Whether you are male or female, testosterone (T) levels have a large say in dictating your fat burning and muscle building potential.
…Yep, ‘toning’ and ‘slimming down’ are different labels for burning fat and building muscle.
Maintaining balance with other fat burning hormones (insulin and cortisol) is the key to optimum physical conditioning and vitality, but for now, we are going to focus on T.
For many people, it feels as if burning fat and building muscle is an impossible task and there is a magic formula to helping you do so.
Wrong!!
There is no magic formula of a specific ‘diet’ or ‘magical pill’.
If you are seeking the ‘next diet’ or pouring money into supplements in an attempt to change your body …STOP NOW, you’ll save yourself some dollar and your body’s 11 anatomical systems will thank you for it.
Just whist we’re here, I’d like to bring something to your attention, the health and fitness sector is massively crowded with clever manipulating marketing campaigns, unethical and non-holistic approaches by companies (not all) for consumers with little to no dis-regard for empowering clients with knowledge and tools to achieve goals.
Kind of like a government party that promises lots of positive healthy change in the community, but really they’re false promises to get votes, once they get those votes, those promises don’t happen.
Back to the main point, sometimes a plateauing fat loss can be down to one simple reason, your T levels may not be high enough, but that’s ok, you can increase your T levels yourself…….NATURALLY.
Dudes, no, you won’t bulk up and look like a monster…and females, you certainly won’t balloon up and look ‘manly’, by naturally increasing your T levels, it’s a necessary approach to contextually enhance your physical fitness, inside and out.
If you are going to burn body fat and maintain a healthy level of physical and mental fitness, you will have to contextually increase your T levels. Don’t worry, I’m not on about juicing up and getting on the steroids (which is the absolute worst thing to do by the way guys). There are a few simple things that you can do on a daily basis to help you increase your testosterone levels.
- You can do HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training)
- Resistance training (especially multi-joint exercise)
- Optimize nutrition by consuming more zinc, magnesium, vitamin-D and eating more whole foods (fresh meat, oily fish, less processed foods and lots of vegetables).
- Eliminate Alcohol, or at least reduce alcohol intake.
- Get enough sleep (at least 8hrs if possible)
As already mentioned, females produce testosterone, just as males produce the female associated hormone estrogen. It is the balance between these two hormones that really dictates your fat burning potential, of course, in context to gender specifics.
Why?
Because within fat cells there is an enzyme called aromatase which is responsible for the job of transforming small amounts of testosterone into oestrogen, this process is natural and intensifies through ageing and poor lifestyle choices. Generally speaking, the lower the testosterone levels, the lower your fat burning potential, this of course, once again is gender specific, just because females don’t produce as much T as males, it doesn’t mean that females can’t transform..once again it’s relative to gender transformation and unique to body type.
Anywhooo, the protocol for lifestyle change remains the same, it’s really a universal principle.
It is for this reason, that maintaining a lower body composition is far more suitable for body transformation as lower body fat compositions yield individuals with a higher production in testosterone, of course again, in context to gender.
But what if I don’t have a low body fat percentage and I want to transform?
Bluntly put, irrelevant.
It’s a ll about learning universal principles of exercise, nutrition, strategy, applying them to your situational factors, creating momentum, maintaining momentum and staying consistent.