TRANSCRIPT:
- Hi, I'm Sage. Welcome back to the Addictive Wellness channel. Today we're gonna talk about the best natural ways to improve testosterone levels. And these are ways that are not just gonna benefit your testosterone at the detriment of other areas of your health, this is a very well-rounded, holistic approach to this that's gonna give you testosterone results and radiant health in all other directions as well.
Now the first few things I'm gonna talk about are the real basics, the foundational stuff. And don't tune out just 'cause you may already be aware of these, there's some other fancier lesser known stuff that we're gonna get into in just a minute. But I wanna start with the basics because if your foundation is not right, there's no point in getting to the things that are more expensive and more advanced, or fancier, you always want to make sure that the foundation is there before you start building the testosterone house.
Now the first thing is sleep. Sleep is so essential for every single area of your health. From mental health, to physical health, to recovery, to hormones, everything requires healthy sleep. So you really wanna be aiming for six to eight hours a night of solid sleep. You know, ideally, seven to nine is really gonna be more optimal but six to eight, minimum. And then you wanna make sure out of that it's great to have some method of tracking your sleep you wanna go for somewhere between an hour and a half to two hours each of REM sleep and deep sleep, because they both have very important benefits and you don't wanna just be getting one and not the other. You wanna watch out for things that are gonna impair your ability to achieve those various states of sleep. You can go in the description, I'll link to a whole video all about optimizing sleep health.
But the reason why this is specifically important for testosterone, is that when they looked at people who slept seven to nine hours a night, and they looked at a second group of people who slept less than seven to nine hours a night, on average the group that slept less, had the testosterone, on average, of a 10-year-older male. So, if you're 45, but you don't sleep enough, you have a testosterone levels of a 55 year old who does sleep enough. So if you wanna maintain healthy testosterone as you age and having testosterone that you would have had, you know, 10 years ago, sleep is gonna be key.
And sleep also plays a role in the next key factor, here, which is minimizing stress. If your body is in fight or flight all the time and it's not able to focus on, you know, the long-term, it's just focused on immediate survival, you're producing these fight or flight hormones. Things like cortisol, and epinephrine, and norepinephrine, and your endocrine system on an evolutionary basis because it's focused on making you survive this immediate situation, surviving, you know, fighting this tiger or this bear, or, you know, this other caveman who's trying to steal your mate, your endocrine system is gonna prioritize production of these fight or flight hormones. Above the production of hormones, they in turn ensure longterm health like testosterone. So, if you're just making those, you're not producing testosterone. And that's why longterm, if you're stressed all the time, your testosterone levels are gonna drop.
And so if you can drop that stress, and getting the right sleep is one way to do this, right? And, you know, I'm never gonna tell you, "Hey, you need to stop stressing," because that's not helpful, I'm trying to give functional solutions here. So getting good sleep is gonna help you have a great stress buffer. You can also look at herbs like reishi and He Shou Wu, even things like Siberian ginseng, is great here, and ashwagandha. And ashwagandha, we're gonna get back to in a second because that's even very directly helpful with testosterone. These are gonna help build a stress buffer. And then also supplements like magnesium or magnesium glycinate, is one form, magnesium L-threonate is another form that's especially helpful for stress. And then also things like L-theanine, an extract from green tea, very good at decreasing stress. CBD, ideally in a nanoemulsified form, that's gonna be very bioavailable and reach your blood quickly. And then also maintain high levels in your blood for longer. So you wanna get it nanoemulsified, because CBD is notoriously poorly bioavailable.
And then, you know, going on from stress, what's another important lifestyle thing is Vitamin D levels. Now, this, if you're spending a lot of time out in the sun with bare skin, great, you may already have healthy Vitamin D, somewhere above 60, is your Vitamin D score. But maybe not. For some people, especially if you have darker skin, you need more time out in the sun to produce it. Now, there's no shame in taking Vitamin D3 as a supplement. In fact, it's one of the most affordable supplements you can take, and it has such a huge impact on many areas of your health, including testosterone levels. In fact studies have shown that just taking Vitamin D3, you take your Vitamin D into a healthy level, alone, not making any other changes to diet, lifestyle, supplementation, just that, you can increase testosterone by up to 20%, which is amazing.
Now, with D3 it's gonna support all your other hormones as well, it's gonna have great longevity impact, and you always wanna make sure you're taking D3 with Vitamin K2, because when you have D3 coming in, it's gonna influence the way your body works with calcium and there's gonna be more calcium flowing throughout your body. And this can be good, but it can be bad. If it's not taken care of properly, if it's not sent to the correct places in your body you can get calcium where you don't want it. For example, in your heart, you don't want atherosclerosis and you don't want atherosclerotic plaque. Where do you want calcium? In your bones. And when you take K2, that provides your body with the signal to send all this extra calcium to your bones, so naturally you're gonna have great bone health also, from getting your Vitamin D levels in a healthier place, as long as you're taking the K2 with it. Most good Vitamin D supplements will be a combination of D3 and K2. But if you're taking one that's just D3 on its own make sure you get K2 separately. And you wanna look for a Vitamin K2 in the MK-7 form. That's the best way to take it.
Now, another lifestyle thing is how you're training. Now you wanna avoid over training. You know, going super hard every single day your nervous system, and your endocrine system are not gonna be able to handle that on a longterm basis. And also, long endurance exercise, on a regular basis, not really good for testosterone either. So, instead of going for long endurance stuff go look at more high intensity interval training, short term bursts, doing sprints, these are all good for building healthy hormones including testosterone. And also, make sure you're really working your legs. These bigger muscle groups have a much bigger impact on testosterone than upper body muscles.
So they did a study where they had a group of young, healthy men. One group was only working out in the upper body, the other group was doing both lower body and upper body. The upper body alone group didn't see any significant changes in testosterone, but the group that was training full body, lower body and upper body, did see a noticeable testosterone increase in their lab results. So definitely don't skip out on training your legs, do the lunges, do the squats, do the press, it's all gonna be really helpful in the testosterone department.
Now, okay, that's the basic lifestyle stuff, right? Now we're gonna get a little more wild and exotic. So, here we're gonna look at the effect that light has on your testosterone. And not light just anywhere, we're not talking about light in your eye, we're not talking about light in your face, we're talking about light on your balls, light on the testicles. Now, they've shown in studies that you have, in your testicles, these light receptors, four receptors called opsin proteins. And these respond to different light exposure and depends what kind of wavelengths you hit them with. And the best thing to do is expose your testicles to red light. There's all kinds of great high-powered red LED devices that you can get. And you can even get small ones, you can get big ones that will cover more areas of your body which is great for your mitochondrial health, great in many ways. But for this specific purpose, all you've gotta do is get it on the testicles. And you can do this for 10 to 20 minutes a day at a distance, ideally, of six to eight inches away, using a device that has an irradiance rating of near or over 100, 'cause you wanna make sure it's strong enough. You know, you don't wanna go through all the spending the money and the trouble of doing this everyday, it turns out the device you're using is not strong enough. And if you don't have a device, or can't get one, or it's not in the budget right now, you can actually get some similar benefits from the sun. So, if you can find a way to get your balls out in the sunlight for 20 to 30 minutes a day, you can get the benefits that way as well, in terms of increasing testosterone.
Now let's go into the world of herbs. This is one of my favorite areas to look at. And there's some incredible tools here that we can look at coming from ancient cultures, that have been used for thousands of years. And one of my favorites that I mentioned quickly earlier is ashwagandha. So this is an herb that's probably one of the greatest adaptogens meaning it increases your body's ability to withstand all forms of external stress. Now, here with ashwagandha, it's helping in the stress category, right? Because the more stress we have, the more challenged your testosterone's gonna be. But it's also working more directly. So they did a study where they took 57 healthy men and these were ranging between age 18 and 64, and they gave them actually a pretty small dose, just 650 milligrams a day. And they did this for eight weeks. And what they found at the end, it was on average, an 18.7% increase in testosterone levels. And, as a side benefit, they also found improved muscle recovery and improved fat loss. So, ashwagandha is a great herb in this department.
Another one of my favorites is Cordyceps. Now Cordyceps is very popular amongst athletes because it improves oxygenation, so it's good for energy and endurance. But in here it's also, it's shown, not in human studies yet, it hasn't been studied in humans for testosterone, but in animal studies we can look at, you can kinda get an idea, it was shown to significantly increase plasma levels of testosterone.
Now, going more out of the herb category into the supplement category, it's good to look at two things. DIM, diindolylmethane, and CDG, Calcium D-Glucarate. Because, when we're dealing with hormones, they have to land in a hormone receptor to be essentially active, and create a biological impact. The hormone receptor situation is like a game of musical chairs. You've got lots of different hormones all competing for the seats. You've got testosterone, you've got estradiol, you've got estriol, you've got estrone, you have 16 alpha-hydroxy estrone. You have all these different things. You know, you have DHEA, so many different hormones competing for a seat for the table to actually have an impact on your biology. Now, if there's lots of estrogens circulating in your system you could be in trouble, because these are gonna take up the seats and testosterone is not gonna get its proper amount of seats at the table. So, where are the estrogens coming from? Well, drinking out of plastic water bottles, is one. Plastic has BPA in it, Bisphenol A, which leeches out into the water, and then you're consuming that. It's what's called a Xenoestrogen. It's a chemical estrogen mimic. It looks very much like estrogen, and can fit into these same hormone receptors. And then you could also be getting dietary estrogens from things like flaxseeds, or things like soy, which is of course so commonly used. You can be exposed to pesticides, or colognes, for example, that have compounds in them, that have Xenoestrogens. And the colognes is the most ironic thing, right? Because you put on a cologne to smell nice, to be sexier, to, you know, end up having a great romantic experience, but it's actually containing compounds in it that are then decrease testosterone levels that are gonna increase estrogen level, and just overall have a counter-productive effect long term. So, CDG and DIM are able to decrease estrogen production in the body. And then they're able to effectively detoxify estrogens that are currently in the system. So that is a great one, two punch combination. So from a DIM, diindoylmethane, and CDG, Calcium D-Glucarate.
So up to this point in the video we've looked at things that have a very direct impact on testosterone. We haven't gone, necessarily, into the sexual performance department, but just looking at testosterone. So, there's a whole other set of herbs that have maybe an indirect impact on testosterone through their supportive effects on sexual performance, but don't necessarily impact testosterone so directly or at the very least have not been yet studied for that by modern science. These, for example, are things like Tribulus, and Tongkat Ali, black ginger, beets, even, are definitely in this department. And there's an herb called Cistanche which was the favorite herb of Genghis Khan who you may know as the guy who has fathered more children than any man in living history. Morinda is another herb, not Moringa with a G, but Morinda with a D. And Polyrhachis, is another very powerful one.
Now, if you guys would love to see a video more about these in terms of sexual performance enhancing herbs let us know in the comments, and we'll be sure to do that in the future. So if you guys enjoyed this, please give us a like. Thanks so much for joining us today, enjoy these herbs, and watch those testosterone levels rise, and wishing you all the best. See you again soon.