As a man ages, his testosterone levels naturally drop. If you’re a man in your 30s or 40s, you might find that your naturally decreasing testosterone levels are making it harder to build and maintain the same level of muscle definition and strength that you easily attained in your teens and 20s.
Can testosterone boosters help? Yes, they can. Testosterone supplements are made with natural ingredients like ashwagandha, D-aspartic acid, zinc, and magnesium. Combined with weight training exercises and a healthy, high-protein diet, testosterone boosters can help you gain new muscle and maintain your muscle tone.
Set Yourself Up for Success
Testosterone supplements alone won’t make you ripped. You have to combine them with a healthy diet and the right exercise routine. But being burnt out from overtraining won’t help matters, either.
Lots of things can affect your testosterone levels, not just age. Inactivity is one of them, but so is overtraining. Training too hard might not cause your testosterone to dip into the range of clinical deficiency, but it can cause it to dip enough that you’ll have trouble making new gains and hanging onto that progress. So will extreme dieting and fasting.
Eat a healthy diet of whole grains, lean meats, low-fat dairy, nuts, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. Make sure you’re getting enough calories, including lean proteins and healthy fats, to support the muscle gains you want. Stick to a healthy workout routine — keep your workouts to 60 minutes or less, including rest periods of 30 to 90 seconds, but no longer. You’ll of course want to do strength-training workouts to build muscle, but make sure to keep up with your cardio, too. Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio exercise per week, or 75 minutes of high-intensity exercise.
Choose the Right Supplements
There are a lot of great, natural testosterone boosters available for sale, but use care when choosing which ones to take. Supplements aren’t regulated by the FDA, so avoid fly-by-night companies and buy supplements only from established, reputable manufacturers. Do your research and stick to buying testosterone boosters made with proven ingredients. Read reviews before purchasing a supplement, and let your doctor know what you’re taking, just in case it has side effects or interferes with other medications or supplements you might be taking.
Take Your Training to the Next Level
How you work out and what you eat usually has a bigger effect on your testosterone levels than testosterone boosters alone can, although boosters will help you get more out of your workouts if you use them properly, on the foundation of a healthy diet and regular strength-training workouts.
But if you want to make the most of your testosterone boosters, you can just work out any old way. Start with workouts that activate and strengthen large muscle groups, like compound lifts using a bench press, overhead lifts, or squats. Then work your way towards isolation movements that trigger an anabolic response in specific muscles.
As previously discussed, keep your workouts under an hour, but don’t let that become an excuse for shirking volume. It’s better for your muscle gains and t-levels to work out harder for a shorter length of time, rather than have longer rest periods that stretch the routine out longer.
Of course, you don’t need to work out every day — two or three strength training sessions a week should be enough to maintain healthy muscle definition, strength, and endurance. You shouldn’t overtrain, but you can use techniques that force your muscles to grow by stressing them to the point of failure. Some of these techniques include negatives, dropsets, and forced reps. Don’t go for broke on every set, but doing it on the last set of a “safe” exercise that you know you can maintain form on will help you gain and keep more muscle over time.
Have you been having trouble gaining and keeping muscle as you’ve aged? It’s not your imagination — as you grow older, your testosterone levels drop, sometimes dramatically. Testosterone boosters can help you get back the gains you were used to in youth, and that can help you stay healthy and strong for decades to come.