, you’re not prioritizing your sleep, you’re going to have a really difficult time with dietary transformation or upping your exercise game. Brad (11m 49s): And, boy, the cards are stacked against us because what modern life is all about is artificial and digital stimulation. after dark. We work hard. We’re busy. We have a hectic pace. We’re going around, running around. We want to come home and enjoy ourselves and indulge in the wonderful streaming entertainment that seems to be never ending. There’s a new show. There’s a new series. It’s great. It’s highly rated. There’s more YouTube videos to watch. They keep stacking up. I have an actual, a note on my computer, a note file of suggestions of cool things to watch. And it’s so freaking long, and I’ll never get to the bottom of it. But every time someone says, you got to watch this show. It’s so incredible. I’ll write it down and, you know, take note of it. Brad (12m 33s): Ah, so we have this constant potential to be entertained. And this is like no other time in the history of humanity. So what’s getting pinched and compromised is not only our evening sleep patterns, but also this natural downtime that we’ve had forever, for the history of the human race. Obviously the, the prehistoric human had a very low stress, low the stimulatory lifestyle, where they sat around for hours every single day and just kicked it and then, you know, tended to their shelter or the gathering or the hunting duties. But studies from modern day bushmen that we cite in The Primal Blueprint reveal that their leisure time everyday is like six hours. Brad (13m 20s): They have, you know, tending to basic duties for something like six hours. So they don’t even work that hard of a day, even though they’re in the hunter gatherer lifestyle where everything’s tough. They don’t have a air conditioned office environment to go in and type on a keyboard. They gotta deal with everything. Every bite of food has to go be earned and prepared, but they still have a lower engagement and lower stimulatory situation than the modern human. So, of course, we have to optimize our evening sleep habits, and that starts with a mellow, dark, quiet, calm, relaxing evenings with the big goal of ending your screen use at least an hour, ideally two hours before bed, and then devoting those final, that final period of time to nice restorative, low stress activities. Brad (14m 17s): Now, I want to talk a little bit about the obligation for downtime because that’s something that’s, we often forget when we just obsess on our evening sleep habits. So the downtime particular concerning with the advent of mobile technology. So like no other time in the history of humanity, we have something in our hand that can completely entertain us and absorb and engage us non-stop throughout the day. So whatever else we’re doing, our core daily responsibilities, also an arm’s length away is text messages or social media feeds that can keep our brain nonstop. And when that happens, guess what? We experience a rise in stress hormones, because this is a dopamine triggering stress provoking. Brad (15m 3s): Even if it’s good, it could be good, or it could be bad. It doesn’t matter. It still has a high stress score and a stress factor. So we have to orchestrate opportunities to have downtime, to have more engagement with nature, which the forest bathing research in Japan and elsewhere in the world reveals that we get an immediate lowering of blood pressure and stress hormones. When we simply engage in a natural environment, taking a walk around the block at night, instead of watching one more show, remember that your, your streaming entertainment will be there the next day. That’s, what’s so great about it. You’re not going to miss, like the old days LA Law came on at 10:00 PM and we had to watch it on Thursday the nights, otherwise you’d miss it. Brad (15m 47s): And it’s over never to be seen again. Now, oh my gosh, we can control our environment and our entertainment choices like never before. So all the more justification for structuring these evening patterns in a way that promotes good sleep and then powering down, getting really good at prioritizing engagement with nature and live social interaction, which is far more relaxing and restorative than interacting with a screen. And just think about it this way. Cortisol that’s the prominent stress hormone that increases when you have this hectic high stress, constant stimulation, constant engagement with technology, cortisol antagonizes testosterone. Brad (16m 32s): So when you have chronically high cortisol levels, which is the essence of the modern human experience, you are going to antagonize, you’re going to lower testosterone. Okay? So that’s the, the first category is more sleep, more downtime, better sleep, better downtime. And then number two is junk food. So today’s standard American diet is heavily processed nutrient deficient insulin- stimulating meals and snacks deplete your body at the cellular level. So you are a depleted human. You are not at full strength. Your battery power is that 78% to use a mobile device technology analogy that will resonate with the audience. Brad (17m 17s): You know, we want to get it up to a hundred percent. We want to be the best that we can be, whatever age we’re at, whatever our genetics, you know, this is what we’re talking about here. And we need tremendous nutritional support from the diet. You’ve heard people talk about how the soil is depleted these days. So even today’s wonderful salad bowl of nutrient dense foods. Foods is not the same as it was before, of course, with the feedlot animals and the industrialization of the animal foods, same with the, the plant foods. We’re getting an inferior nutrient deficient animal, particularly when we forget the ways of our ancestral humans, and we fail to consume animals in the nose to tail strategy. Brad (18m 6s): That’s such a big deal in the ancestral health movement. So we’re eating mostly muscle meats, right? Chicken breast, hamburger, steak from these feedlot animals. These industrial produced animals concentrated animal feeding operations. CAFO is the acronym. So they’re giving us inferior nutritional value to a properly sustainably raised grass fed pasture, raised heritage breed, pork, wild caught fish. So we want to kind of not only get rid of the processed food, but also make the best choices and find the most nutrient dense foods that are possible today. Brad (18m 48s): What’s happening when we have this nutrient deficient diet, we tend to promote these conditions of oxidation and inflammation from eating crappy food, eating too much sugar producing too much insulin. And this causes the accumulation of this highly disturbing type of body fat known as visceral fat. This is the fat that collects in the midsection in the abdomen surrounding our organs and growing and growing until you get the spare tire. And when you accumulate some visceral fat, it has inflammatory properties, profound, inflammatory properties, such that it is efficiently designated as its own organ, because it has the ability to secrete inflammatory cytokines. Brad (19m 44s): That’s the term, that’s the agent that they’re secreted into the bloodstream. So just like an organ, it secretes a substance into the bloodstream that has inflammatory properties that called inflammatory cytokines. And so when you accumulate a bit of visceral fat and send these inflammatory signals into your bloodstream, this begets the accumulation of additional belly fat. So that’s where the slippery slope comes in is if you let yourself go a little bit and start getting a little bit of a spare tire, this will change your blood chemistry and your hormonal profile to basically encourage the accumulation of more fat and a further suppression of testosterone and other important hormones. Brad (20m 30s): So basically you’re going to exist in an inflammatory state because of your spare tire. You’re going to trash your testosterone levels. That’s going to make it more difficult for you to let’s say, get your butt in shape, get rid of that spare tire, have the energy, the motivation, the discipline to go out there and do what you need to do to, to get your body back in shape. So I consider it this lifelong battle, especially for males in the older age groups. And one day we might’ve talked about 50 and over, but today it’s really like once you hit 27 or 32, and I know you’ve frat boys raising your hands. You know what I’m talking about because when you’re in, you’re in your element and you’re in those wonder years of accelerated cell division, you’re growing, you’re getting big, you’re working on your muscles, you’re eating whatever you want. Brad (21m 20s): Nothing can stop you. You pound the hot food sundae, you get right back up and go do another workout. Aren’t those wonderful times? But then pretty soon you look down and here comes a spare tire due to your fun, exciting college style life ways that haven’t been recalibrated since you left campus five, seven or 12 years ago. So sometime the, the magic runs out. A lot of people can nod their heads, know what I’m talking about. And when that magic runs out, that’s when you got to turn the corner, start getting the junk out of your diet and fighting that spare tire battle valiantly for the rest of your life. Brad (21m 60s): Do not let that spare tire accumulate. Imagine yourself, getting the spare tire, becoming inflamed, trashing your testosterone and making it more difficult to build or maintain lean body mass and more difficult to avoid the accumulation of fat. So that’s the a category number two of junk food. And then number three on the list here. Yeah, that’s right. Relationship conflict, anger, resentment, arguing, and nitpicking are huge testosterone killers. I love my shows with John Gray, the relationship expert, Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus author, where he gives the essential male hormone assignment to optimize testosterone is to act like a Kung Fu master in life, maintain control of your emotions. Brad (22m 50s): You are the guy that’s calm, cool, and collected in every setting and every situation. So you have to make a firm resolution to not engage in destructive arguments. And when you experience an emotional disturbance or you’re not at your best or you’re feeling triggered or feeling reactive, John Gray’s wonderful assignment is to go into your cave. That was his epic metaphor from Men are from Mars women are from Venus, and it means going off and engaging in testosterone boosting activities. And these range from hobbies, sports, competitive settings, especially this can even count like playing a video game as a competitive setting that can boost testosterone, tinkering with the motorcycle in the garage or your a model airplane project, or going out and throwing some weights around or playing pickup basketball in the park. Brad (23m 46s): These are activities that rebuild testosterone. These are aligned with the males primary biological drive, which is to compete to conquer one’s environment and to persevere under difficult and challenging circumstances to rise to the top of this social structure. That is what males are wired to do. And on the female side, John Gray does a great job talking about this and how males and females can interact successfully in a relationship. The female’s primary biological drive is to nurture love, support, and connect. So females, to regenerate estrogen which is easily depleted in hectic high stress modern life, will go off and do estrogen boosting activities like hanging out at the salon and chatting and gossiping and engaging. Brad (24m 33s): And some people might want to take exception with the gender stereotyping that I’m talking about. Yes, females are allowed to go tinker with the motorcycle in the garage, or go throw around some weights at the gym. And males are allowed to go hang out with a salon and get a manicure pedicure, and spend extra time chatting about sports. Right? So what we want to do is always tie this back to the male and female primary biological drives rather than make commentaries or try to shape culture in a potentially offensive manner. Okay? So that’s all we’re talking about here is the underpinnings and the way that a man can be the best he can be, especially with regard to testosterone levels, is to choose to be the calm, cool collected one and to not engage. Brad (25m 20s): And, oh my gosh, some of these takeaways from the John Gray shows like, you know, arguing and talking things through in a long drawn out discussion will absolutely trash your testosterone. And in practically speaking, and anecdotally speaking, I can totally attest that this makes a whole ton of sense and that going off and recollecting yourself and, you know, returning to the relationship to the home or to whatever the situation is renewed and refreshed because you’ve received a testosterone boost. So choosing testosterone building activities, instead of relationship conflict, that’s third on the list. Brad (26m 0s): And then fourth is doing the wrong kind of exercise. And basically today it’s doing too little exercise in general, everyday movement, right? Prolonged periods of sitting are even a more important objective than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen for overall health testosterone status, immune function, hormone optimization, everything. So if we sit around too much, of course that’s a big one, but we also have this modern trend of extreme exercise of overdoing it or doing it in an incorrect manner. And this can also trash your testosterone. So the ideal approach here for hormone optimization is extensive low level movement every day, especially taking brief breaks from prolonged periods of stillness. Brad (26m 49s): So no such thing exists. So the longest you’re ever sitting still is 20 minutes. And then you always get up and do one set of kettlebell swings, a one set of pull-ups a few stretches heading up and down the stairs. For some, whatever reason, you’ve got to go get another, a pad of post-it notes, but you’re kind of fidgety and making an effort to move, keep your body active rather than sitting. And then the other objective here is to pair that with explosive, brief and duration, high intensity workouts, that prompt an incredible burst of adaptive hormones, but don’t leave you feeling exhausted and overstressed like many of the popular fitness programming does today. Brad (27m 35s): So we’re kind of screwing up this fitness objective, because if you can look at it from big picture, the most popular fitness endeavors seem to fall into the category of steady state cardio or overly stressful high intensity interval training sessions. Oh my gosh, I just walked into one of the biggest fitness centers I’ve ever seen in LA recently, LA Fitness and the banks of treadmills, stair climbers and stationary bikes was literally extending for probably 25 or 30 meters wide. And then, you know, five or six or seven rows deep, it was a massive warehouse looking situation where, you know, many, many people’s kind of busy. Brad (28m 19s): There was so many people climbing the stairs, walking on the treadmills. It was shocking. So then you have all this square footage devoted to a steady state cardio, and then you have the classroom setting and the people throwing around the weights, the machines, the free weights who are in there for quite a long duration workout. 60 minutes is a cutoff that I just heard on the great new podcast called Huberman Lab from Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford University has got a great show and he does these wonderful narrations kind of like my breather shows where he’s just spitting out content. And let me tell you, it’s a lot of effort, a lot of work it’s much easier to sit back and interview a guest than it is to come up with an hour or two hours of awesome programming. Brad (29m 3s): And he did one on a male hormones, testosterone. And he was talking about how, if you were in there doing a strength training session that lasts for over 60 minutes, you transition over from any potential testosterone benefit to actually deliver a decline in testosterone, due to the increasing rise of cortisol, the stress hormone. Because you need to spike cortisol to get you through the damn workout because it’s so difficult and it’s lasting for so long. So we’ve talked for years now, Mark Sisson, Primal B,lueprint that these strength training sessions need never last longer than 30 minutes. Brad (29m 45s): Go hard and go home. And this is, we could say that the 30 minutes is the kind of, if the stopwatch is going, we’re not talking about warm-up or foam rolling out your legs before you go and hit the machines. But you know, a work block of 30 minutes is plenty and less than that can be highly effective. Also my sprint workouts, the total duration of the high intensity effort is probably only a few minutes total. And that counts my difficult drills and preparatory technique efforts. And then the brief explosive sprints, which usually I’m only going 80 meters. Brad (30m 28s): Sometimes I’m doing some, two hundreds or one hundreds, but if you add up the whole thing, it’s just minutes mere minutes rather than hours, or certainly never exceeding that obvious 60 minute mark. Okay. So the wrong kinds of exercise are really causing problems. And with the steady state cardio, it’s so popular for some reason, I think we’ve been programmed to believe that we have this obligation to get our heart up into the training zone and peg it there for however long duration. We’re, we’re, we’re striving in the name of fitness, but Dr. Brad (31m 9s): Doug McGuff makes a great case in his book Body by Science. Many other people are on this wavelength too, but I love how Body by Science references tons of studies and almost every paragraph. There’s another study, another study. And basically you can go get the gist of it with a very short YouTube clip. If you type in Doug McGuff Cardio Doesn’t Exist. And that’s the name of his YouTube presentation. And what he’s talking about is how you can’t really isolate the cardiovascular system away from the rest of the body. So any form of activity that you perform is going to train is going to elicit a training effect from the cardiovascular system. Brad (31m 53s): Even if you’re throwing around some heavy weights and taking long rest periods between your weight training set, you are getting an awesome cardiovascular training session where your heart rate is spiking up to high levels for a very short period of time when you’re going through your, your reps in the set. And then when you rest and you sit on the block for a minute or two, it’s still vastly exceeding your heart rate at rest. And so from the moment you exit your car and walk into the gym to the moment you go back into a resting position, you’re getting a great cardiovascular training session. There’s no obligation to extract a different workout on a different day where you go onto the bike or onto the treadmill and peg your heart rate up at whatever the desired heart rate is. Brad (32m 42s): And in fact, there’s many, many risks in the emphasis on steady state cardio, especially overdoing it. We’ve talked so much on this show and in the books about exceeding your maximum aerobic heart rate and prompting an undesirable stress response, and a chronic cardio approach to exercise. You can look at Mark’s Daily Apple, the epic article from back in 2007 called the Case Against Cardio, where Sisson details what happened to him, the breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury that occurred from his devotion to marathon training, Ironman training, and rethinking this obligation to go out there and peg your heart rate at a certain level. Brad (33m 26s): So if you think about it this way, that you’re getting an awesome cardiovascular training effect in every type of movement that you do guess what else counts here? Walking that’s right. When you get up off your butt and walk around the block, even if you’re a devoted athlete and you really want to be in great shape, you are getting a great cardiovascular training effect at the lower intensity levels from just walking around the block. Your heart rate is still double resting heart rate, and you’re still activating the aerobic energy producing enzymes and muscle fibers that you will call into action when it’s time to run your ultra marathon race or your triathlon. So if walking is delivering a great cardiovascular training session, strength training, and high intensity exercise are delivering great cardiovascular training effect. Brad (34m 13s): The obligation to go and throw in these steady state sessions is now diminished. I guess you could really say that the only reason to do it is if you, you enjoy it, which is a fantastic reason in my old time childhood friends, from, from running Dr. Steven Kobrine and Steven Dietch both are out there still putting in a substantial amount of miles in their fifties, mainly because they enjoy the act of running. And they’re not trying to make the Olympic team anytime soon, but the enjoyment factor is huge. And then of course you want to do it correctly, which would be to do the vast majority of your steady state cardiovascular exercise at the maximum aerobic heart rate or below. Brad (34m 57s): So you don’t trigger these excess stress, hormone, production, immune suppression, and all the things that happen when you’re engaged in a chronic cardio pattern. So if you’re going to do steady state do it the correct way, make sure the workouts are comfortable. And then when it comes to high intensity interval training, oh my gosh, this programming that’s out there where they’re taking you through the paces for up to an hour, or they’re asking you to again and again, and again, perform this interval work with insufficient rest between efforts doing workouts that lasts a little bit too long, where the efforts are a little bit too difficult with not enough rest between them. Brad (35m 40s): That’s where we get into the, the testosterone suppressing stress hormone, eliciting effects of these sessions. And unfortunately, what I see in the fitness scene are programming that are calibrated to be overly stressful, high intensity interval training sessions. So in the follow-up show, I’m going to talk you through how to do an explosive high intensity workout in the correct manner to avoid these risk factors from doing traditional approach to hit. And I did an entire breather show about the difference between HITT and Dr. Craig Marker’s clever take on it, which he has the acronym hurt. Brad (36m 21s): H I R T. And that’s called high intensity repeat training where you’re getting plenty of rest in between your work efforts so that all of them are extremely high quality and explosive rather than having this exhausting depleting effect that occurs when we see the protocol for most of the bootcamp workouts or the spinning classes, or the group training efforts out there in, in outdoors, in cycling or running. Even Peloton, you know, in your home-based training systems, mirror, Peloton, all these cool things. For the most part, I’m going to contend that these workouts seem to last a little bit too long, where you lose the intended benefits of hormone optimization. Brad (37m 8s): And instead, just give yourself a nice flood of stress hormones. Okay? So we covered sleep, dietary practices, relationship interactions, and then work out patterns and talked about why those four things to highlight are contributing to declining testosterone levels and not getting the intended benefits that you think you’re going for when you decide to enter a relationship or enter the gym for a workout. So in the next show part two, we’re going to talk about some great immediately actionable takeaways in each of those four categories where you can get it dialed in and do it right. Brad (37m 49s): Thanks for listening to this breathers show. And thanks for spreading the word to remember. If you push a couple buttons, you can share this episode with a friend or loved one who deserves it. I use this great podcast player called overcast, and you can actually push a button and generate a clip, an audio clip to send a text message to someone else and say, Hey, listen to this guy for two minutes here. It’s gonna get you all psyched up to listen to the whole show. So that’s kind of fun, but whatever podcast player you use, if it’s apple podcasts, that by far the most prominent podcast distributor, you can, you can also send a text message and share the show with others. Brad (38m 32s): And what’s especially great is leaving a review, a five-star review for the show. It helps us rise up the rankings. More people can listen. So if you can do a great, solid and mention our show on social media, texted to a friend or loved one, or leave a review, that would be super awesome. We appreciate it so much. We’re working hard trying to give you the best content you deserve. We also love feedback. So send an email to podcast@bradventures.com could be questions for the Q and A show or any suggestions feedback we really appreciate hearing from you and connecting. Brad (39m 15s): And thanks so much for listening. Bye-bye thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support. Please. Email podcast@bradventures.com with feedback, suggestions, and questions for the Q and A shows, subscribe to our email list of Brad kearns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful bi-monthly newsletter edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with apple podcasts or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. Brad (40m 1s): It helps raise the profile of the B.rad podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called overcast allows you to actually record a soundbite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much for spreading the word and remember B.Rad.
