Obstructive Sleep Apnea Is Associated with Low Testosterone Levels
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
If you think you are having trouble breathing at night or are sleepy all the time please consider looking into whether you have sleep apnea. It's very common, has many serious systemic health consequences, and can be easily treatable. I wrote a blog post about my experience with diagnosis and treatment here: http://www.somebits.com/weblog/life/cpap-obstructive-sleep-a...
I bought a travelling battery (lithium-ion pack) and it lasts about two nights and can re-charge from a cigarette lighter.
Normally turn off the humidifier when I am using portable power.
The funny thing about my obstructive sleep apnea is I didn't think I was having trouble sleeping. I'd sleep 8 hours and have no memory of any problems. In reality I was gasping for breath every 50 seconds, all night.
Note I had no symptoms during the day (even when jogging or weightlifting). In my case it's induced by dust mites and there is no good defense against this except asthma medication.
There are also people with sleeping problems due to silent reflux.
If you feel you're clearing your throat often, burp a lot or lacking air, check for those two.
I used to think (or I believe was told), that two cups and no more before noon is ok, but found my sleep was just an utter mess. I tried everything , sleep test, black out curtains, magnesium, CBD oil, melatonin, yet it never occurred to me it could be coffee as I never drank it outside of the morning.
I cut out caffeine completely. Had a horrible withdrawal; headache from hell, back ache , neck ache, everything ache, but then around day 6 or 7 I did something I had not done in years - slept all night AND had a vivid dream (showing I was in deep REM sleep).
Poor sleep can also be caused by stress/anxiety/depression, or just poor sleep hygiene.
Wouldn't obesity more a factor than a sleep apnea for testosterone levels?
It's definitely true that getting fat constricts your airways. When you lose weight, your tongue actually gets smaller, letting through more air. This is basically the same idea as losing weight in your feet and your shoes fitting differently -- weight gain or loss happens all over.
But the converse is also a problem: when you can't breathe at night, your body is under stress, and that can lead to overeating during the day.
There is some connection between the hormones lectin and ghrelin and lack of sleep. Not sure what the best reference is but I googled and found a few articles:
By the way, professional body builders who go to the gym a couple times per week, increase their diet, optimize their diet, etc. are happy to gain 2,5kg of muscle a year.
So no, muscle gain has nothing to do with weight gain/loss. Successful diets are a lot faster, and most exercise based programs fail in studies.
No matter if you are trained or untrained, the number of muscle cells doesn't change. Only the amount of muscle fibers inside the cells changes.
Also there is a difference in what kinds of muscle fibers are added, and which are removed or replaced by others. Some are better for endurance, others more for peak strength.
My main point is that it is impossible to gain muscle mass faster than you can loose body fat with a proper diet. A proper weight loss in my opinion starts at one kg a week. Extremely obese people should, with medical consultation, aim much higher, though. There is no way you can gain 52kg of muscle mass in a year. Also for shorter periods it doesn't add up.
I've never heard of a professional body builder, or any other athlete, who only went to the gym a couple times every week. The handful of semi-pro body builders I have known are more likely to be at the gym a couple times per day.
With consistency and the right approach you really can feel a sort of compounding effect on your body's hormonal output. It's important to have some intuition around nutrition, human physiology, and the necessity of rest also. The more muscle mass you have the easier it is to get lean quickly because your body just has more capacity to expend energy.
Do not listen to the lies on this website that movement and exercise are not an important part of the equation, but keep in mind that getting injured will derail you the most and should be avoided at all cost. Nutrition is easy if you consume a variety of natural foods (nothing out of a package or can) and get enough protein, which is possible also for vegetarians and vegans and I'd suggest it.
If you are fairly obese I would suggest by starting with regular short walks, as many as you can manage in a day, while eating as much as you need, as long as the ratio of calories from protein compared to those from carbs and fat is reasonable.
Equally, lower testosterone levels often result in diminished activity and less muscle mass, leading to weight gain.
But the primary cause of reduced testosterone is age. The trick to avoiding all of these problems is to not be old. Stay at 18 and you are less likely to suffer any of these things.
There are studies with millions of participants and by controlling for smoking, obesity, they still find increased risk and associations that are still very probably noise.fitting.
That's why they compared obese patients who have sleep apnoe to obese patients who don't.
No, not everybody who is obese has sleep apnoe.
(But maybe testosterone levels are way more tightly correlated than I realise, IANA anything relevant!)
You don't really notice it but it can mess up a lot of your health and it's not obvious...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/sexual-health/i...
[0] https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/60/11/145...
My boss woke me up at my desk as I was snoring away after lunch.
The wife complained I snored and also that I stopped breathing at night - driving home from work I nearly hit the road dividers a couple of times.
Went to a pulmonologist and got a home sleep study - it was eye opener.
The first night was horrific - felt like I was struggling to breath but the machine needed some calibration to up the start pressure.
The first month I used sleep tablets and wore the mask 30 minutes with the machine on before I went to actual sleep just to get used to it.
Biggest issue is mask comfort - tried different brands (the fittings are universal) and eventually settled on a F&P Eson 2.
Life changer for me.
People with apnea have reduced SWS, which is responsible for the release of growth hormone, which is tied to testosterone.
https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...
Meanwhile, the orthopedist I had seen for my shoulder suggested I try to correct the hunch I've developed from sitting at desks so that my shoulder doesn't heal in an awkward position. I had been doing that and noticed that every once in a while, I would sleep perfectly fine and wake up fully rested. This made me suspect this was a fixable problem and not some permanent feature of my anatomy.
After ~6 months of exercising and stretching to fix my shoulder hunch, I could finally sleep through a night and today I get better sleep than I can remember having in many years, without the CPAP. If you think you have sleep apnea, I'd recommend checking out r/posture on Reddit to see if you might have poor posture first. It can be really difficult and uncomfortable to fix if it's been developing for ~10-15 years like mine, but it's so worth it and there are a lot of other nice health benefits that come with it.