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Optimizing testosterone secretion is especially important
for natural bodybuilders. Proper training can increase the
secretion, while over-training will reduce it to near zero.
An intense heavy squatting session can boost your testosterone
secretion for several days. Even if you could somehow achieve
a sky-high testosterone level, however, it wouldn’t
guarantee fast muscle growth. The way the muscles “accept”
the hormone is at least as important as how much your system
has. The question is, Is it possible through proper training
to maximize the impact of testosterone on your muscles?
Testosterone and Its Muscle Receptors
Various bodybuilding publications have recently featured articles
stating that as a bodybuilder’s level of androgens increases,
so does the level of testosterone receptors on his muscles.
In other words, testosterone is said to be able to up-regulate
its own receptors on the muscles. Needless to say, the more
testosterone receptors you have, the more anabolic testosterone
will be.
The result of the above reasoning is that it gives license
to all sorts of excesses. Natural bodybuilders, who have a
modest supply of testosterone, would, according to the theory,
only have a limited number of testosterone receptors. Conclusion:
They’ll be unable to accumulate a significant amount
of muscle if they remain drug-free. They would, therefore,
be limited in their muscle development by two factors:
1) Limited testosterone.
2) Limited impact of testosterone on the muscles due to a
less-than optimum number of testosterone receptors.
So, based on the above reasoning, bodybuilders either have
to use steroids or they are condemned to stay small forever.
What’s more, the more anabolics they take and the longer
they take them, the more significant the effect will be. Only
massive amounts taken over a long period would give them the
proper accumulation of testosterone receptors on the muscles.
That’s supposedly the reason people grow more if they
take more anabolics, because there are more receptors.
The good news is that the above theory is erroneous, not to
mention dangerous and contrary to reality.
It’s dangerous because it promotes doping. It’s
contrary to reality because one observes the opposite occurring
among users of anabolics. Let’s look at this in terms
of what you see in the gym.
First of all, if the theory were true, sedentary persons using
androgens, for contraception, for example-would become huge.
The extra testosterone would increase the number of testosterone
receptors. The anabolic effect of testosterone would become
increasingly stronger. In reality, untrained people who use
steroids have very limited muscle growth. They rapidly become
immune to testosterones anabolic effect. That doesn’t
sound like an androgen receptor up-regulation, does it?
For the sake of argument, let’s say the above happens
because the people
don’t use enough androgens. After all, the heaviest
steroid users are found among bodybuilders. In those heaviest
users there should be an up-regulation of androgen receptors.
If that were true, here’s what would happen.
The androgens would cause their own receptors to multiply
and get increasingly more potent as time went on. If androgen
receptors were truly up-regulated that way, steroid users
would get their best gains at the end of a cycle, not the
beginning, and professional bodybuilders would get far more
out of their cycles than first-timers. The trouble is, the
best steroid gains are seen in the first cycles. The longer
a course of treatment lasts, the more users are obliged to
take drugs to compensate for the loss of potency. Besides,
that’s the reason they do cycles in the first place.
The time off is supposed to permit muscles to recover their
natural responsiveness to testosterone.
Following the theory, there would be no need for training.
As the doses were increased, the anabolic effects would be
enhanced. In fact, drug users would be completely crazy to
keep training while on a cycle when the steroids were going
to do most of the work.
Androgen up-regulation would take place in every single muscle,
not just in the exercised muscles. Consequently, a user of
anabolics who only trained his arms should see his calves
grow. That’s not the case, however, even for the professionals.
I wish it were true, as they wouldn’t look so silly
with their huge arms and puny calves.
I don’t have to keep demonstrating that the theory is
just plain stupid. It is refuted daily by the experiences
of bodybuilders who use anabolics, as well as by the research.
The fact is, excessive androgen levels induce the rapid loss
of muscle testosterone receptors. There is absolutely no increase.
The muscle fights the excess and immunizes itself against
androgens, which is the reason steroids become less potent
as time goes by.
The key point to remember is, only the trained muscles get
bigger. The growth is determined by the numerous local alterations
caused by muscular contractions, not a systemic circulating
factor.
While this discussion may seem far removed from natural bodybuilding,
it has important implications for everyone who trains. As
suggested above, if the theory of testosterone-receptor up-regulation
were true, there’d be no way a natural bodybuilder could
ever get big.
Testosterone and Training
Obviously, testosterone is a hormone that makes the muscle
grow, and the body will use all the anabolIc hormones at its
disposal to respond to a bodybuilder’s training. Therefore,
the training has a significant impact on testosterone, which
can occur in one of two ways.
1) It increases the level of testosterone. It’s true
that training, if it’s intensive and brief, will raise
the level of testosterone, but never as much as one might
wish. What’s worse, if you train too much, the level
of testosterone really falls. If training increased the level
of testosterone enormously, all bodybuilders would be covered
with pimples and would have prostate problems. In short, we’d
all resemble users of anabolics and we’d suffer from
all those side effects. That’s the reason proper training
can boost testosterone secretion but not in excessive amounts.
One solution to the above dilemma would be to stimulate the
secretion of testosterone in the trained muscle itself. That
would allow the stimulated muscles to be flooded with testosterone
while other organs would still be exposed to a normal testosterone
level. Muscle growth would occur without any side effects
of testosterone. Unfortunately, testosterone is not a paracrine
or autocrine hormone. It is an endocrine hormone, and only
the testicles (or the ovaries in women) and the adrenal glands
can make it.
2) It increases the sensitivity of the muscle to testosterone.
The body is ready for everything. Rather than increasing the
level of testosterone significantly, training will increase
the sensitivity of the trained muscle to testosterone. In
other words, proper training can force your stimulated muscles
to suck up all the blood testosterone. How do you make that
happen? Simply by increasing the number of testosterone receptors
in the muscle that you train. As a result, a normal level
of testosterone will have a normal effect on your organs,
since the number of testosterone receptors there doesn’t
change. As the number of testosterone receptors in the trained
muscle increases, however, the hormone’s effects will
be multiplied.
That brings us to the million-dollar question: How do you
increase the number of testerone receptors? There’s
a lot to be said on that subject, but here are some highlights.
Testosterone Receptors and Negative Reps
It seems clear that negative-accentuated training lowers the
sensitivity of the muscle to testosterone, at least in the
short term. So while that type of training will trigger the
anabolism of fibroblast growth factor, insulinlike growth
factor 1 and the satellite cells, it will also reduce the
impact of the anabolism of testosterone. A few days after
the damage occurs, the number of testosterone receptors will
be increased; however, for some days at least the testosterone
will lose its effects on the muscle. There are three possible
reasons for this:
1) Destruction of the testosterone receptors.
2) Inactivation of the receptors, they don’t respond
to the signals that are sent to them anymore.
3) A little of both effects described above. This will slow
the muscular recuperation, providing another reason to avoid
doing pure negative repetitions too often on the same muscle.
Testosterone Receptors and Positive Reps
Positive repetitions will have the most beneficial effects
on the proliferation of the testosterone receptors in the
trained muscle. The big problem is that although training
a muscle specifically to increase the receptors will in fact
increase their number, it will also cause a decline in the
level of testosterone in the natural bodybuilder. So we face
an unavoidable trade-off: training enough to increase the
number of testosterone receptors without training too much,
causing the level of testosterone to collapse. That’s
not an easy equilibrium to find.
Taking anabolics doesn’t solve the problem either. Users
of anabolics certainly have elevated levels of androgens,
but they have very few testosterone receptors in their muscles.
If they could combine the two conditions, it would not take
more than a year to acquire a physique of Olympia caliber.
The paradox for natural bodybuilders is that they have plenty
of receptors but not enough testosterone. Therefore, their
training should be oriented toward the restoration of the
level of this hormone first and then to the up-regulation
of the receptors. They should also consider using testosterone
precursos, such as androstenedione.
Users of anabolics, on the other hand, have more androgens
than they need, so their training should be oriented exclusively
toward reopening the testosterone receptors. Anabolics users
don’t fear a reduction of the level of testosterone,
since they control it artificially. That has an important
consequence: Naturals and non-naturals certainly have the
same overall objective, to build muscle, but they have training
objectives that are diametrically opposed. One group needs
more testosterone, the other needs more receptors. Each group
needs what the other has, which is the very reason that the
first cycle of anabolics has the most effect. It’s the
only time there are simultaneously plenty of receptors and
hormone. Meanwhile, there’s only one obvious conclusion
that everyone can agree on: Natural bodybuilders shouldn’t
train like the champions or even like the biggest guys in
the gym.
Here are some rules for natural bodybuilders.
At workouts in which you don’t do negative reps:
•Boost your testosterone level once a week, as discussed
last month.
•Train heavy with low reps.
•Stick with brief training, it’s not necessary
to do 10 different exercises per muscle.
•Train infrequently.
At workouts in which you perform negative reps:
•Don’t do negatives more than two times per month
per muscle group.
•Don’t do too much negative work per muscle group
at any session.
•Don’t hesitate to space out the negative-based
and heavy-poundage sessions with workouts in which you use
lighter weights and longer sets.
In short, don’t train too much, and change training
techniques often.
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