How a 40 yr old increased his testosterone 35% in 3-years | Vitality Blueprint & SUF NC

Become a nutrition coach w/ Show Up Fitness Nutrition Coaching Certification learning how to interpret blood panels w/ the Vitality Blueprint partnership while networking with RD's

A 40% testosterone increase in your 40s sounds like hype until you see the labs, the timeline, and the unsexy habits that actually move the needle. We walk through my blood work and why a “normal” total testosterone range can still leave you performing below your potential, especially when sleep, stress, body fat, and micronutrients are quietly dragging you down.

We also talk about our partnership with Vitality Blueprint and what changes when you stop relying on the standard 10 to 20 lab markers and start looking at 80+ markers with clear recommendations and scientific references. That bigger picture helps you avoid the common trap of getting sold on TRT as the first option. TRT can be the right call for some people, but we make a strong case for optimizing naturally first, using a structured test, plan, retest approach and working alongside medical professionals when needed.

You’ll hear practical strategies for testosterone optimization and longevity: lifting weights without fearing cardio, eating enough protein and healthy fats, improving vitamin D, managing cortisol, reducing alcohol, avoiding estrogen-like chemicals where possible, and building a sleep routine that actually works, including getting your phone out of the bedroom. If you’re a coach, we also get into how blood work and better systems can level up your service while keeping you in your lane.

Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s “fine” but tired, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway: what’s the one habit you’re changing first?

Want to become a SUCCESSFUL personal trainer? SUF-CPT is the FASTEST growing personal training certification in the world!

Want to ask us a question?  Email info@showupfitness.com with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
Become a Successful Personal Trainer Book Vol. 2 (Amazon): https://a.co/d/1aoRnqA
NASM / ACE / ISSA study guide: https://www.showupfitness.com

Transcript

Welcome And The 40% Claim

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Addio, welcome back to the Show of Fitness Podcast. How is it possible that a 40-year-old hunk was able to increase his testosterone 40% in a three-year period? Whereas from 30 to 40, the average person is losing one to two percent of total testosterone every year.

Why Testosterone And New Partnership

SPEAKER_00 0:19

We're gonna talk about testosterone today. We're gonna go over our new partnership with Vitality Blueprint. These are my lab reports three years ago when I went to a concierge doctor, $800, they took 50 markers. Vitality three years later, it's only 300 bucks. That's if you're going through the SUFNC and becoming a nutrition coach. But the cool thing about this is they take over 80. Your general practitioner is probably gonna draw blood maybe once a year, do 10 to 20 markers, and you're gonna get an email back that says, cool, you're okay. As coaches, we should be able to give more information staying in our lane. But with a nutrition coach, with therapists and doctors on your team, we can dive a lot deeper

What Testosterone Really Does

SPEAKER_00 1:05

into the stuff. And that's what I'm gonna do today. Testosterone is an anabolic hormone. Girls have it, guys have it. Men produce it in our adrenal glands as well as our testes. Girls, you don't have testes, your adrenal glands. So, this is a really cool anabolic hormone that gives us libido, that helps our bones, that helps optimize muscle protein synthesis. Testosterone has a negative effect because we think of all the jack bodybuilders, Arnold, and we just associate it with muscles. There's a ton of cool characteristics that you will get when you optimize your testosterone. Now, with our partnership with Vitality, the cool thing is as a coach, you get one free test, you're gonna go get your blood drawn at Quest. Within a week or so, you're gonna get the results back. And here's the breakdown. I did a call with one of the founders, Dan Gardner, also Dr. Galpin. We did a podcast with him, he's a co-founder as well. And Dan was saying that 85%, that's an A. His NNA fighters are getting that, and that's what he's striving for. So I'm basically a hunk. I'm just joking, but that's my score. So we're gonna take a look at the blood work, and these are my results. 80 of them that they're gonna look at. Today, specifically, we're just gonna take a look at testosterone.

Lab Ranges And The TRT Pitch

SPEAKER_00 2:16

The normal range, this is when it gets confusing. 250 to 1100. When I went to that medical concierge doc, he told me, Chris, you are at 390. That is low. Imagine if you're walking up a hill, you're in ninth place. How does that make you feel? And guess what he pitched to me? You gotta go on TRT. Every week you're taking shots, you gotta come back in, you gotta pay us a bunch of money. I'm okay, doc. I'm gonna try to do it naturally. So I'm gonna go over some things that I did, but also better educate you on why this number is so important. And we're not just looking at one number, it's in totality. These other markers that I'm not gonna review today, they could play a role into that. So don't just get sold on some jack guy at the gym saying you gotta go on TRT, oh, you're in your 40s, you gotta go on TRT. Try it naturally first. There's so many cool things that we can do from a lifestyle standpoint, from a dietary as well as supplementary standpoint that can help you improve those numbers. One of the really cool things I like with this is they're gonna give you recommendations on things that you can do to increase that. Train regularly, prioritize zinc-rich foods. You could try some supplements like ashkawanda, probably pronounce that improperly. Ashquaganda, that's a hard word to say. Say it with me. Oshwaganda, there we go. I think I got it. But then they're also gonna give you other suggestions based off of science. So if you go down here, you'll see references. It's gonna give you scientific references on what the physiology of testosterone is so you can learn about this stuff, not just cherry-pick information. Why should we have higher than quote unquote normal levels of testosterone? Could you potentially have it too high? Should everyone just start doing all this stuff to increase their levels? Well, no. Anabolic means it grows. So if you were to start taking TRT or an anabolic agent without the supervision of a medical professional, you could have a benign or malignant tumor assist on your body or in your body, and now it's gonna grow. That's not good. As we age and go through this wonderful thing we call life, the shortest yet the longest thing that we will

The Real Causes Of The Decline

SPEAKER_00 4:29

ever do. Testosterone shoots up when we go through puberty. Young kids start getting hair, they start getting acne, talking all weird, doing weird shit. They're all slimy and gross. They're going through puberty, you get this huge influx, and then it starts coming down. Dudes are going to peak around 36, 38, ladies around 28, but we can avoid this decline. There's a lot of things that we're doing on a regular basis that's dropping it significantly. If we're not sleeping enough, two nights in a row, six and a half hours or less, your testosterone levels can drop as much as 50%. If we're not properly hydrated, the more excess adiposity that we have. Oop, that number comes down. Dudes, are you waking up with a morning fun zone? If you're not, start there. I don't mean go playing with yourself in the bathroom. I mean you should be waking up with a morning erection. That's a great telltale sign how your levels are doing. You may be thinking, I'm not going to talk to my clients about this stuff, but you should have it in your questionnaire as a nutrition coach. That's a conversation I'm having with my dudes. How many times a week do you wake up with a morning erection? Don't say boner or hard on. That's not professional. Use the scientific jargon. And for ladies, you can talk about sex drive. Because if there's no libido, it probably means our T levels are pretty low. So how can we increase them? If you want to nerd out in the science, National Library of Medicine, also have PMC PubMed down here. Great information to dissect. You're going to need to take some time reviewing this. Also suggest looking into Healthline. This is a board of medical professionals. You have Doc O'Carroll right here. He's an MD, but then you have an RD with her master's. Also has her CISSN, which is the International of Science and Sports Nutrition, which is the go-to for nutrition information. Talking about the eight ways to increase your testosterone. It's not from T Rex T over here, who has three million followers and all jacked out of his mind with hormone replacement therapy, giving you his anecdotes. This is backed by science.

Training Food Stress Vitamin D

SPEAKER_00 6:36

So here are some suggestions that they're going to go through, starting with exercising and lifting weights. Talking about, as I said earlier, testosterone has a key role with bone health. If we're not exercising regularly, our bone mineral density could be affected. If we have those excess levels of adiposity, that's going to make the body more inflamed. And we want to lower that. Guys, if you got your little beer belly in your pooch, that's from excess adiposity at visceral level. That's why guys are more prone to having coronary arteries disease versus women. Ladies are more prone to be storing it down here in the gynoid area. But by exercising regularly and specifically lifting weights, that's going to help increase your testosterone. Let's not go on the other side of the equation by saying stupid things like cardio lowers your testosterone. That's a crazy statement to make. You want heart health just as much as bicep health. So focus on both of them. Eat your protein, fats, and carbs. Fats are a huge component for the backbone for testosterone. Minimize stress and cortisol levels. This is really important, but also confusing. You can't just tell someone who doesn't know how to swim and they're drowning in the ocean, swim, buddy. So for people who are stressed out, you can't just say, stop stressing. Most of us are stressed out. We're on our phones, which leads into a lack of sleep, which drives our cortisol levels up. So then we get this nasty hormonal tornado that can be optimized by working on minimizing our stress, seeing a psychotherapist, exercising regularly, recognizing the patterns that drive more of that stress, and creating healthy habits instead of the poor habits would a lot of us choose. Eating processed, highly caloric foods, drinking too much, smoking, those are all going to play a role in lowering your testosterone levels. Increase your vitamin D intake. That was one of my levels that was low. Dan was like, holy crap, I can't believe your levels are at 530 because they could be significantly higher. I'm like, Dan, let's get me to 1500. And he kind of chuckled, but he's like, realistically, if we can increase your vitamin D levels, because mine were at 29, the low end being 30. So that was actually flagged for a risk. If we can get those levels elevated with supplementation, well then maybe we can get you at 650, maybe 700. So we're getting to the optimal output for my organism. It would be so easy just to start taking some TRT. My balls are gonna shrink to the size of raisins, and my body naturally is not gonna be making it. I don't want to take that shortcut. Nothing against those that do that to reach their own, but I'm gonna try to optimize it for my organism first. Vitamin D is huge, supplementation can absolutely increase that. Think of it as if your T levels are low and your vitamin D levels are low, you may feel fine. And that's a big thing, the feeling parts of it. I got plenty of energy, but you're also jacked up on caffeine and pre-workout all day long, nicotine, methane, phenamines, cocaine, who knows what you're doing. You're not optimizing your performance. So you could be averaging 30 or 40 points per game, but right now you're settling for 15 and you see that as I'm fine. But what if you doubled that? 50% increase in testosterone levels, that's pretty significant. I didn't have to do any shots or anything. I worked on it over a time period, three years, where the average person during this time frame, they're losing 2% annually. That's significant.

Supplements Without The Hype

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Consider taking supplements. The great thing about the app, they give you those recommendations. With our new partnership with First Form, I'm taking this microfactor. It gives you all your multivitamins, your antioxidants, your CoQ, which is good for your heart health, probiotic, your essential fatty acids, as well as a little fruit and vitamin green powder within that. They're gonna give you recommendations, but you can upload the supplement company that you believe in or you're working with, so you can also generate revenue. I know today in the world of supplementation, people freak out. I don't want to start taking this stuff. We just had a call with one of our RDs and she's food first. But if we can bridge that gap by taking some supplements, why not? And if there's an opportunity to work with one of these supplements companies, you can generate revenue. And working with clients over a year, three years, five years, that compound interest of them getting the supplements: protein, creatine, bars, beef sticks, greens, powders, vitamins, whatever it may be that you believe in that work well with your client, talking to your RD, over time you can make money. $1,000 a month, two, three, $5,000 per month because of these recommendations. I'm all for bettering the health and success for my clients. And if supplementation needs to go into that equation, that's okay because we're working alongside of a team. I'm not calling myself a macro coach and saying, oh, here's some vitamins and minerals. You got to take it from first form just because I said so. This is a very thorough process. If you want nutrition coaching, you got to train with me for a month first. That green light is turned on, so now we can talk about nutrition. You got to go get your blood drawn. When those results come back, I'm going to break those down with you and we can have our RD on the call as well to better serve you for your success. That's what nutrition coaching is all about. Not just throwing blanket macro calculations out there at clients. You're giving them a step-by-step approach to optimize their longevity. That's a big word today: longevity. Use it. You're gonna live longer by recognizing where you're not performing optimally. Your body, the physiology, if you're not getting tested at least annually. Dan does it with his athletes every three months. I suggest biannually. So you do it on day one, day 180, and it's cool because it tracks it for you. How's your sleep? This is the biggest crushing effect on your testosterone levels. Less than six and a half, your T levels are gonna be shocked. So let's get into a sleep routine. Are you on your phone? Where is your phone? I need my phone for my alarm clock. Shut the hell up. Put it in the other room. Go get one of the old school ones. Get a fucking quacking duck and put it on your bed. We depend on our phones, and that light is screwing up that melatonin production. When the sun comes down, melatonin should come up. But what are we doing? We're looking at Tinder and doing weird shit on all these sites today. We're just scrolling, we're getting the dopamine, but that light is saying, oh shit, it's actually not dark. So I can't sleep very well. Do it for a week. Black out lights, no light in your room. Don't watch TV. Bed is for three things. You sleep, you hump, and that's where you go when you're sick. That's it. So read somewhere else, get into a good mindset and optimize your sleep. This is a huge, huge thing that we don't address today because it's not sexy. One of the first things that I do as a nutrition coach, go through sleep and we have them take a stress questionnaire. And that gives me so much data. So as a nutrition coach, you're separating yourselves from all those coaches out there that incorporate this within their training. You should be getting paid for this, and that's exactly what this sets you up to do. And avoid estrogen-like chemicals. A lot of the microplastic, there's things that we can avoid using to optimize our testosterone. And last but not least, I don't like this one, but it's true, alcohol is not good for you. I'm Czechoslovakian. I'm Irish. It's part of my blood. I like to drink. But one of the things that I cut back on, drinking regularly. So I look at my week, these are four days I'm not drinking. If I choose to drink, I'm gonna drink on these days. But I challenge myself, I have to work out the next day. So your alcohol intake will have a dramatic impact negatively on your sleep, but also your testosterone. They don't have diasparic acid on here. That is an amino acid. And the interesting thing with the studies have shown with that is if my levels were at 390 and I took deasparic acid, you cycle on, like four weeks on, two weeks off, I could either dip, my T levels could go down, or my T levels could go up. So you have to be very mindful when supplementing with deasparic acid, dudes, because ladies, it doesn't work for you because of the hormones and the organs that we have. It may help. So really track your energy, your mindset, your morning yu-ha's. And if you start taking deasparic acid within the first 10 to 14 days, if you notice an increase, then cycle on and off it. If you don't, it actually might lower your testosterone. So just go off of it. It's only gonna be one month out of the six months, so it's not gonna have a dramatic impact. Worst case scenario, you're a non-responder, a negative responder, you dip down a little bit, you got five months to clean it back up. So it's really important to look at the things that we can do regularly, exercising, losing fat. What can we do to drop the excess adiposy that we have, optimize our sleep, address your stress? So, with stress, that outlet could be exercise. Maybe it's meditation. How can we calm down the sympathetic nervous system? Because if we're always on, blood pressure is gonna go up, other factors are gonna be affected as well. We have to have better outlets for stress management. Again, why not have a therapist? I'm not talking about physical therapist, because you absolutely should, a psychotherapist. Get into the mind, figure out mommy and daddy issues, all that fun stuff. Why don't you like to talk to me? I want to talk about my emotions. Yes, we should. Just giving you shit. But, dude, specifically, we don't do that. So we bottle it up. It's like in Taladega nights, you know, just stuff that down. Don't ever come up again. Just keep it down as far as you can. That's not what we should be doing, dudes. We should be learning how to better communicate, regulate our emotions. And these are things that a psychologist can definitely help you with. Learn to talk about this stuff. And you're gonna find that your stress levels go down, T levels are gonna

Blood Work As A Coaching Edge

SPEAKER_00 16:58

shoot up. So let's go back to the vitality blueprint. And again, why we're such big fans of this is because this report right here, you look at the report that I had from this. I got a paper. It's like, okay, high, high, okay. At this time I had elevated LDL levels. I worked on that. Now they're in the normal range. This is the check mark for your success. Paper, I don't like that. 800 bucks trying to sell me on TRT. Here, nice, pretty technology looking at the metrics, giving you a protocol, educating you about things that you can do to improve this. I think that blood work is a huge missing point today. And if you're a trainer in the front line of defense and you're not doing blood pressure and blood work, you can't see the force for the trees. I love that saying back in the 1500s over there in England, John Hayward coined that term. It means we're focusing too much on the small details. We got to draw it out. We just got to lift weights two times a week and you're gonna be good. Well, let me talk about nutrition within the session. No, you got to take a step back. When I train you, we train, but we're also gonna talk about nutrition. That's an additional service. I went through this course to get certified as a nutrition coach. I now have an RD on my team. I work with a blood blueprint company that sets you up for success because we're managing performance, longevity. You're gonna check your blood on day one, every six months. If you want to do it every three months, you can. You incorporate this into your nutrition coaching package. And that's how you can charge 500 plus per month. Trainers are missing out on extra money by not charging for nutrition, and this is gonna set you up for success. When you sign up for the SUFNC, you get access to this. You get a free blood draw, which again, normally 300 bucks. You're gonna get a coaching panel. So it's just gonna be specific to you and your clients. This is the individual, like I'm a consumer panel. As a coach, you have your own panel, you have all your clients, you click on them, you get to see all their labs, which is so cool. But you gotta level yourself up on this stuff. LDL, what's the normal range? Less than 100, greater than 130 is bad. Again, we're not telling our clients, go on medication, but if we want to bridge the gap between fitness influencers and medical professionals, we have to be practicing more over here. Having the conversation with the doctor, yeah, I did a review on my client's blood chemistry, and their C reactive protein was kind of high, their LDLs were kind of high, blood glucose was kind of high. Also, they're like, whoa, what the heck? Are you like a med student or what's going on here? No, I'm a trainer. I'm just a dumb old trainer, but I'm not the average trainer. I've gone through a program that really sets you up for success working with medical professionals. That's why I have an RD on my team, a physical therapist. Hey, doc, who's your trainer? Oh, you should come into my studio, take you through a workout. We can talk more about this stuff. Have you had your blood drawn recently? Oh, doc, are you just doing those 10, 20 lab results that you guys are doing? Oh, come on, doc, you gotta level yourself up. Get these 80 done. Let's take a look at these. I'll explain some of these to you. The doc's like, what the hell did I miss out in med school? Who the hell are you? That's a really cool bell buckle, by the way. We are now practicing more as medical professionals. Trainers want to be respected. This is what you need to be able to articulate and help your clients move the needle so they feel better, they move better, they're out of pain, and their physiology is performing at the level where they should be, not way down

Final Takeaway And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 20:37

here. And remember big biceps are better than small ones and keep showing up.