New Year, New You: Don’t Let Low T Wreck Your Exercise Goals
Leading up to the New Year, many men seek a fresh start—a new version of themselves that feels better, stronger, looks healthier, and delivers a more vibrant spring in their step. However, there may be undiagnosed health challenges that put them at a significant disadvantage before they even get started:
Low testosterone.
No matter how hard a man with clinical Low T works to get healthier, lose weight, and build muscle mass, he will likely find progress much more difficult than it should be, and often a losing effort.
Your Body’s Messengers
Your hormones are chemical messengers circulating throughout your body, and they can drastically affect how you look, function, and feel. Healthy levels of testosterone bind to receptors found on muscle cells, which signals your body to efficiently synthesize protein and produce more lean muscle mass.
If there isn’t enough testosterone to get the message where it needs to go, your body will not repair and adapt effectively to the physical load a new exercise routine would place on it.
Therefore, your low testosterone levels could be handicapping the investment of time and effort you’ll be paying into your health. Who wants inferior results compared to what you could achieve if your body had a more optimum hormonal balance?
(Learn more about how your body could be shedding muscle mass as you age.)
Low T and Your Exercise Goals: Taxing Your Motivation
While the exact relationship between your emotions and low testosterone is still something of a mystery, low testosterone can set you up for failure by drowning your motivation and negatively affecting your overall sense of well-being. Many men in this situation describe how difficult it is to get to the gym and put in the work necessary to achieve that better version of themselves.
What is often generalized as fatigue can actually be broken down into the following:
- Chronic lack of energy
- Extended periods of low motivation
- Lack of alertness
- Poor sleep patterns
- Lack of strength
- Longer recovery times
It’s easy to see how these symptoms of Low T can hamper any will to work out regularly. This drain on your resources significantly affects your performance, and prevents a positive effort-results ratio that you’d expect to see.
Low T and Your Exercise Goals: Set Yourself Up for Success
If your testosterone levels are borderline, you may be able to make some lifestyle adjustments in order to get the results you want from your workouts—your body needs to be primed for action and for healthy recovery to benefit from the exertion you place on it.
Control Stress Levels
One of the first actions you can take is to get your stress under control.
Your hormonal health can be damaged by periods of prolonged stress and anxiety. You can become trapped in a complicated cycle that leaves you in poor health and a state of lessened capacity.
Exercise, to a point, can help you reduce stress. Those lower stress levels then ease some of the drag on testosterone and other hormones that you’ve been experiencing.
On the other hand, too much exercise can increase stress, which in turn reduces the effectiveness of your workouts. Healthy balance is the key to healthy progress.
Better Sleep Patterns
Another point of attack on low energy and motivation is overhauling your sleep patterns.
Serious workouts break down your body. You need to give yourself the best opportunity to recover at night, especially if you are pushing your body to new limits.
When your body gets plenty of quality sleep, it usually increases your testosterone production naturally. You need 7-9 hours of sleep to get the maximum benefit, although even professional opinions vary on the exact amount.
Late nights actually hinder your body’s natural healing and testosterone production. If your snoring has become disruptive, or you are waking up gasping for air, sleep apnea may be a culprit. We can help with this as well by scheduling a quick and easy at-home sleep study and diagnosing obstructive sleep apnea.
(More information about how poor sleep patterns can damage your hormonal health is available here.)
Failure to Progress?—Learn About Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT)
These and other lifestyle adjustments can help your body work to its own advantage rather than working against itself. However, you still may not see the progress you were hoping for.
Don’t throw in the towel. Consider first that your hormonal health might be what’s keeping you from accomplishing your goals.
You may be suffering from chronic low testosterone.
Normalizing your low testosterone levels could help your body prepare the healthy base required to take on a greater exercise load and produce results. Medical research supports TRT as the best way to relieve the debilitating symptoms of Low T.
Our comprehensive guide that provides facts and the answers to the most common questions concerning TRT and the treatment of low testosterone.
