Delicious
Digg
Google
YahooTestosterone is one of your main life hormones. It helps increase your lean muscle which boosts your metabolism helping you lose fat, increase your energy, and look and feel younger.
Remember, aging is inevitable, but looking and feeling old is optional.
Resistance exercise is essential to increase testosterone levels. Any type of strength training is going to increase your testosterone levels. But, high intensity resistance exercise is going to increase your testosterone levels 127% more than low intensity training. This means you need to ditch the light weights and high reps, and switch to heavier weights with fewer reps.
You also want to skip concentration exercises that only focus on one muscle group at a time, because the most effective promoters of testosterone production are compound exercises utilizing multiple muscle groups. Examples of this include: squats, overhead presses, dead lifts, pull ups, push ups, and other Olympic style lifts.
You also want to decrease your rest time in between the exercises. This has been shown to not only increase testosterone, but growth hormone as well. The more testosterone and growth hormone you're producing the more muscle you will build, the higher you will boost your metabolism, and the more fat you will lose.
Quick Strength Training Circuit:
Superset 1:
DB Squat (8 reps)
no rest
DB Flat Press (8 reps)
Rest 30 seconds to 1 minute and repeat 2 more times.
Super Set 2:
Russian Deal Lift (8 reps)
No rest
DB Bent Row (8 Reps)
Rest 30 seconds to 1 minute and repeat 2 more times.
Here is a video resource to help you increase testosterone and other hormones.
Interval exercise is the most efficient form of cardio to boost testosterone. This is partly due to testosterone's relationship with cortisol.
Cortisol is a catabolic hormone which means that it helps break down tissue, mainly muscle tissue. In the optimum situation cortisol breaks down the muscle tissue, then the testosterone and growth hormone comes in and repairs the cells.
But, the longer the duration of your workout the more cortisol will be produced, without increasing your testosterone, often lowing it. This skewed ratio makes it nearly impossible to repair the muscle tissues that you are breaking down during your workout.
If you don't continue to repair the muscle you are going to decrease your muscle mass, which will actually lower your metabolic rate. Which, of course, no one wants.
To complete testosterone producing intervals you want to exercise at a high intensity (9/10 intensity) for a period of time, and then recover (3/10 intensity) for another period of time, then repeat up to 6 times.
Interval Examples:
Treadmill - 1 minute sprinting, 2 minutes walking, repeat for 6 total reps.
Bike - 45 seconds sprinting, 60 seconds slow pace recovery, repeat for 6 total reps.
