Increase your testosterone by training your legs

Increase your testosterone, strength, and power with these challenging workouts and exercises

For any athlete or sportsperson, testosterone levels play a fundamental role in performance and recovery; this anabolic hormone has a direct effect on muscle mass, sleep quality, and metabolic rate.

Literally, you would be nothing without this hormone… well, the thing is that we are inundated with supplements and tricks that can be shortcuts for increasing testosterone, but most of the time, a good workout is necessary. While training your legs to increase testosterone may not be a shortcut, it is still an interesting idea, both for bodybuilders and athletes in various sports.

Leg training: love vs. hate

Could leg day, the day so many people dread, actually provide greater benefits than simply increasing your quads and giving your sprints a more explosive start?

There are two camps when it comes to training legs: those who love it and those who generally hate it because it can become a nauseating and painful experience, even for experienced athletes.

But the importance of getting under the squat rack is something more valuable than the effort itself, because beyond how your legs look in shorts, it could be the key if you are a serious athlete who desperately needs to become stronger and increase testosterone.

#1- A good leg workout creates a balanced and powerful physique.

• You see countless memes of guys with pin-thin legs and other ads saying that you cannot skip leg day. Not training your legs leads to an unbalanced and embarrassing physique; however, for some, this may not be sufficient reason to train twice a week.

# 2- Powerful legs are useful for a wide range of sports

• Without them, you sacrifice a great deal of mobility and “ground reaction force.” Think about boxing, for example: could you imagine the difference in power if a boxer only worked on their upper body? Almost every coach you speak to, in nearly every sport, would emphasize the importance of having strong legs.

# 3- Legs burn more calories than any other part of the body

• Your legs contain more muscle than any other part of your body; in short, working your legs requires a great deal of energy when you want to burn additional calories, and that is efficiency.

 

Leg training and testosterone

Now, this is where training your legs relates to something you NEED to be doing. And doing it twice a week if you can; whatever your sport or discipline, your legs should be a fundamental part of your training because it increases testosterone and other crucial anabolic hormones, which promote muscle growth and improve performance.

A study (1) conducted with a group of athletes was key to understanding this; these athletes performed 4 arm-training sessions per week over a period of 11 weeks. In 2 of those arm workouts, they were asked to incorporate leg training first, and the results were quite conclusive. They found that anabolic hormones were much higher on the days they trained their legs, and since this aligns with other studies, we find it interesting to draw the same conclusion.

Now, to obtain the best anabolic response to leg training, you need to squat. This compound movement, performed for 5-8 repetitions per set, with a rest period of 45 seconds, will get those hormones pumping.

Once again, this was found in a study (2) that compared free weights with machine weights. The conclusion was that “free-weight exercises appear to induce a greater hormonal response to exercise than machine exercises using similar lower-joint and primary movements.”

Leg workouts are vital for developing strength and power. In addition, you now know that if you squat to full depth before bringing the bar back up, you will not only burn more fat or build more muscle while strengthening your lower limbs, but also increase that testosterone, which will definitely help you grow as an athlete, as a person, and as a partner.

Sources

• (1) European Journal of Applied Physiology – 2011: Ronnestad, BR et al. Physiological elevation of endogenous hormones results in superior strength training adaptation
• (2) The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research – 2014: Shaner, AA et al. The acute hormonal response to free weight and machine weight resistance