Over the last few years it’s become increasingly obvious that certain populations in the functional fitness space aren’t competing naturally. In fact, a growing list of athletes being banned from the Games for doping highlights this fact. While you might expect that many top athletes are using PEDs, you might be surprised to learn that PED usage is probably just as common at the local level. In this article we are going to talk about some of these issues, look at some interesting research, and talk about some methods to naturally increase your testosterone. Keep reading for more.
Before we get into the details, I want to say that nothing in this article is meant to assist you in taking any substances. I’m not a medical doctor, and I don’t personally recommend being your own endocrinologist. This article is going to cover some relevant research and give you some options to increase your testosterone without pharmacological intervention.
How Common Are PEDs Used in Functional Fitness?
The quick answer is more common than you might have thought. A few weeks ago, I was doing some background research for an article, when I came across this piece of research entitled, “Physiological differences between advanced CrossFit athletes, recreational CrossFit participants, and physically-active adults.”
These researchers compared three types of athletes: Games/Sanctional level athletes (ADV), locally competitive athletes (REC), and generic gym goers (CON). They measured things like strength, anaerobic fitness, as well as various hormonal differences. Their conclusions aren’t particularly startling. News flash, top level athletes are stronger and in better shape. They have lower body fat and more muscle as well! But they did inadvertently reveal something interesting.
They measured all participants for their testosterone levels. They had four men, and four women in the advanced functional fitness group (ADV), several of which had participated in the Games on teams or individually. There were also four men, and four women, in the recreationally competitive (REC) functional fitness group. The control group (CON) of regular gym goers had four men, and three women. Now stay with me, these number are telling.
For those of you who aren’t nerds, I’ll break down these testosterone levels for you, and explain why they are highly suspicious. In the ADV group, the females have what we would expect to see for for T levels, while the men are off the chart. The advanced males show roughly 1400 ng/dl as an average for all four male advanced athletes. A normal testosterone limit for men is generally considered to be roughly 1000 ng/dl. These guys are roughly 40% higher than the top of the range!
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If we look at the recreationally competitive women, we can see that the average female has more testosterone than the average males!? Most males average around 500 ng/dl and the average for these women is about 600 ng/dl from the chart. In fact, this level of testosterone is so high that the Olympics would have excluded these women from competition a few years ago.
Is this 100% slam dunk PEDs usage? No, and here’s why. Given a large enough population you will see extreme outliers. Let’s use height as an example. If you tell me you’re seven feet tall, chances are that you’re using stilts. If we consider millions of people, then certainly some would be that tall.
It’s suspicious that when sampling less than 10 people that we see extremely high levels of testosterone in both men and women. While I’m not accusing them of anything, it is incredibly unlikely to find such naturally high readings.
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Does High Testosterone Help Athletes?
Within normal ranges there isn’t a whole lot of evidence that more testosterone helps athletes. If you are an average male athlete with a 500 ng/dl level, you aren’t likely to notice much if you went to 600 ng/dl. This is not necessarily the case when we start to talk about supra-physiological does of testosterone.
If you have double or triple a natural amount circulating in your system, you will certainly have advantages your competitors will not. Testosterone is anabolic, and it will help you build and maintain more muscle mass than you otherwise might, in such large doses. Of course there are side effects of abusing PEDs, which is why I don’t recommend you DIY your endocrine system.
However, there is some research that indicates that Ashwagandha extract can improve testosterone levels, and reduce cortisol levels as well. Will it triple your natural T levels? No, but it also isn’t likely to leave you with non functioning testes either! Let’s look at the research.
Ashwagandha’s Effects of Strength, Testosterone, and Muscle Mass
The sad fact is most testosterone boosters simply don’t work, but not all of them. We will review two studies on Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera dunal) and discuss it’s implication for functional fitness athletes (Amazon Affiliate Link).
In the first study, researchers recruited athletes from a local gym, and had them take 300mg of Ashwagandha twice daily. They participated in 8 weeks of standard bodybuilding style training that was fairly well designed. They measured their strength and muscle mass increase at the end of the study.
It should also be noted that this was double blind and placebo controlled, meaning that some participants got capsules that looked like Ashwagandha, but was not. That also means that neither the participants nor the researchers knew which group got which substance during the trial.
Ashwagandha Results on Strength and Muscle Mass
These athletes weren’t elite strength athletes but they were regular gym goers, and they showed some impressive gains. The Ashwagandha group crushed the placebo group both in muscle mass and strength gains. Check the chart out below.
Not only did Ashwagandha improve strength (Amazon Affiliate Link), and muscle mass, it also increased serum testosterone levels and decreased creatine kinase levels. Creatine Kinase (CK) is a biological recovery marker, the harder you work out the higher your CK levels are. Consequently, being able to keep CK lower means you can withstand more work.
This chart highlights that weight lifting alone will increase your testosterone. The group taking Ashwagandha showed a marked increase in T, and they were recovering better by the end of the trial, with much lower CK levels.
Lastly, the Ashwagandha group managed to decrease their body fat levels by an average of 3.47 percent, where as the placebo group decreased their levels by 1.52 percent. This isn’t unexpected in newer athletes, but I would be very interested if experienced strength athletes could gain muscle and lose fat with Ashwagandha.
Now that we know that Ashwagandha can improve strength and muscle mass, let’s take a look at what effect it has on endurance.
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Ashwagandha Effects on Endurance
This study examined the effects of Ashwagandha on endurance, and subjective measures of recovery. It was similarly well designed, as it was double blind, and placebo controlled. This study was also 8 weeks in length and they gave their trial subjects two 300mg doses twice daily.
The researchers found statistically significant increases in Vo2 max (measure of cardiovascular endurance), and a measurable increase in subjective feelings of recovery, and overall wellness (as measured by a questionnaire).
To my mind this is just as important as gaining strength and muscle mass. Functional fitness athletes put in very high training volumes. So much so that I would argue that increasing recovery might be more important than increasing performance, at least over a short term basis. Both studies also reported that Ashwagandha was well tolerated, with no harsh side effects. Obviously, I recommend discussing any supplement usage with your medical doctor.
Final Thoughts
It seems obvious to me that PEDs are only becoming more popular both with local athletes and top ranked functional fitness athletes. Personally, I don’t care what someone does to their body, that is their decision, and they must live with the consequences. However, it is important to recognize that the performance and appearance that these athletes attain will not be attainable for those of us who don’t make those same decisions. We need to recalibrate our expectations.
We also need to realize that there are natural ways to increase our performance and recovery with Ashwagandha. While these research results look promising, they are averages for all participants. That means some athletes did even better than these averages, and some may not have shown any effect from Ashwagandha. If you are interested in trying it, you might try this brand of Ashwagandha Extract (Amazon Affiliate link). It has over 30,000 positive reviews on Amazon, and as of this writing is less than $20 for a two month supply.
At the end of the day we need to realize that much of this doesn’t matter. You should seek to compete against yourself, striving to be just 1% better than you were yesterday. What other athletes do or don’t do shouldn’t affect your fitness. Now get out there and get training!
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You have to be careful with statistics (which means, with almost every study that comes out).
The sample size in this particular study is too small for the study to mean… anything at all. Really, there’s no value to this at all (other than publicity for the study authors, who should – and probably do – know that this isn’t meaningful).
For a statistically valid sample, they’d need to sample a minimum of 30 males and a minimum of 30 females in each group. (It actually gets more complicated than this, but 30 is considered the standard minimum for a sample to be statistically valid). Even with those numbers, that just means that the results are likely to be representative roughly 19 out of 20 times – which means that you could still get results that don’t mean anything, it’s just not very likely.
So, with only 4 people in each group? The numbers truly are useless for inferring anything about the general population. They may tell you that some of the specific people included may (or may not) be doping, but they don’t tell us anything at all about the field in general.
If you’ve never taken a formal course in statistics, I recommend you read Statistics for Dummies or something similar (I’ve read it, and it’s good). You don’t have to finish the whole thing, but it will give you at least some idea of how useless the stats in most articles (and many studies) is.
If you want to dig deeper on just how common bad statistics are in academic papers, look up Andrew Gelman and read some of his works. You’ll quickly lose faith in most everything you read about 🙂 But that will place your faith in it where it really should be – just about every scientific study you read about should be taken with a shaker full of salt unless/until you dig into the numbers yourself, or see it analyzed by someone credible (like Gelman).
That’s sort of the whole point. The odds of a small sample demonstrating an extreme outlier are very low.