Cafe Body

It’s no secret – testosterone can be the key to unlocking the physique of your dreams. This hormone is responsible not only for pushing you through puberty, but also enhancing the growth and development of your muscles. In fact, research has shown that testosterone may have significant impacts on both muscle building and fat loss; according to a study from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that increases in testosterone not only led to greater lean muscle mass, but lower concentrations of abdominal and whole-body fat mass (1).

But you can’t just start injecting testosterone without experiencing problems – legal and otherwise. However, there are many testosterone-boosting supplements available, with a wide array of ingredients purported to create favorable hormonal environments for anabolism. Unfortunately, those can be quite expensive. Thankfully, you may be able to increase testosterone levels dramatically while using something you may already be supplementing – amino acids.

Specifically, the amino acid taurine appears to be able to spur increases not only in testosterone levels, but in production of luteinizing hormone, which is responsible for stimulating testosterone production. A study published in the July 2010 edition of Amino Acids found that five weeks of taurine supplementation triggered a 100 percent increase in testosterone levels. It is worth nothing, though, that this research was performed in rats, so you may not experience the same results (2). However, amino acid supplementation has other advantages, so it may be worth a shot.

SOURCES:

1. S Bhasin et al. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2007; 92(3):1049-1057

2. J Wang et al. Amino Acids, 2010; 39(1):155-160

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