Patriot Health Digest
Use a Mineral to Increase Testosterone
If would like to boost testosterone levels and a blood test indicates you are below normal, your physician will most likely give you a prescription. But what if your T levels are low but aren’t considered medically low by the standards of today? The first step is to find out why. It might be as simple as this: you are not getting sufficient amounts of magnesium.
The Magnesium Crisis
Up to 85% of Americans could have a magnesium deficiency. Athletes are probably even more deficient in magnesium because sweating like an animal causes it to seep out of the body.
This is pretty significant because magnesium plays a role in a little over 300 biochemical reactions within the human body. Also, magnesium is critical to protein synthesis, energy production and insulin metabolism. Without enough of the mineral, you get excessive lactic acid build-up, poor recovery, muscle cramping, and poor exercise performance at the gym in general. Having a magnesium deficiency also makes it more difficult to lose fat.
Taking magnesium supplements should relieve all those side effects and symptoms, but according to Turk scientists, it could be beneficial in another way. It seems that combining magnesium supplementation with intense workouts can boost testosterone levels by an impressive 24%.
What They Did
The scientists signed up 30 male students that were between the ages of 18 and 22. 10 of which sat on their butts a lot of that time while the others did intense taekwondo training sessions for between one to two hours five days a week.
The sedentary group took 10 milligrams of magnesium per kg every day for a month, as did ten of the taekwondo trainers. While the other 10 martial artists didn’t take anything.
The researchers measured their testosterone levels before the study started, once at rest and then once again after all the participants ran at high intensity up until they reached the endurance wall. After taking magnesium for a month, the scientists again measured the participant’s testosterone levels while at rest and after exertion.
What They discovered
Magnesium intake boosted the total and free testosterone levels of both the athletic group and the sedentary group. Most notably, however, the mineral boosted free testosterone levels in the sedentary group by an estimated 15% while boosting it by an astounding 24% in the magnesium-plus group that had trained.
What This Might Mean for You
Magnesium plays a role in numerous biochemical reactions; it is not surprising that there could be one or more out of all of these reactions that could play a role in testosterone production. It is also possible that the mineral “frees up” additional testosterone from needing to bind proteins, which raises the level of free testosterone.
Either way you look at it, taking a magnesium supplement is a good idea. General suggestions for health are 4 milligrams of magnesium per kg each day, so a guy that weighs 200 pounds would need about 363 milligrams per day to meet the minimum requirements.
However, that does not take into account the presumably higher amount athletes need to consume and it is a lot less than what is needed for the dramatic boost in testosterone seen in the study.
The dosage that was used by the Turks is about 10 milligrams per kg, or about 907 milligrams per day for that same hypothetical guy that weighs 200 pounds, which is a little less than a gram. That is not much at all.
You can go the whole food route and consume high-magnesium foods. These options include the following: seaweed, green leafy vegetables, spinach, nuts, swiss chard, beans, bananas, avocadoes.
Author: Blake Ambrose
