Boost your Muscle Building Hormones - By Mark McManus

If you want to maximise your muscle building hormone levels naturally, you definitely need to read this article. Implementing the advice here may have a very significant effect on your gains in muscle size and strength. Here are 7 ways to optimise your muscle building hormone levels. You can begin implementing these recommendations straight away and start seeing positive results in the gym, and in the mirror!

1. Dietary Fat

You have to eat fat. Fat is required for the production of muscle building hormones. This is why low-fat diets are undesirable for a person wishing to add new slabs of muscle. Here are some great sources of dietary fat:

• Eggs
• Avocado
• Fish
• Seeds
• Olive Oil
• Red meat (low-carbers can have more of this than high carbers)
• Nuts and nut butters
• Real butter (for low-carbers)
• Coconut oil (contains an abundance of medium-chain triglycerides)




2. Compound Exercises

Everyone's weight training program should include the basic, heavy, compound movements such as deadlifts, squats, leg press, overhead press, and bench press. The heavier loads involved and the multi-joint, multi-muscle nature of these exercises leads to higher secretions of muscle building hormones.


3. Train to a High Level of Intensity

Of course it's not just the type of exercise employed, but the intensity of effort involved. I'm a big believer in working to positive failure on every set. This is how trainees using my system "Targeted Hypertrophy Training" work.

I regularly get positive feedback via facebook from people like this one from a guy in his 40's, "Got my blood results back - growth hormone and muscle building hormone levels all up significantly". So use 100% of your strength potential in every set by training to that very last rep.


4. Sleep Well

Apart from being detrimental to your well-being, a chronic lack of sleep is negatively impacting your efforts to build more muscle.
The National University of Singapore studied 531 healthy men aged between 29 and 72 [1]. In a nutshell, those who slept 4 or less hours per night had 60% less total muscle building hormones, and 55% less bio-available muscle building hormones than those who slept 8 hrs or more. Message: Get 7-8 hours of sleep at night, every night!



5. Lower your Stress Levels

Stress causes higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol levels usually negatively correlate with muscle building hormone i.e. the higher the cortisol, the lower the levels of muscle building hormones [2] [3].

Apart from taking some measures like taking regular walks in nature and having a good network of genuine friends, always remember that it's not so much the events themselves that causes stress, but our chosen response to them. Remember the ability to choose your response when tempted to respond automatically with worry or fear to situations in your life. Choose differently - "response-ability".


6. Take it Easy on the Booze

Alcohol lowers levels of muscle building hormones. But it gets worse, it also raises the catabolic hormonse cortisol.
In this study [4] the maximum decrease in musle building hormones occurred 12 hours after the alcohol was administered. Levels of muscle building hormones remained depressed for a full 24 hours after the alcohol was consumed. Cortisol levels increased and remained high for this 24 hr period as well.





7. Erotic stimulation

There's always some curiosity about this one, so let's have a look.

The Department of Endocrinology and Physiology, Edinburgh, Scotland, had 8 male subjects watch adult material and then measured the concentration of hormones in their blood for 5 hours afterwards. [5] The erotic stimulation caused a slight rise in muscle building hormones, but it was not statistically significant. They said...

"There were no significant changes in hormone or catecholamine levels following either the erotic or the neutral stimuli, except for a rise in cortisol during the neutral but not the erotic film. These results indicate that in the laboratory, substantial sexual response can occur without accompanying endocrine or biochemical changes."

So any real benefit to this seems to be in potentially lower cortisol levels. The biggest differences in muscle building hormone and cortisol were recorded during the periods when the material was actually being viewed. So take that for what it's worth.


Mark McManus

References
[1]Sleep, sex steroid hormones, sexual activities, and aging in Asian men.
[2]Testosterone, gonadotropin, and cortisol secretion in male patients with major depression.
[3]The relationship between high and low trait psychological stress, serum testosterone, and serum cortisol.
[4]Sex hormones and adrenocortical steroids in men acutely intoxicated with ethanol.
[5]The endocrine effects of visual erotic stimuli in normal men

Mark McManus is a certified exercise professional from Ireland. He is the creator of the free bodybuilding program "Targeted Hypertrophy Training", which you download from his site "MuscleHack.com - The Home of Muscle Growth". Join tens of thousands of people around the world who have ended years of frustration and finally packed on serious muscle and transformed their bodies in a shorter period of time than they though possible. He is also author of the globally successful book "Total Six Pack Abs" - the no BS, scientific, confusion-free system for torching fat at an accelerated rate. The book comes with free calculator software that shows you what to eat down to the last gram! Sample menus, workout logs, and member's forum access are all included free of charge too! All testimonials are 100% authentic.

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