Are testosterone levels proportional to physique quality? Okay, thank you Gil for doing this review of the Vitruvian Physique video. You got it. Okay, so let's talk a bit in the order that the video was presented.
So Igor of that Vitruvian Physique channel talked first about one guy, he gave him as an example, a guy with very low testosterone levels. He showed his pics, I will show them on this channel again here, and he told us that this guy has very low testosterone levels and that was the reason that he got that physique even after six years of training. So what do you think about that? Is that really the cause, that low testosterone, or is it rather the training, the diet? Can't we build just a great physique with low testosterone levels?
Can you build a great physique with low testosterone level? The answer is yes. Yeah, you certainly can. Is it an ideal scenario to go into?
Probably not. Are you going to have an easier time if you're optimal? Yes.
But can it be done? Yes, it can. It's done all the time. In fact, I did it myself back in my late 30s when I was a lifetime natural.
And I'll share the photo with you if you'd like to put it up there. I can show you exactly what I was doing back then. and the result. And at the time, my total testosterone was in the 500s.
And my free testosterone, which is the key here, which was totally missed in the video, was only 13 nanograms per deciliter. People accused me of being on steroids and everything else, but that's okay. At the end of the day, when it comes to building a physique, you have to look at the three top priorities.
And priority number one is going to come down, and this may surprise a few people, it's going to come down to training. The amount of stimulus that you put on your muscles for the intended purpose, whether it be performance, aesthetics, or anything else, the stimulus that you deliver and the intent in which you do it is going to be the priority number one when it comes to shaping your body. So training and training correctly.
and training optimally is going to be priority number one, followed by nutrition and refueling. It's extremely important. It's not more important than training. You can eat well and never have a good physique. You could train and eat half-ass and still have a decent, moderate physique.
So the training comes first, followed by nutrition, and then, only then, biochemistry comes into play. Yes, you can defy biochemistry if you're training and eating properly. The individual in the video that he had shown, I can promise you, was not eating anywhere.
I mean, if he's training legitimately for six years, for starters, he looked very young. The face was blurred out and I can't really tell, but he looked like he was a teenager. So when you say six years, okay, maybe he started lifting when he was 12, but he didn't look a day over 17, 18, 19. Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe he was in his early 20s. Either way you chop it. That guy was malnourished. There was no amounts of food going into that body over those six years. to sustain the lean mass that presumably he was trying to put in there.
It had nothing to do with his hormones. It had to do everything with his training and nutrition, for starters. Secondly, let's not rule out genetics. I hate to say the word genetics because people like to use it negatively when they fail and they like to say, well, I have poor genetics. It's not that you have poor genetics.
Everyone can make progress if the training and nutrition and obviously the biochemistry is optimal. However, There are people with superior genetics. There are people who are genuinely going to look good and have good muscle definition and be bigger than the rest of us. And some of us can train years and still not achieve what someone with superior genetics can do in a matter of six months. So some people just have that type of a body, okay?
And some people, you know, are ectomorphs and they're just going to never really put on massive size and that's okay. I've always kind of struggled to put on size. Part of it is because I probably don't eat as much as I should, even when I bulk.
And, you know, I've gotten into, you know, the 220 range, you know, fairly lean at six foot one. But I've never been a mass monster. Not that I want to, but I don't believe I have the potential genetically to be 270 with abs.
It's just not my frame. So genetics certainly plays a role. But to say that. you know, your low T is the reason why you're struggling in the gym. It may be the reason why you're struggling to get in the gym.
It may be the reason why you're not motivated to train or why you have brain fog or why you have fatigue. But if you mentally overcome that and you put in the effort and you eat correctly, it is not your low testosterone that's preventing you from making progress. Next point, then Igor showed the normal testosterone ranges with that typical bell curve.
And so he presented, I will show the same bell curve here, low, normal, and high ranges for testosterone, total testosterone. So what do you think about those ranges that he presented? First and foremost, those ranges fall in line with what the larger labs tend to put out there. And we have to understand that lab ranges are derived of sample pools that are being tested. Generally, your healthy young men do not walk into a clinic or doctor's office and say, can you please check my testosterone levels?
Those who go in and complain of low T symptoms are the ones that are typically tested, and that makes up the sample pool. So the total testosterone, which we'll get into shortly, but the total testosterone, which he was referring to in nanograms per deciliter, is typically tested by people who are symptomatic. And then it is followed up by people who begin therapy.
So the numbers are all skewed. Those are not your optimal ranges by any means. And to call them averages is really, again, depending on a sample pool of people who go in requesting a test.
Because if I threw in people who are truly optimal, then that range would move. So at the end of the day, I don't put a lot of stock in the numbers, especially when it comes to total T, because as you and I know, there's so much more underneath the surface that plays a role in biochemistry than just total testosterone levels. And what about those free testosterone levels? Should he have used those as an example?
Yeah, so total testosterone is a snapshot in time. It's like if I toss a ball in the air and I say, take a picture and you catch it on the way up or you catch it on the way down and you say, that's how high the ball went. Well, you didn't catch it at the peak. You don't know, nor do you know how long it sat there before it came down. So a snapshot in time doesn't tell me a darn thing.
And it was evident because you see he had... an example of a guy who tested in the 200s and then tested in the 700s. And he claims that it was due to the fact that the guy was, was cutting versus bulking.
And while that may hold a little truth to it, there is no way the guy went from 700 to 200. This is literally, you know, I can go in. Okay. If I, if I'm natural and I go in in the morning and I want to sabotage my, my blood work, I can literally stay up all night, have a couple of beers, order a pizza and then go in at a, you know, 12 noon and have my blood drawn and come back in the 200s.
I could also get a solid week of sleep, rest, recovery, quality hydration, and go in and test in the mid 700s. So a snapshot in time is so transient and so irrelevant in the grand scheme of what is actually going on under the surface that it just blows my mind that people are actually going to look at a total testosterone level and saying, this right here is the reason that I am successful or the reason that I'm failing. Is the level of total testosterone, 1,000 nanograms per deciliter, really that abnormal, that high, as Igor presented?
Because I remember the lab ranges were even lowered a few years ago. In 2016, LabCorp had 1102 as the upper range of the limit. And again, remember, this is people going in who are not feeling well, who are making up the lab ranges.
I mean, I have personally seen, and I know Dr. Grant mentioned in one of the text messages. a few weeks ago to us that he had a patient that came in and the guy was in his seventies and he presented with a total testosterone of 1500 nanograms per deciliter, totally natural yet functioning, luteinizing hormone and everything else. Is it an anomaly to be in your seventies at that level?
Probably to say that there aren't young health, healthy men in the teams is silly. I mean, I've seen it. I've seen it. I have a friend who's in his fifties and is a hundred percent natural and I've seen his blood and he's, He's in the teens, 11, 1200 range total, and the guy's in his 50s. People do get into those ranges.
So to say if you're over 1,000, you're automatically, we have ways of knowing if guys are using exogenous hormones or if this is endogenous production. There's very, very simple ways to check tropic hormones and various ratios of epitestosterone and other factors that contribute to it. I know when someone is natural and someone is not when I'm looking at their labs.
And at the end of the day, when you say, well, here's the cap or here's the optimal, you know, again, you're looking at a snapshot in time. It is so almost, I don't want to say irrelevant, but so negligible in terms of what is actually usable by the body and what is actually happening. Your free tea is not going to fluctuate the same way your total tea is going to fluctuate. Total tea is refilling the reservoir. Free tea is unbound and unbound means that your total T that is bound starts to get released when it drops too low.
So we really got to look at the free T and we also got to look at the estradiol conversion and we also got to look at the DHT and we also got to look at the IGF-1 and there's so many other factors and you know a lot of these guys that claim to be natural not only are they coming off of things but they're also running other compounds that will not show up as testosterone on bloodwork. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. Just because someone looks good on Instagram and they claim to be natural and they show you these labs, again, they're fooling the public because the public doesn't understand what they're looking at and they think testosterone is the end of it. Then Igor presents a whole list of aesthetic physiques, guys from YouTube and Instagram especially, with their tested total T-levels. What do you think about that list, that consequence?
I mean, from the photos he put in, again, I know these are like Instagram photo shoots, and these guys look good. Obviously, they put in the work, they train, and they eat well. Looking at their testosterone level, again, this is just pandering to their crowd, their followers.
And I get it. It's a business. The mere fact, I mean, the whole video started out with a promo or an ad for a company that mails you out these little finger spot tests, which again, it's, I mean, how are you going to do a serum test on a... on a blood drop is beyond me.
And there's no way they could test SHBG, luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, free testosterone, DHT. I mean, this is just total to you, which is a complete waste of a test, as you and I know, but you know, people, people buy it. So, you know, when you put out a video that is sponsored by a company that is selling you a product, then the goal of the video is going to be to describe this product and this test and this. metric as the holy grail but it's far from it so you know people really should understand that there's a lot more that goes into your hormones and your biochemistry and the metabolic functions of your body than total testosterone people put way too much stock in that one number that's why they should subscribe to this channel instead best channel there is okay gil the most important question of this video actually are testosterone levels proportional to physique quality This would be more associative than conclusive. We can't just say you have high T, you should look good.
You have low T, you shouldn't look good. Like I said, and I'll send you that photo. I think I looked fine with relatively low, and God knows I was symptomatic for low T at the time, testosterone free T levels.
And there are people, I mean, heck, we know personally, you know, hundreds of men who have testosterone in the 13 to 1500 range total. And they don't look good at all. They're overweight.
They're underweight. They're obese. They train.
They don't train. They eat right. They don't know what they're doing. They're doing all these fad diets.
It comes down to training, followed by nutrition, followed by chemistry. And when you optimize your chemistry, you're not going to just have a physique handed to you. By the same token, when your chemistry is a little off, you can still build a physique.
You may just have to work a little more for it. So again, this is not... an end-all be-all of, hey, my testosterone is great, and this is why I look like this, and my testosterone is not good, and that's why I look like that. It's complete and utter silliness, and I usually find this tooted by, you know, people that sell supplements or testosterone boosters or all these natural remedies or all these, you know, again, it comes down to business.
It's all about business. It's all about listen to what I have to say, buy my product, look like me. I'm sorry.
It's just not the way it works. I wish it was that easy. Heck, you know, we like to train, we like to do all this stuff and we work our ass off for years.
And, you know, we still have this, you know, thing in the back of our mind that we haven't hit our goals. It's that strive for perfectionism that pushes you, but ultimately you'll never find happiness with the way you look because you're always going to critique your weaknesses, right? But it's a personality trait.
So if it was easy, great, but it isn't. There's a reason that most people don't look the way they want to look. They all want to look that way.
Very few are actually willing to do what it takes. And I can promise you, it's not your testosterone level that's holding you back. Okay, thank you, Gil.
Vitruvian Physique announced a part two. I'm sure we're going to do a part two at that moment as well to be continuous. Thank you. Anytime, you got it.