You’ve been going hard with your training, you’re on point with your nutrition, you’re getting a good night’s sleep and you’re keeping it consistent. Right? But you’re frustrated because maybe you’re not feeling like you’ve progressed. You’re wondering specifically about boosting metabolism and changing your body composition.
I’m sharing a few ways to get those progress points you’re after! I was inspired to share this information after listening to Dr. Huberman talk about controlling metabolism by thyroid and growth hormone.
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After learning this, I guarantee that you’re not going to skip your warm up anymore. And we are going to talk about human growth hormone and how to promote GH production which will enable you to improve your metabolism and change your body composition.
Warm ups are important to prepare your CNS for the work ahead, to ensure that your body is ready for the workout and it’s also a terrific way to reduce risk of injury. But the other reason you won’t want to skip your warm up is because it’ll promote GH in the body.
What is human growth hormone:
Important for boosting muscle growth, increasing exercise performance and promoting strength gains. Also important for recovery and staving off disease. Growth hormone plays a key role in our metabolism, cellular repair, also and reaching body composition goals.
How to activate growth hormone?
First thing: Kinds of exercise are important:
*either strength training or endurance training (limited to around 60 min); when our workout time exceeds 60 min, cortisol levels increase so much that it starts to inhibit estrogen and testosterone production
Optimal conditions for releasing the most GH:
*Spend more time warming up
A sufficient amount of warming up will increase the release of GH once the difficult part of your training session begins; it seems like 10 min is the sweet spot (check out the research by Kanaley, 2008) . So if your warm up is shorter than 10 minutes, increase the time to properly warm up and make sure your body is actually getting warm.
*Increase body temperature
Temperature of the body is important. So you can wear more clothing during your warm up, alter the temperature of the physical space you’re in, close the windows, turn off the AC and this ways you’ll increase the heat during your warm up because you’ll be maximizing your growth hormone release
*Pay attention to blood glucose levels
It’s best to have lower blood glucose levels to promote GH. Keep your glucose stabilized, this is one of the reasons a fasted workout is so powerful. If you insist on eating or ingesting something pre workout, then try to leave enough time between having that and doing your workout, avoid eating sugary things or glucose spiking foods or drinks during the exercise.
*Work out for max 60 to 75 min
The duration should not exceed 75 minutes if you want to maximize the release of GH. Anything more than 75 minutes has minimizing returns according to scientific research.
*Don’t Train to Failure
And what’s also interesting is if you’re keen on growth hormone release then you don’t want to push your body to absolute failure during your training session. So the last few reps you’re not maxing out. In the last leg of your marathon training you’re not about to puke. What about super tough workouts? There’s research that supports why your workouts shouldn’t be so hard. If your workout is too hard, you won’t get the boost of GH in your system. I’ve noticed in my own training when I’m doing grueling workouts day after day week after week I’m not getting the strength gains I expected to be getting when my workout leaves me depleted. Same with increasing the load. So this is why I don’t do extremely grueling workouts right now.
*Cool your body down quickly
Quickly bringing your body temperature back to what your baseline was starting the workout seems to give you an additional boost of GH. So if your temps remain elevated for long periods of time post workout then you probably won't get the second boost of GH the next night. This is why if you can take a cold shower post workout that could also help. I know some people like ice baths or walking outside in the cold with little clothing, a la the Wim Hoff method (cold therapy) that could also do some good for increasing GH.
And the increases of GH when you do these things have been reported in studies to be 300% to 500%! That’s major.
So hopefully you took away a few important points from this video. I hope that you’ll consider making your warm ups longer in addition to the other factors here. Let’s get after that growth hormone release!
See you in the next one :)
Ciao for now!
Thank you for reading!!
