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How many milligrams of Testosterone do men naturally produce?

3-10 milligrams per day, with the average being 6-7 milligrams per day.

When bodybuilders refer to Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) dosages theyll often state that 200 milligrams is a therapeutic dosage.

This is typically not a therapeutic dosage at all, and is more like a small supraphysiological cycle being used year round.

A therapeutic dosage of Testosterone is a dosage that would bring serum Total and Free Testosterone levels in the blood up to what you would produce naturally if you werent hypogonadal.

Delving into the clinical data, we can see that the true milligram equivalent is actually far less than that.

Before delving in deeper, keep in mind that ester weight and the milligram amount per milliliter stated on the vial of your prescription doesn't necessarily equate to how many milligrams of Testosterone per milliliter your product truly contains. Let me elaborate on that.

Testosterone is the principal circulating androgen.

In men, it is secreted primarily by the Leydig cells in the testes at a daily production of about 6-7 mg [R].

Other clinical data corroborates this as well.

A more broad and accurate range is 3-10 mg per day [R], but in general, the average daily production is approximately 6-7 mg per day in healthy men.

The difference between 3 mg per day and 10 mg per day is massive, as you would logically conclude.

However, this is not reflected in the therapeutic reference ranges you will see in your blood work.

Depending on the lab, the healthy range of natural Testosterone production could be as low as 240 ng/dL on the bottom, and 1000 ng/dL on the high end.

Some labs are even worse.

It doesnt take a rocket scientist to realize that a Testosterone level 4x higher will not equate to the same quality of life, muscle building potential, etc.

However, 90% of doctors still are so far behind the curve that they truly believe that a 250 ng/dL Testosterone level is just as good as a 1000 ng/dL Testosterone level.

Based on the daily average production in milligrams, we can calculate that weekly the average healthy male produces between 42 to 49 mg per week.

A ton of men using 200 mg per week probably think that number is far too low and isnt accurate.

However, what a lot of guys don't consider is that the ester itself takes up a significant portion of the milligram content per milliliter.

After administering Testosterone, your body has to cleave the ester from the molecule to free up the Testosterone to actually be bioavailable in the body, and that ester accounts for a significant portion of that milligram/milliliter amount.

The only exception to this is Testosterone Base and Testosterone Suspension, which are just straight up Testosterone products with no ester attached, but you would never get a prescription for that as the half-life is so short it would require multiple administrations per day.

The Cypionate ester has a high molecular weight and accounts for 30% of the milligram total stated on a TRT prescription.

For example, if your TRT prescription was 200 mg of Testosterone Cypionate every week, despite the vial being labeled as 200 mg/ml, the Cypionate esters molecular weight takes up 30% of that mg content, and cleaving the ester from the Testosterone molecule in the body leaves only 140 mg/ml, which is 70% of the stated label dosage.

There are vastly different perspectives on hormone levels in the TRT community and the bodybuilding community.

There are many men (mostly bodybuilders) who believe that 200 mg per week is the bare minimum for high-end TRT, and dosages of 250 mg or even 300 mg per week are justified as within the realm of natural production still.

There are doctors who will corroborate this too, which to me is pretty baffling.

Very, very seldom does somebody actually need 200 mg a week to maintain the equivalent of healthy endogenous production.

Usually, those guys are essentially running a cycle year-round.

This is something Ive been saying for a while now, as I used to actually believe that 200 mg per week was therapeutic (until I started really monitoring my blood work closely).

My TRT is currently 125 mg per week, and even that is pushing into supraphysiological territory when you actually split that shot into seven micro shots to keep more stable blood serum concentrations.

Splitting a large dosage/administration of 125 mg per week into 7 administrations/micro-doses of 18 mg per day increases Free Testosterone more relative to a large weekly dosage, decreases the amount of aromatization to Estrogen occurring in the body, and maintains more stable Testosterone blood serum concentrations.

Often times, doctors will prescribe their patients 100 200 mg of Testosterone Cypionate every 7-10 days, and then advise them to administer it in one giant dosage once per week, or even once every 2 weeks.

This is insane and reflects on how completely inept the majority of physicians are when it comes to hormone management.

When you administer yourself with a large dosage at once, you spike your Testosterone levels to supraphysiological levels, often 2x or even 3x as high as they should be for a few days, which obviously has an equivalent amount of aromatization occurring in parallel to this.

Following this, levels slowly crash down as hormone levels decline in the body, and often times patients will fall back down to the low end of the reference range while waiting for their next shot.

The end result is a constant roller coaster of fluctuating Testosterone levels going from way too high, to way too low, over and over again, with far too much Estrogen aromatization occurring, resulting in completely unnecessary side effects.

These side effects often then need to be mitigated with an Aromatase Inhibitor, which doctors know even less about how to prescribe and mange correctly, and will often crash their patients E2 levels into the ground and leave them feeling like complete trash and ruining their lipids.

AIs are not something you want to be on long term as they are not healthy, and E2 management can be done via lifestyle and diet changes more often than not in the context of therapeutic TRT.

There are constant arguments about what the optimal replacement dose of Testosterone is.

There's a small camp of guys who believe that 10 milligrams of Testosterone Propionate per day is ideal for most men, and I'm inclined to agree with them far more than the guys who believe that dosages as high as 200 mg per week are necessary.

This will of course vary depending on a variety of factors, but typically 10 mg of Testosterone Propionate per day will put an individual at top end of the Testosterone therapeutic range.

I find that when men talk about ideal dosages being closer to 125 150 200 mg per week, the ester weight often isn't taken into account (Cypionate, Enanthate, Propionate, etc. all have different molecular weights), and they are often individuals who administer large dosages at once, let their levels spike way above the therapeutic limit up to supraphysiological levels for a few days, and slowly crash underneath that until their next shot.

If you get your blood drawn during a trough and the results show that you have a 850 ng/dL Testosterone level, you may not be accounting for the fact that right after you administered your fat weekly (or even bi-weekly) dosage, your levels probably skyrocketed upwards of 1500 ng/dL.

I found this statistic very interesting as 50 milligrams a week really is not much whatsoever in contrast to what most guys are injecting weekly believing they are just replacing their natural production.

There are a lot of massive bodybuilders, including IFBB pros, who maintain massive physiques in the off-season and in retirement with just 200 mg of Testosterone per week.

They're able to maintain physiques that are blatantly not maintainable naturally.

If top bodybuilders who are pros at 240 pounds plus are maintaining those physiques with just 200 mg per week, its pretty transparent that the 200 mg per week dosage is actually more than the therapeutic amount in most situations, and the clinical data backs this up.

Personally, I used to believe I needed 200 mg per week to maintain my physique, and I was SO wrong.

200 mg per week for most individuals is the equivalent of running a cycle year round, and certainly is not therapeutic in any capacity.

There are caveats to this, with SHBG, ester choice, body composition, diet, lifestyle factors, and many other things playing a significant role in how much Testosterone actually becomes usable in the body, consequently influencing how large of a dosage an individual would need to achieve healthy Free Testosterone levels.

But in general, true therapeutic TRT would be as simple as replicating the natural daily production of 6-7 mg with an exogenous source after factoring in the ester weight.

P.S. I do all of my daily TRT injections with an insulin pin now in my glutes and ventro glutes.

With such a low volume of daily oil, its something I can get away with daily without creating a lump of oil that doesnt absorb properly, which would occur if you tried to jab a large amount of oil too shallowly with a short needle.

No more harpoons for me.

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Intense physical activity may not be as helpful in losing weight as you may hope. Catherine Falls/Getty Images hide caption

Intense physical activity may not be as helpful in losing weight as you may hope.

It's an eternal question: What diet is best for weight loss? Or, what should we eat (or avoid) to stay healthy?

Devotees of paleo or keto will talk your ear off about why their diet is the most sensible. People choosing vegan diets (no animal products, including dairy) make a compelling case for both personal and global health.

Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, argues that human metabolism has evolved to the point where how we eat and expend our calories is more important than all of our collective obsession with what to eat.

In his new book, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy and Lose Weight, Pontzer breaks down the science of metabolism and shares tales from his work studying caloric expenditure among hunter-gatherer societies.

One of the most startling findings is the notion of constrained daily energy expenditure. This is the idea that the human metabolism adapts to our activity levels to keep our daily calorie burn in a surprisingly narrow range no matter how hard you work out. But don't let that depressing fact hold you back from the gym it's crucial that you still get daily exercise for weight maintenance and overall health.

This interview with Pontzer is adapted from an interview for Public Radio Tulsa's Medical Monday program and has been edited for length and clarity.

In your book you debunk the common metaphor we use for caloric expenditure an engine or a machine. You say it would be more accurate to compare it to running a business. Why is that?

The engine view gets a few things right. We put fuel into our bodies in the form of food. And we do burn it off in all the tasks that our body does, the way that an engine burns fuel.

But an engine, like the engine in your car, doesn't get to decide how it burns the fuel. A car's energy burn is all about how hard you step on the gas pedal. Your body isn't like that. Your body is more like a business, as it has an overall goal like any business does. The overall goal of your body is to survive and reproduce, because that's what every organism has evolved to do. But there are many parts and pieces and departments that are in the service of that overall goal.

In a business you have finance, sales, human resources and security and everything else. It's the same with your body. You've got all these different organ systems that all work together. And like a business, when income is low, you can juggle things around. So you spend less on this or that task. And when things are good, you can ramp up the energy that you spend on different tasks. And so that kind of juggling or prioritization that businesses do is the same that your body can do with how it spends calories.

One fallacy with the engine model of calorie burning is we think, OK, I've got to burn more calories than I take in, either by eating less or exercising more or both. But as you point out, the metabolism adjusts, and it becomes harder to lose weight. So even though exercise isn't really a great weight-loss strategy, it's still very important for your overall health, right?

That's exactly right. If you're more physically active, eventually you don't burn more calories a day, but you change the way your calories are spent. If you spend your calories on exercise, what that means is you're spending fewer calories on other tasks.

And for most of us, that's a really good thing, because if we spend less energy, for example, on inflammation, we reduce our inflammation levels. If we spend less energy on stress reactivity, for example, our cortisol levels don't go up as high and our adrenaline levels don't go up as high, we achieve lower levels of stress response. And it seems that that exercise might also help keep testosterone for men or estrogen levels for women at a slightly healthier level. So that adjustment, that metabolic adjustment that we make is one of the reasons exercise is so good for us.

You've done extensive research with modern-day hunter-gatherers, like the Hadza people of Tanzania to better understand how human metabolism works. What did you learn?

The Hadza, to this day, don't have any domesticated crops or animals or machines or guns or electricity or anything like that. They live in grass houses in the open savanna in northern Tanzania. And every morning they wake up and women are off to get plant foods, such as berries and tubers. The men go off to hunt for a wild game using bow and arrow.

For somebody like me who studies how humans evolved, a community like that is just an invaluable way to ask what hunting and gathering does to our bodies. Because we humans evolved over millennia as a hunting and gathering species. And yes in a population like that, food can be scarce sometimes. And you're always spending lots of energy on physical activity. So your body really has to be good at prioritizing how it spends its calories.

The Hadza walk everywhere they go, and compared to us, are seldom sedentary. I'd assume they burn significantly more calories than we do in a day. Yet surprisingly, your work shows that their metabolism isn't all that different from the average American.

About 10 years ago, we went and measured how many calories men and women in the Hadza community burn every day. The Hadza are so physically active, we'd expect that their total calories burned every day would be much higher than we see in the U.S. and Europe and other industrialized populations. And instead, what we found was that actually, even though men are getting 19,000 steps today, women are getting 13,000 steps a day on top of all the other work they do, they aren't burning more total calories every day than we are in the West.

Physical activity ends up being another one of those things that the body can juggle and adjust. And so in the same way that your body can adjust to changes in your food environment, your body can adjust to changes in your physical activity. So for the Hadza, their "metabolic business" has adjusted so that they spend less on other body systems to make room for that big physical activity workload that they have.

What does this mean for someone who is trying to lose weight today?

If you or I started an exercise program tomorrow, we will burn extra calories from that exercise for a while. But after a couple of months, our bodies will adjust so that we're spending about the same energy every day as we were before we started the exercise. Your body adjusts how it spends its energy to keep the total calories burned every day within a relatively narrow range. It just speaks to how adaptable and flexible our bodies are and how we're not really in charge of our metabolisms the way we think.

You include a section in the book about the TV show The Biggest Loser in which contestants competed to see who could lose the most weight. What was the problem with that?

Contestants went on this show and were put under a brutal routine of intense exercise, coupled with near starvation. You can lose a lot of weight that way. But it's not sustainable. Your body pushes back hard by slashing its metabolic rate. Some of those contestants have been followed for years afterward. The folks that have been able to keep the weight off still have lowered metabolic rates from what they went through. A lot of the contestants gained the weight back.

It goes to show you the way to fix the obesity crisis societally or [to lose and keep weight off] individually is not some big, drastic crash approach. You've got to go more sustainably than that because the body will just push back if you push too hard.

So if your goal is to lose weight, nutrition will offer the bigger impact than exercise. But for maintenance of healthy weight, that's where exercise is essential?

That's right. Let's rethink what exercise is doing. I call it the rhythm section of your body. Exercise keeps everything on the same page, on the same beat, and it helps regulate how your body works. And so once you get to a healthier weight, once you are able to lose weight and get to a set point where you want to be, exercise is really key in keeping yourself there. Exercise changes the way that your body regulates how hungry you feel or how full you feel.

The paleo diet is based on the idea that when we were all hunter-gatherers, we ate a certain way, and we didn't have problems with obesity or Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure. But based on your study of the Hadza, what is it that the paleo folks get wrong?

If you go out and have a chance to live with a group like the Hadza, you realize that a lot of the stories we tell ourselves about the past, including things like the paleo diet, just kind of fall apart. So there's this idea in the paleo diet world that there's one sort of single natural human diet, and that diet was very meat heavy, hardly any carbs at all and certainly no sugars.

[In reality] the Hadza have a mix of plants and animals in their diets. It changes day to day and year to year, but about half of the calories are coming from plants. And not only that but actually something like 10[%] to 20% of their calories every day comes from wild honey, which is just sugar and water, you know, which it would not be on any paleo diet person's menu. Another big part of their diet is the starchy tubers and these root vegetables, which you often aren't allowed to eat on some version of the paleo diet.

One last thing that stunned me from your book: You write about the metabolic cost of pregnancy comparing pregnant women to Tour de France riders.

You can push the body as in the Tour de France, where riders burn 7,000 or 8,000 calories a day for three weeks. But it also makes sense that pregnancy is pushing the same metabolic limits as something like the Tour de France. They both run your body's metabolic machinery at full blast for as long as it can keep it up. It just speaks to how taxing pregnancy is, for one thing, but it also speaks to how these things are all connected. Our energetic machinery gets co-opted into these different tasks and makes connections that unite all of these different experiences.

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How Humans Really Burn Calories And What That Means For Losing Weight : Shots - Health News - NPR