antiantifa
Fuck you.
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2021
- Posts
- 3,194
- Reputation
- 3,875
I see this argument often: There's no point in increasing T levels naturally, you won't gain as many effects as you would if you'd just roid. This seems to be true, especially if you were already at a normal testosterone level before you modified your lifestyle in whatever way to gain maybe 20-30% more testosterone.
Yet this seems very counter-intuitive, after all testosterone receptors are most sensitive at lower levels and diminishing gains occur with every increase in testosterone levels. To understand this issue it's critical to differentiate between system hormones, their action on peripheral tissues and what seems to be mostly limiting that action on the peripheral tissues.
The average testosterone level of a young male is about 600ng/dL, that's about 6000ng/L or about 6 ug/L. A typical male has 6 liters of blood. This comes out to only about 36 ug of testosterone in blood at any time, about 98% of it is bound and 2% is unbound.
Now testosterone being bound isn't specifically a bad thing, testosterone bound to albumin can travel to different areas in the body than unbound testosterone, this has to do with the fact that testosterone is mostly lipid soluble, while proteins like albumin can become soluble in both water and lipids. Albumin doesn't only move testosterone between blood vessels and peripheral tissues, in fact albumin moves a lot of biological substances every-day in and out, it's like a transporter basically.
However, there's only so much albumin in your blood, increasing testosterone levels does not increase albumin levels neither does it increase albumin-bound testosterone levels significantly.
So what happens when you naturally increase T levels? Your SHBG levels increase in parallel instead and the T becomes SHBG-bound. Now SHBG stands of sex-hormone binding globulin and it's verified that SHBG binds to testosterone so strongly that it doesn't allow it to bind as freely to peripheral tissue as it should. Now SHBG is not a bad molecule. It keeps a lot of bad hormones from messing up your whole body, it not only inhibits testosterone but it also inhibits estrogen.
So what's going on here? Okay suppose out of the 600ng/dL of testosterone that an average male has, he has about 3% free, 55% bound to albumin and 40% bound to SHBG, the rest 2% bound to some weird shit. That means about 18ng/dL is free, 330ng/dL is bound to albumin, 240ng/dL is bound to SHBG and 12ng/dL is bound to some other shit.
Now suppose the average male doubles his testosterone, the amount of albumin then stays reasonably the same and there's simply not much space for the new testosterone to attach to the albumin molecule. Now his testosterone profile will look like this: Out of 1200ng/dL of testosterone there will be 36ng/dL free(doubled), 360ng/dL bound to albumin(slight increase relative to all hormones), 24ng/dL bound to weird shit and finally 780ng/dL bound to SHBG(triple increase).
Now let's calculate the bioactive T levels of scenario where you have a normal level of 600ng/dL compared to the second scenario where you double your T levels.
In the first scenario of 600ng/dL you have 18 + 330 of bioactive testosterone which comes out to 348ng/dL of bioactive testosterone.
In the second scenario of 1200ng/dL you have 36 + 360 of bioactive testosterone which comes out to 396ng/dL of bioactive testosterone.
396ng/dL vs 348ng/dL is only a 13% increase even though you doubled the levels! This is why testosteronemaxxing is absolute cope beyond a certain level. This is also why doctors are right and random faggot redditors are wrong, when you hop on hormone therapy there's no need to stay above 1200ng/dL, the benefits are literally almost none compared to 600ng/dL.
Now obviously I pulled these numbers out of my ass, but you get how it works. Basically once you optimize your body, there's simply no realistic way for you to increase bio-T that much. Any actual significant increase in bio-T will automatically signal the brain to signal the testicles to make less T!
So why do steroids work? Because steroids elevate T levels so much your body can't produce enough SHBG, so your free levels increase by hundreds of amounts. This doubles or triples the bio-T.
The funny part is that steroids don't even elevate T that much. The normal production is 6mg/day, the typical steroid dosage comes out to 42/mg day, the normal production doesn't count in it because it will be suppressed.
TL;DR Beyond normal levels, testosteronemaxxing is absolute cope and doesn't provide any physiological benefits.
So, what are some ways to actually increase the effect of T on the body?
There is no way to specifically increase T levels to increase T effects on the body, it's so complex at the micro-level, there's no point in even trying to predict anything.
Instead you should look for substances that increase high T symptoms, these substances might not increase T levels, but through millions of interactions they may somehow increase peripheral T effect. It doesn't matter how, what matters is that they show high T symptoms.
For example: Ashwagandha, the effects of Ashwganadha are described as increased sex drive, increased muscle mass, decreased fat mass and less mental inhib(IDGAF attitude). So Ashwganadha is probably in some way androgenic even if it doesn't increase bio-T levels that much, it doesn't matter how, all that matters is that it probably is.
There's probably millions of substances that are either anti-androgenic or androgenic.
Yet this seems very counter-intuitive, after all testosterone receptors are most sensitive at lower levels and diminishing gains occur with every increase in testosterone levels. To understand this issue it's critical to differentiate between system hormones, their action on peripheral tissues and what seems to be mostly limiting that action on the peripheral tissues.
The average testosterone level of a young male is about 600ng/dL, that's about 6000ng/L or about 6 ug/L. A typical male has 6 liters of blood. This comes out to only about 36 ug of testosterone in blood at any time, about 98% of it is bound and 2% is unbound.
Now testosterone being bound isn't specifically a bad thing, testosterone bound to albumin can travel to different areas in the body than unbound testosterone, this has to do with the fact that testosterone is mostly lipid soluble, while proteins like albumin can become soluble in both water and lipids. Albumin doesn't only move testosterone between blood vessels and peripheral tissues, in fact albumin moves a lot of biological substances every-day in and out, it's like a transporter basically.
However, there's only so much albumin in your blood, increasing testosterone levels does not increase albumin levels neither does it increase albumin-bound testosterone levels significantly.
So what happens when you naturally increase T levels? Your SHBG levels increase in parallel instead and the T becomes SHBG-bound. Now SHBG stands of sex-hormone binding globulin and it's verified that SHBG binds to testosterone so strongly that it doesn't allow it to bind as freely to peripheral tissue as it should. Now SHBG is not a bad molecule. It keeps a lot of bad hormones from messing up your whole body, it not only inhibits testosterone but it also inhibits estrogen.
So what's going on here? Okay suppose out of the 600ng/dL of testosterone that an average male has, he has about 3% free, 55% bound to albumin and 40% bound to SHBG, the rest 2% bound to some weird shit. That means about 18ng/dL is free, 330ng/dL is bound to albumin, 240ng/dL is bound to SHBG and 12ng/dL is bound to some other shit.
Now suppose the average male doubles his testosterone, the amount of albumin then stays reasonably the same and there's simply not much space for the new testosterone to attach to the albumin molecule. Now his testosterone profile will look like this: Out of 1200ng/dL of testosterone there will be 36ng/dL free(doubled), 360ng/dL bound to albumin(slight increase relative to all hormones), 24ng/dL bound to weird shit and finally 780ng/dL bound to SHBG(triple increase).
Now let's calculate the bioactive T levels of scenario where you have a normal level of 600ng/dL compared to the second scenario where you double your T levels.
In the first scenario of 600ng/dL you have 18 + 330 of bioactive testosterone which comes out to 348ng/dL of bioactive testosterone.
In the second scenario of 1200ng/dL you have 36 + 360 of bioactive testosterone which comes out to 396ng/dL of bioactive testosterone.
396ng/dL vs 348ng/dL is only a 13% increase even though you doubled the levels! This is why testosteronemaxxing is absolute cope beyond a certain level. This is also why doctors are right and random faggot redditors are wrong, when you hop on hormone therapy there's no need to stay above 1200ng/dL, the benefits are literally almost none compared to 600ng/dL.
Now obviously I pulled these numbers out of my ass, but you get how it works. Basically once you optimize your body, there's simply no realistic way for you to increase bio-T that much. Any actual significant increase in bio-T will automatically signal the brain to signal the testicles to make less T!
So why do steroids work? Because steroids elevate T levels so much your body can't produce enough SHBG, so your free levels increase by hundreds of amounts. This doubles or triples the bio-T.
The funny part is that steroids don't even elevate T that much. The normal production is 6mg/day, the typical steroid dosage comes out to 42/mg day, the normal production doesn't count in it because it will be suppressed.
TL;DR Beyond normal levels, testosteronemaxxing is absolute cope and doesn't provide any physiological benefits.
So, what are some ways to actually increase the effect of T on the body?
There is no way to specifically increase T levels to increase T effects on the body, it's so complex at the micro-level, there's no point in even trying to predict anything.
Instead you should look for substances that increase high T symptoms, these substances might not increase T levels, but through millions of interactions they may somehow increase peripheral T effect. It doesn't matter how, what matters is that they show high T symptoms.
For example: Ashwagandha, the effects of Ashwganadha are described as increased sex drive, increased muscle mass, decreased fat mass and less mental inhib(IDGAF attitude). So Ashwganadha is probably in some way androgenic even if it doesn't increase bio-T levels that much, it doesn't matter how, all that matters is that it probably is.
There's probably millions of substances that are either anti-androgenic or androgenic.
