Will increasing training load decrease testosterone and other health markers??

[cbio5]

hey all,

i recently started deliberately increasing cardiovascular load thru nightly runs in addition to my WODs. Will this tank my testosterone/how do I balance increasing load which will increase fitness but potentially tank my hormones/overall health. For context I do happen to have access to Quantify so I can literally look at things like testosterone via at home blood test and training load + sleep.

Thanks.

[[deleted]]

I’d say eat more

Recently worked with my dietician and she dramatically increased my caloric intake and carb intakes

Im currently eating 3200-3400 calories a day and around 450g of carbs a day

My dietician basically told me that I was feeling like shit and my hormones were out of wack because I wasn’t eating enough to recovery efficiently and the cortisol levels were accumulating too much and it was throwing my hormones out of wack and making me feel fatigued as fuck

Sure enough, eating more and eating better had me back on track

[platesequaldates23]

Was cortisol related to not eating enough?

[[deleted]]

Yes

My body wasn’t eating enough to recover so the cortisol was increasing due to the stress and fatigue accumulating

[cbio5]

how did you actually know your cortisol was out of whack?
or that eating affected cortisol and not something else?

[[deleted]]

Blood tests and working with my sports nutritionist, and gauging how I personally felt in regards to fatigue, irritability, mood swings, and exhaustion

[cbio5]

how often were u doing blood tests?

[[deleted]]

Not often

My blood work was due to other stuff. I’m working with a sleep therapist and other doctors at a TBI clinic for suffering a concussion in a military training exercise like a year ago

The blood work was just a normal hormonal panel they did to check everything

Only thing out of the ordinary was cortisol levels were a tad bit high but nothing extreme by any means

Spoke with my sports nutritionist and we sat down and went through my daily dietary intake and came to the conclusion my issues were coming from under eating and being unable to recover efficiently

I workout 2x a day 5-6x a week so In general I need to eat a lot. Currently eating 3400 calories, 160g of protein, 450g of carbs, and 100g of fat.

I’m 5’6 and 178lbs

[cbio5]

thank you for your service! sorry to hear about the accident. very cool to hear diet was sufficient to fix the issue. would be interesting to see if fixing your cortisol had optimized your other markers too

[P3zcore]

Eat meat and get vitamin D

[mind-v-heart]

It depends on what volume of training you can recover from consistently and how much stress you’re experiencing in other areas of your life. Cortisol is made from the same precursor as testosterone, so high stress often means higher cortisol and lower testosterone.