Episode 8 - The Hormone Hierarchy: What to Fix Before TRT/HRT

Business athletes, what is going on? Episode number eight coming at you and today we are talking all about hormone systems and hormone optimization and this isn't just not hormone replacement therapy. This is hormone optimization across the board. This is what are all the levers, what are all the variables that you need to know, male or female, that will help you optimize your hormonal situation. First of all, let me preface this by saying that hormones do a lot more than most people think. That's not just relating to muscle mass, you know a lot of people think of hormones, they think of testosterone, they think of steroids, they think of big bodybuilders. There is so many other things that hormones will have an influence on in the body, male or female, think of different types of hormonal systems as a series of communication channels. And what you'll find is that if you feel like you're quote unquote putting in the work but your body didn't get the memo, this is often part of it why. When I say you put it in the work but your body didn't get the memo, what I mean is you might be trying things that you did when you were 20 or 25 and your body just doesn't respond like it used to. I find this is particularly relevant for women that are or have going through menopause where you're doing the cardio or you're doing the dieting and you're sticking to the calories and you're trying to do the right things. And it seems like the body is just not responding, you are not broken and we will solve so many of these challenges for you. I've had a massive number of people come to me in over the last few years with these issues that either were borderline infertile and they were having real hard time conceiving men and women or they were going through really challenging menopause or changes and it was making them feel terrible or just for the guys under the pressure and stress of building a legacy and building a brand and your body is breaking down. How do you manage that? And what I want you to tell you is that hormone systems affect everything from females, your monthly cycle. So the severity of your menstrual cycle in terms of bloating, cramping, water retention, the heaviness of the bleeding, all of these different things, it will affect everything from libido, it will affect your mood, it has a big effect on your mood for males and females, it has a big effect on your drive. So what you'll often find, especially for the guys that if your testosterone is low, you will feel like you don't have much drive, grit, determination, effort, output. That's a real thing by the way, they've studied this, testosterone affects drive and output. So if you have big aspirational goals and you just feel like you cannot get motivated and you cannot get going, part of it's probably hormonal, sure there's going to be other components to this and we can solve those in the other podcast episodes or you can jump into my business athlete council, group of my anomaly project course and get some help, right, I would highly suggest that, but we can solve these challenges. So today I want to talk predominantly about total and free testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin or SHBG, estradiol, estrogen, luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormone, which are in a way fertility hormones and precursors to some of the others. I also want to touch on DHEA and pregnant alone and a little bit on IGF1 but we won't be talking about thyroid and cortisol and adrenals and things like that today. I want to do a separate podcast on some of those so that way we can dive deeper because I think if I fire who's with too much information, you just won't retain much of it at all. So when it comes to hormonal situations, what I would tell you first and foremost is you've got to get your blood work run. This is why I'm such an advocate of getting regular blood panels done. You cannot just rely on your primary care physician by the way. Please don't just rely on them. If you try to just go through insurance, it's like pulling teeth, unless you have a very proactive forward thinking functional medical doctor on your team. It's often like pulling teeth. They run the bare bones with the insurance they've got, half of the stuff that you want to missing. If you want to understand why, go back and listen to, I think it was episode three on blood work. I talk all about how most physicians will run 20 or 30 markers out of 200. And how are you meant to assess what's happening in your physiology when you have 150 markers missing? It doesn't make any sense to me at all. It's literally just because it's difficult to run these things through insurance. So they don't. So pay out a pocket if you have to. Go to function health, for example, and then I can do an analysis on it in the Business Athlete Council. But I say this because when you get your blood work run, you know your data. You know your numbers. The first thing that I'll tell you is remember, just because something is in a normal range, doesn't mean it's optimal. I cannot tell you the amount of times that people say to me, oh, my so and so markers normal. And I'm like, yeah, but do you want to just be normal? That's kind of an embarrassing thing to say to be honest. I don't want to be normal. I want to be, well, what does it show me what's superb, it's show me what truly optimal looks like. Right. So there's a big difference. And obviously you don't know this, but you don't get told these things. And so it's you have to be proactive. And so the first thing that I'll say is just because everything's normal, doesn't mean it's optimal. A good example is testosterone. You know the range is anywhere from about 250 through to a thousand. You might be 350 or 400 and feel like garbage. And the doctor will say you're normal. That to me is not ideal at all. Like that's not where you want to be if you want to be an A player. You want to be up around 800 to 900 total. And you're going to play that logic to every single hormone system in the body. Just because something is in a normal range, there's probably, there is a Goldilocks zone for each one. And my role part of what I do is I help people get into those Goldilocks zones. That's where you'll have a better, some more stable mood. You'll notice your anxiety decreases. Your energy levels will be way more balanced through the day. You won't get so many mood swings and energy swings. You'll notice that you don't get as many cravings, which means it's easier to stick to a good dietary protocol. You'll notice that your body just starts to respond better to the stimulus. So the walking and the cardio and the training, you build muscle easier. You lose fat easier. It's not like trying to push a boulder up a hill. Part of why you feel like you're struggling is because physiologically your hormones are de-optimizing your ability to optimize your body composition. That's a real thing. You are fighting an uphill battle, but there are things that you can do, like many things by the way. So let's dive into this. First of all, understand that testosterone or estrogen, it's not just a number on a screen. It's, like I said, it's going to affect energy availability, sleep, stress load. You'll just stress tolerance. I find people that have lower levels of hormonal output. They don't tolerate stress as well. They burn out faster. You hit that burnout point from that accumulative stress response way faster. So I've found, for me, by optimizing these things, I can handle a lot of stuff. That's why I push like I do, because I've really fine-tuned my engine, so I can get up at two or three a.m. every day and go all the way through it all the time and not stop at all and not crash and do it because I love it and feel like I'm genuinely in a good mood where I'm not running on caffeine and I'm not running on anxiety. I'm running on just like motivation and clarity. I genuinely mean that and I absolutely think that we can create that outcome for you because I've seen it with my other students. Now, what you're going to find is that there are different things in the body that can exacerbate hormonal situations for people. Obviously for the ladies, if you're running into menopause, if you're perimenopause or going through it or gone through it, that will have a big impact. Postpartum, so after childbirth, especially if you're breastfeeding, that's another one. My wife, Lauren, right now is breastfeeding and she's seven months postpartum. There's a lot of hormonal changes that happened during this time. So part of it is you have to be gentle with yourself and you have to show yourself a sense of loving compassion during a time where you are going to be strained and you are going to be much more stressed with sleep cycles and just navigating life with a little baby, right? Same for the guy though, it's the same thing. I mean, I remember when our daughter's dear was first born seven years ago. I barely survived, I mean, she would wake up between five and fifteen times a night and I just remember really, really struggling. And so the sleep is a big component, sleep is a big component and so there's things that relate to sleep and sleep apnea as it relates to sex hormone profile. So we can touch on that. Even over training and/or under eating and/or over eating with a lot of inflammatory foods. So if you're stress eating and you're eating a bunch of processed crap, that will have a negative effect on your hormonal output. Remember, food is like software and your body and mind are the hardware. Equally, some people almost like under, under eat when they're stressed. My wife, Laurence, she's like that. She'll typically under eat when she's stressed. That's not good. When you are too low in calories, like a lot of people, they'll diet down so aggressively. They don't even have enough energetic substrate to create hormonal output. Think about this. The last thing your body, your physiology is going to want to do is to help keep you fertile and procreate if you're dying. Like if you don't even have enough energy to sustain your body weight and function well, it will de-optimize fertility first because it just realizes that it needs to keep the organism alive. Now I would say some people who are very aggressive with like a 75-hard challenge can almost run into this issue where you're so chronically dieted and your metabolism is so down-regulated that not only you're not really losing any fat but you feel exhausted and you're just running on caffeine and stimulants, that's not ideal. So under eating can play a big effect, especially for the ladies. Now, overtraining, so what I find is this is again very common with 75-hard, too much intensity, too much volume. As you age, you cannot do such barbaric workouts like you used to. You need to be way more intentional. Why do you think I just get people to add in a lot of walking? Because walking is actually good on the nervous system. It's actually a recovery mechanism, high-intensity interval training, a bunch of crossfit and kettlebell swings and like burst on an air bike going all out, that's very stressful on your nervous system. You throw in some cold plungers, you just add more stress. Now your nervous system is so strained, it's just going to become unresponsive. You need to find that sweet spot of just enough stimulus but also ample recovery. So when I train, I do probably two good working sets per exercise, not three, not five, two. Very high quality ones, and then I spend a lot of time walking, that therapeutic recovery tool is a big lever to pull in terms of energy stability, insulin sensitivity, improving digestion. So walking and quality resistance training using large muscle groups, ideally two plus times per week per muscle group. So legs twice, back twice for example, so I structure all my training in the normally project course and in the Business Athlete Council with those fundamentals in mind. I would even tell you just chronic mental stress. Some of you guys are very manic. I find a lot of business owners and a lot of business entrepreneurs and high achievers and ambitious people, they're pretty manic. They run on mania, they're quite OCD and they're quite manic, and that combination is, and you know that this is you, because typically you'll see sleep disruption and you'll typically see digestive issues. When you get those things, it's because you're being too manic. You need to learn how to calm down your state. You need to learn how to breathe, you need to learn how to calm down your central nervous system, because if you don't you're just going to continue to get a negative output response. So there's obviously a whole discussion around calming of nervous system and psychology, which I'm going to do podcast episodes on this, but I just wanted to kind of frame up some of the drivers as to why would you be seeing negative changes. Some of the other things are like environmental exposures. So this is especially relates to fertility. What I have found is that chemicals in your environment, so pollutants, cosmetics, laundry soaps, dish soaps, kitchen countertop cleaners, deodorants, colognes, shaving creams, moisturizers. You want to start working on cleaning all of those things up, because all of those things remember, what does someone do when they want to stop smoking? They use a nicotine patch. They put a patch on their skin, and the nicotine absorbs through the dermal layer of their skin. Your skin is a giant absorption site. So colognes, aluminum based deodorants, all that stuff is garbage. You want to make sure you're not using tired pods, for example. There's chlorox wipes, tired pods, dorn dish soap, all that stuff's got to go. You've got to find healthier, clean, basic alternatives for those things. And again, I talk about those things in the Business Athlete Council, because it's a really important part of the equation. Now, the thing outside of getting blood work run, I would say is very important. And by the way, when you get your blood work run, you must get total and free testosterone checked. Total isn't as important as you think. What is important is you're free. And what dictates your free testosterone is sex hormone binding globulin. So SHBG, sex hormone binding, it literally binds up sex hormones. One of, there's a couple of reasons why sex hormone binding globulin can be elevated. So I'll just give you a couple here now. But one of them is an accumulative stress response. So someone that's not getting enough recovery protocols in and they're stressing their system out from multiple angles. Increased stress drives up SHBG. Now that's where I say instead of doing high intensity cardio, do some walking, focus on some breath work, really work on optimizing your sleep, focus on being more intentional with your training, like higher quality reps, less volume. There's a lot of different levers to pull, but I would say those are some key ones I focus on. But another thing that can be useful is boron supplementation. So boron, low levels of boron can affect the dry up SHBG. So if you take a little bit of boron, 10 milligrams of boron daily, that can pull down the SHBG level and potentially liberate more of that total testosterone, making more of it bioavailable. So that's one of the first things I wanted to mention. So boron, and it kind of ties into what I was going to mention with minerals and nutrient foundations. So outside of getting your blood work run, what I would suggest that you do is get an app like my fitness power or chronometer and run, count your calories, track all your food for five days, three to five days, and get an average of all your different vitamins and minerals over that five day period. So on average, how much magnesium were you getting? On average, how much zinc? On average, how much selenium? Where was your vitamin D? Where was your boron at? Where was all these different markers at? No where you need to be. Because what you'll find is that, for example, and like I've said, food is like software and your body and mind are the hardware. So different foods will elicit different chemical responses in the body that act like chemical precursors. So you want to go to chat GPT and plug in and say, give me the top 10 list of healthiest foods, higher magnesium. Give me the top 10 list of healthiest foods, high end zinc, high end selenium, high end boron, and then incorporate some of those foods into your calorie intake and make it fit. For example, what I'll do with boron is prunes, a high end boron. I will often get people to do post-workout prunes or a bit of prune juice during a workout. That also doubles as a glycogen replacement. Looking rather than doing dextrose powder or something sugary, you're using the prune juice or whole prunes to replace glycogen to help with performance and you're getting boron from it. See, this is the key. You want to address multiple levers at once. That's where I do a really, really good job because I prioritize this stuff. You see, some people will use dextrose powder, some bodybuilders. Basically, refined corn sugar. It works well in terms of giving you sugar for your muscle glycogen, but it's super inflammatory and that's all it does. There's no boron and dextrose, so why not use something that has a better ROI, a more bang for buck? So use prunes instead of just gatorade, blend up some drinks and prune juice instead of gatorade, you're going to get the sugar, but you also get other aspects of it too. If you apply that logic to everything you do where you're trying to check off three or four targets off each list, that's how you truly optimize and become a business athlete. That's how I'm able to go all day for as long as I do, look the way I do without counting calories and function this way. I promise you, this is a repeatable process. If you listen to what I'm saying and you follow my lead, it will pay off. So remember, like I said, I rattle off some of those vitamins and minerals. Other things that are often important to think about is your sodium intake and potassium, as well as omega-3 based fats that can help with stimulating cholesterol production. Cholesterol is essentially like the governing molecule that everything else is produced from. So that's also why I do a double dose of omega-3s every day. I do clean machine ahifiao omega-3s personally, but a good quality omega-3, and ideally if you really want to perform well, a double dose. And what you'll find is that higher amount of omega-3s has a very good anti-inflammatory effect. It's very good on hard health and brain health, but it helps with cholesterol production HDL, which in turn helps bring down APOB, which is your small particle LL, which is not good, which is very commonly high, especially in a lot of people that do like a carnivore-based diet, or a very heavy keto-based diet, their APOB is high. That's not good. It doesn't matter what these people say, that level, it's not good. So you want to make sure you get your APOB down. And remember, like I said, just because something is normal doesn't mean it's optimal either. So I typically want to see that number below about 70, when most people are above 100. So again, omega-3s can help with that. Now I would say in general, outside of tracking for a few days and looking at your vitamins and minerals, and by the way, if you are trying to figure out all the other details, you just go to chat GBT and plug in what are the chemical, what are the vitamins and minerals that help with DHA production? What are the vitamins and minerals that help with estrogen production? It might say, it might give you a list of different things. And then you can say, now give me the top 10 list of foods that are high in those things, and then you add them in. See, this is where your body in many ways is like a puzzle that you can solve. You know, for example, if estrogen in minus 2 high, you can use dim, where is the supplement, or it's found in cruciferous vegetables to help as an estrogen metaboliser. So I find a lot of men, when they're on testosterone replacement therapy, we get given a nastrozole, which is an aromatase inhibitor. It's not good. It's like a women's breast cancer drug, and over time it causes bone mineral loss, it lowers HDL cholesterol, and when you crash estrogen, estrogen is cardiovascular protective. That's why a lot of women, once they go through menopause, they start to get high. It's hard issues, because they lose that cardiovascular protection, unless they dial in their hormones via hormone replacement therapy, or bioregulator peptides, or the right supplementation, or all of the above. So you can see here how it's not just testosterone, and all the different hormones have key roles. Now I won't go into a ton of depth on each situation, because there's so many variables we could go down. So that's why obviously getting in my rotation, getting in my business athlete council will be the smartest thing you can do, because I can help you specifically with your situation. But typically what you'll find with women, as they go through menopause, is everything just starts to deplete. Estrogen goes down, testosterone goes down, progesterone goes down, and as you drain out all these hormone supplies, that's when you notice, like your skin starts to thin out, you lose collagen production, you notice your mood starts to go down, you notice that you start getting a lot of cravings, your hair might start to thin out, and you just don't feel very good, right? You lose your libido, you don't feel good. That can be optimized. So the first thing that I would say is, always trying to optimize via food, so trying the best you can to add in foods that help with those precursors. What foods help with estrogen? What foods help with progesterone? Add those in. Add that GPT, or reach out to me if you want. Seed cycling is a good example of something that's not really founded in science, per se, but the principle remains, where if you go to such seed cycling for female hormones, the whole principle behind it is, each week there's different seeds you can add into your rotation that will help with a different aspect of your monthly cycle, from a chemical level. Now I've tested this on women, and it's hard to say if it works or not, but put it this way, it's not going to do any harm, it's not going to be a bad thing. I always tell people with food, you really can't go wrong when you're adding in a lot of whole foods, so why not try it? Why not just try? I would be adding in more cruciferous vegetables, and if someone has issues with their gut, lots of broccoli microgreens, kale microgreens, because kale and broccoli are cruciferous vegetables, so you'll never see me eat a cup of broccoli, I'll eat a cup of microgreens, so now I'm getting three times as many vitamins and minerals in the same cup in the same calories. Most people don't think this way, and it's why they die down for a competition or a challenge, and they don't even get in great shape and they still don't feel that good, and they can't even sustain it, because they don't know how to optimize the nutrient input, microgreens are another way to optimize that nutrient input. Now I would say for the ladies, there are different things like bioregulator peptides, so bioregulator peptides help with, there are almost like adaptogens for different types of organ systems in the body, so they help optimize ovarian output. There is a combination of bioregulators that you can get that will help optimize all the different aspects of female physiology that will help with ovarian function. You can even use peptides like kispeptin, so kispeptin for example, is a peptide that helps stimulate LHNFSH through the hypothalamus in the pituitary. So basically think about like this, your pituitary gets a signal from LHNFSH to produce testosterone, and that's also why for the men, using something like inclomerphine citrate, can be a good intermediary step if they don't want to use testosterone. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a second, because it's going to be a topic people want to know about. But I say this because there are bioregulator peptides that women can use for hormone situations, I would be telling you, do not use birth control whatsoever, I'd be telling you to clean up the environmental and chemical exposures in your diet. I would be telling you to make sure you get enough calories and you're adding in a lot of omega-3s and monoinsaturated fats, keeping your saturated fat a bit lower, but monoinsaturated high, which is like avocado, olives, good quality olive oil, hymseed, that type of stuff. Now I would be saying kispeptin is a good tool you can play with. And I would be telling you to stop doing any high intensity interval training, take slightly longer rest periods with your weightlifting. So add in weightlifting with longer rest periods and walking. Don't hit cold plunges, you can do soreners, but more stress on your system from cold plunges and high intensity stuff is going to stress your system more and it's going to shut down your system even more. And if you've been dieting down a bunch and your body is just unresponsive, you may need to do a small reverse diet or some type of refeed protocol to restimulate your basal metabolic rate because you've probably got so much downregulation. So basically like having a day or a week where you're pushing more calories into basically send the signal to your brain that hey we have enough food to survive, turn on the metabolism again and start producing hormones again because that's a big part of it guys. That's a big part. Now when it comes to hormones in men, what you'll find is that the first thing I would always tell you, so let me say a drink, like a frog in my throat, the first thing I would tell you is always get the blood work done first, assess the vitamins in minerals via chronometer or my fitness pal and then look at optimizing all the different organ systems too. So you want to look at your liver enzymes and liver clearance because liver plays a role. You guys want to look at your optimizing your gut health. I'm going to do a podcast on gut health because we are just what we eat, what we absorb. And so if you have gut issues, you can add in a lot of these foods but if you're not absorbing all the nutrients, there's a broken link in the chain, right? So it's very important that you optimize gut health in conjunction with this. And I've really worked on this over the years because I had a lot of issues with my gut early on that I really had to troubleshoot. But the first thing is that I would say once you've addressed it with minerals and there are herbal supplements like Tomcat Ali, Fadogia Agrestis, Ashwagandha and Shilajit. I find generally Shilajit and Tomcat Ali are probably the better ones. Ashwagandha seems to be more geared around cortisol management. Fadogia Agrest is sort of a hit and miss but then obviously coupling it with all those minerals that I talked about and making sure that you get your vitamin D levels up. So a good quality vitamin D3 plus K2 because vitamin D is a precursor for testosterone. And if that's low, not ideal, and remember like I've said, normal doesn't equal optimal. And so if you're like, the range is about 33 to 100, if you're 40 or 50, that's not ideal. You need to be up around 80. So we need to make sure we refine that and a good D3 plus K2 because K2 is a synergist to help with absorption, very, very important. But outside of that, there are, outside of this herbal supplements, you obviously want to work on sleep because sleep apnea and broken sleep low levels are deep and ram, will have an effect. So I'm going to do a whole episode on sleep. But I would also say training and making sure that you train big muscle groups two times a week because the bigger the muscle groups, the bigger the anabolic and metabolic response. I'd be saying do focus on quality work, not just a ton of volume, focus on low intensity step count rather than lots of high intensity work, men can do some high intensity stuff. You know a little bit, but again, it's going to be different for each person based on their recovery, their HIV, their resting heart rate, their strain scores, that all varies. But outside of that, there are again bioregulator peptides that can help with male hormone optimization systems. And remember, I've talked about peptides in another podcast, the episode five. And bioregulators are a subset of peptides, their smaller chains of amino acids. And I really like them, I think they're very useful and they're not very widely known. Most average fitness pros out there on Instagram don't even know bioregulators exist. And they target specific organ systems. So you can literally get a bioregulator that targets that you're retina in your eyes. You can get one that targets your pancreas for insulin sensitivity. You can get one that targets your kidneys, your vascular system, and your heart. So I often will run bioregulators for heart, vascular system, and brain. Because those are the key areas that you must look after as you age. So I almost think of it like an insurance policy. I'm running it preventatively, prophylactically. So I'm don't have issues, but I'm doing it to avoid it. Big and big important note, be proactive with your health guys. You've got to play an offensive game, business athletes play an offensive game period. They don't wait till things are breaking. And if they are breaking, they get them addressed. They do not just let you like stumble through life haphazardly. So what I would say is kiss peptim can also help with male hormones, but there are a set of male bioregulators that you can get as well. If you want more information on that reach out to me because I don't want to go into too much on that. And obviously this is not medical advice, this is me just sharing what I know of my education, that type of thing. I'm going to put that in there. But if you were to use different types of peptides and bioregulators and/or some Tonkata Lee, and you see positive changes, great, awesome, stick with that, it's working. If you don't see the changes that you want, you may benefit from some inclomerphine citrate, which is like an intermediary option. What it does, the good thing about inclomerphine citrate is it can help with fertility optimization. So a lot of my guys that have come to me that were having issues conceiving with their wife. This can help with fertility, because it boosts FSH and LH, lutinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone. And those are precursors to testosterone. So I would say that's an intermediary approach. Now sometimes that will work well, but you still may not necessarily feel the best you could. This is where I would say testosterone replacement therapy for men and/or hormone replacement therapy for women, including estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. When done correctly, can be a very useful tool. There is stigma around this and there's a lot of misinformation. I've had people say it's bad, it's steroids, you can have a heart attack, all these things. It's very, very ignorant because it's all dependent on the dosing ranges. If you can get someone into a physiological goalie-locked zone with all the different hormone levels, they will be the most optimal. They'll be better than someone that's quite natural with suboptimal levels within the normal ranges. Period. Hands down. But you will run into issues if you do the wrong thing and you get into super physiological ranges. That's when you notice increases in hemoglobin and hematocrit. That's when you notice an increase in blood pressure. That's when you can see cardiac hypertrophy or other issues. But that only happens with irresponsible protocols. It does not happen when you do it well. This principle, you can apply to almost anything. I say this because I've had so many people come to me where I've been doing this for years and I have refined and fine to my processes because I took a bunch of psychiatric medications in my teens that completely destroyed my pituitary system. My luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormone were wrecked. I'm actually surprised I was able to have children. I think it's just because everything else that I do is so diligent, but for the grace of God I was able to have kids because it was very close, but all my levels in my system were not good and I'd done a bunch of research and connected those dots. But I've done a well dialed in TRT protocol over a number of years and I've really learned to fine tune it where my total is about 850 and I don't even use an estrogen blocker and blood pressure is normal, hemoglobin and hematocrit is normal, every other marker is normal. Cardiovascular system is good, everything. And I tell you, when you do dial this in the right way, it can give you a sense of energy and output and grit and quality of life that you probably don't even know you could have. So with the ladies, obviously you want to solve problems in the right order and you want to cross each bridge as it comes. I always tell people, you know, work on your sleep, work on reducing stress with your training and life, work on cleaning up your diet, food is like software, focus on getting a good mineral base, focusing on adding in any adaptogens and herbs that might help. And maybe if you want to try bioregulators and peptides, you can or if you want to start testing with hormone replacement therapy, I would suggest for the ladies some type of subcutaneous testosterone shot, multiple times per week with a little insulin syringe, a progesterone cream and an estrogen cream as well or some type of other administration with estrogen. That would be another talk, but I say this because fundamentally you really want to address all three, because if you just address one or two, one of them is going to get neglected and you won't feel the effect you could. The three work together like a synergy, like an orchestra. So you really want to fine tune all three and the good thing is is that you can start off with an average dosing and then get blood, we'll run every 12 weeks and fine tune and refine your dosing based off those numbers to get yourself in those goal lock zones and I promise you'll notice that bloating and discomfort decreases, you'll notice your hair looks fuller, you'll notice that your collagen and your face looks richer, you'll notice that your libido improves, you'll notice that your energy improves, you don't need to take naps through the day. And you'll look better, like your body composition will improve. And the same for me and too. Now I will say this though, this is not a magic potion. I've seen plenty of people use these things and they still look like garbage because they drank too much, they didn't do the right things as the base. They didn't solve problems in the right order. So I'm absolutely not telling you that TRT is going to just turn you into Chris Bumstead or like some jacked superhero, absolutely not. I have this people that you and I know that are on TRT and they look like crap because they do so many other other things sub optimally. It is definitely not a magic bullet but it does factor in. It does factor in. And so what do you need to understand about if you've addressed your environmental stuff, if you've managed sleep, if you've managed stress, if you're moving, if you're focusing on minerals, if you've got your blood work run, if you're doing peptides as a base to start with, when you go for something like TRT which would be the last type of option you focus on, you need to model in mimic the natural testosterone diurnal pulse as closely as possible. What does that even mean? The last thing that you want to do is take a pallet because think about this, your testosterone pulses on a daily circadian basis. Every system in your body is timed on a circadian rhythm, sun up, sundown, dusk in dawn, different hormones get released, and dusk in dawn, growth hormone increases at night as you fall asleep, cortisol rises in the morning to wake you up out of sleep. Everything works on a 24 hour clock, including testosterone pulse. The last thing you want to do is drive up testosterone through the roof, taking like a shot once or twice a week, or a pallet like once every three months, because what will happen is you'll send up a super physiological spike and play super physiological, I mean, it's going to be way higher than you could ever produce naturally. And when you go into that range, that's when you're going to get side effects. That's when you need to use an estrogen blocker to control estrogen. And the last thing you really want to do is crush your estrogen down using a nostruzole because that will have its own set of effects. It will affect your libido, it will affect your mood, it will affect your heart health. And it makes your joints ache a lot, so there's a lot of things that are not good with that. And most clinics describe that like tick-tax, it's not good. And it can be avoided. So outside of estrogen control, hemoglobin and hematocrit increase, those essentially blood viscosity, so it's how thick your blood is. Think about this. If your blood is like thick like molasses, it's going to increase your blood pressure and it's going to be so much harder on your heart to pump your blood around your circulatory system. It doesn't transport oxygen as fast, so you feel tired all the time, even though you're on the quote unquote TRT. So you don't want those situations, and because of all of that, your water retention will increase and you will look way more puffy than normal too. And I see this often. So what you really want to be doing is you want to model a natural daily testosterone pulse as much as you can. Now I'm not going to go into the detailed mechanics of this because that's why you would join one on one or you get into my business athlete council, but all I will say is if your testosterone pulses on a daily basis, what do you think I'm going to say you should do in terms of a in terms of a shot frequency. So if you were to take a certain amount of testosterone each week and you were going to split that up over a daily shot frequency, what does that look like? And then you start playing with that. That's the base of what you do. And if you want to maintain fertility because you want to have children while you do this, that's where you would add in and clone if you're in citrate and or some HCG or human corionic gonanotropin to help with fertility, to help fertility intact. But if you don't plan on having kids, you don't need to add those things in. So I sail this guys because it's absolutely worth you addressing these aspects of your physiology. I've got students that don't use any peptides or any TRT or any hormone replacement therapy and they just focus on diet, stress management, sleep, that type of stuff, which is fine. I've got students that maybe just do peptides and bioregulators and I've got students that are on TRT and all of the above. And each one has their own challenges. Each one has their own path they're walking. There's no one right or wrong way to do this. But what I will tell you is that if you solve these problems proactively, it can massively increase your capacity for stress and your output and performance as well as your body composition. But if why I'm able to look the way I do it 41 years old and look so young and perform all day like I do and not crash and burn and genuinely feel good is because I solved these problems in the right order. I focused on the minerals. I focused on the dietary part. I've got the gut health optimized so the absorption's increased. I really prioritized sleep. I don't have any alcohol in the equation. I don't over train and stress my system doing berserker 75 hard double masochistic workouts where you're just completely crushing your body into submission. I'm very intentional about that. I listen to my physiology in terms of stress load. I focus on breathing and protecting my space so people are not stressing me to heck out. If you let other people stress you to heck out, that's part of your challenge. You need to create better boundaries. I know that sounds kind of woo and just way off topic but that will have an effect. It will. And you need to make sure that you're checking your vitamins and minerals and you're plugging those holes first. Then you add in different adaptogens and different herbal compounds. Then you do barregulators and peptides. Then you do HRT. And I promise you, if you do all those things well, it will literally give you such a potent result, you'll just wish that you did all this sooner. I promise you that. You really will. And you can do it the right way. You won't have to run the side effects. There won't be a bunch of negative things that go wrong if you do it responsibly. So I share all this with you guys because again, obviously people want to improve the way that they look. They want to have more muscle mass. They want to look good. They want to look young. That's important. But you want to feel good. You want to have a good mood. You want to feel like you're anxiety. All of that stuff is really important in terms of the quality of your life. I'll even tell you, just as a side note, I can even look at a guy and tell if his testosterone is low. Typically, if you look at someone and you know they're having issues with antigens, they have a really thin neck. They have no traps, thin neck. And they have a very sort of, there's no other way to say this, but a beta male jaw. So their jaw is very sort of recessed in and very soft looking. The more antigen up regulation you have, the more muscular your neck and traps are and the more of a muscular pronounced jaw you have. So I can look at someone's physiology and tell. I can even look at a woman's physiology and tell because their different body shapes are representative of different hormone profiles. So if a woman's very very insulin resistant and is high levels of testosterone because that insulin resistance does drive up testosterone, they'll often have a big barrel gut, like a big barrel body and thinner arms and legs. So slightly thinner arms and legs, but they'll carry all their weight through their torso, their midsection. Equally if someone's really estrogen dominant and the others are not ideal, they'll carry a lot of weight like a pear shape. Now again, I'm not trying to be like rude or sort of crude. I'm just telling you that different fat distributions and different structural differences can indicate these things. And obviously you determine it based off the data, off the blood, you don't just guess. But I say this because it can change even like, it can even change your physical appearance. It makes you me, when you look more strong, you feel more confident. I mean, I can say this as a man, when you see a strong looking guy, he's definitely more confident. And I think to myself, in terms of business and leadership, you want strong men around you to lead and be strong and be that embodiment of what it looks like to be a lighthouse and raising the standards and being a business athlete. And for the ladies at Hourglass figure and that useful athletic figure, right? Obviously we're all going to age and we do the best we can, but you can do a lot of things to help improve this stuff. So there you have it. I know that we went around a lot of different mechanisms, but I would just say in general, if you focus on your environmental exposure and chemicals, plastics, pesticides, if you focus on minerals and vitamins in the diet and removing process inflammatory stuff and finding healthy food upgrades, removing alcohol, all that other crap. If you focus on reducing stress, stress, and training, like I mentioned with the ladies, focus weight training, walking, not doing a bunch of high intensity stuff, optimizing sleep. So having to get that sorted out and then troubleshooting with bioregulators and peptides first, some herbal compounds, trilogy, tonk at our lead, dim seed cycling. You've got a lot of things you guys can run with on this. So take some notes, go out there and implement and it goes without saying, if you want any help with this stuff, reach out and just ask. But please understand that you are not broken and that you can absolutely solve these problems and create that stronger, more resilient, 2.0 version of yourself, that business athlete.