What Happens to Your Body On Testosterone

 

Find out how to increase your testosterone and how testosterone works inside your body. This is a full science based explanation on what testosterone does in terms of muscle growth, libido, and mood.

Aside from just getting stronger, more muscular, and looking leaner, maintaining healthy testosterone levels with benefit your heart, your bones, your mood, and even your verbal memory and reasoning skills. 

This is because testosterone is the primary male sex hormone. It’s also known as an “androgen,” which is a steroid hormone that promotes the development of masculine characteristics. To better understand exactly what testosterone does inside your body, we’ll first have to look at how it's made. And the process of creating testosterone actually starts in the hypothalamus, which is the part of your brain that you can view as the master regulator of your hormones. The hypothalamus releases gonadotropin-releasing hormone which stimulates the pituitary gland to release luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone. Both luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone are important for male hormonal and sexual health although each are important for their own reasons.

For example Luteinizing hormone is important because it stimulates something within your testes known as a “steroidogenic acute regulatory protein.” This starts the conversion of cholesterol to steroids, more specifically androgens. So, in case you're confused the answer is yes testosterone IS made out of cholesterol. That’s one reason research indicates diets low in cholesterol are terrible for your testosterone levels. (1). They literally crush your testosterone. For example, a study found a direct correlation between cholesterol intake and testosterone. The more cholesterol people ate, the higher their testosterone went. (2))

Now Follicle-stimulating hormone, is less important for hormone production than luteinizing hormone, but it's crucial from a reproductive perspective because it stimulates your body to produce sperm. The testes of the average healthy male produce around four to nine milligrams of testosterone per day. This testosterone production is controlled by a negative feedback loop. This negative feedback loop measures androgen and estrogen levels in the body. That’s done to make sure your hormone levels stay within a certain range. When your body senses testosterone levels have reached the upper range, the hypothalamus stops stimulating the pituitary gland to release Luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone because they're no longer needed for more testosterone and sperm production. But in a normal scenario, when the lower end of that range is reached your body will release more Luteinizing hormone and Follicle stimulating hormone to increase testosterone and sperm production.

Unfortunately if for whatever reason this process is impaired you can suffer from low testosterone. Things that may cause that to happen include poor health, poor nutritional status, or a gonadal disorder. it's also important to realize that not all testosterone that your body makes actually impacts your body in the way testosterone is supposed to impact your body. A big reason for this is that a part of your testosterone gets converted into estrogen on a daily basis, and as most of you already know, estrogen is the primary female sex hormone, that is also of course present in men in more limited quantities. Testosterone is converted into estrogen primarily through the aromatization process. And don't get me wrong, this process isn't inherently bad. In fact, estrogen is vital for regulating your libido, erectile function, and the development of sperm cells. It only becomes an issue if too much of your testosterone gets converted into estrogen. Bodybuilders that abuse steroids routinely run into this issue where they jack up their testosterone, then a percentage of that testosterone gets converted into estrogen, and they end up with issues like gynecomastia. That’s one reason bodybuilders often take anti-aromatase pharmaceuticals like Arimidex. Arimidex helps prevent so much testosterone from turning into estrogen helping keep their testosterone levels high while maintaining more normal estrogen levels. 

It’s also important to note that this aromatization process primarily takes place within body fat, which is why overweight and obese people tend to have higher estrogen levels and lower testosterone. Now, aside from being converted into estrogen, about ten percent of the testosterone in your body gets converted by an enzyme known as 5-alpha reductase into dihydrotestosterone also known as DHT. While testosterone is known for its anabolic muscle building effects, DHT is more androgenic which means that it has more impact on things like beard growth, body hair growth, Adam's apple size, and the pitch of your voice..