Derek (More Plates More Dates)

Those things all factor into how much of an impact the androgen has after binding to the receptor.

So just because you have less testosterone than the next guy, it doesn't necessarily even mean that you have less muscle growth potential or less bone support capacity or less neurological support.

It's not guaranteed any of these things based on absolute values.

It should be a combination of symptoms as well as blood values.

But oftentimes, too, the blood values should be superseded by symptoms in some cases, too, because you'll have some individuals who have insensitivity at the AR.

So it's not just about how sensitive are you and can you get away with lower testosterone.

Some guys need higher testosterone to be able to actually function well, and they might otherwise be told, oh, you know.

You don't need testosterone.

Your total testosterone is 900, but they might have a super high sex hormone binding globulin that's gobbing it all up and they have a low free testosterone or their actual receptor activity after binding is like subpar or they have a gene mutation that inhibits the actual activity of it.

And that's where you get into some of these convoluted cases with like the Olympic boxer and like we're not going to go down that road, but some of these individuals who like

You know, there's a spectrum of androgenic activity that is influenced not just by the total levels on paper, but it is very much dictated by your actual response to the hormone too.

In general, it's very crude the way they assess if you are one of...

the individuals on this like spectrum of androgen insensitivity it's literally like manual assessment essentially of like your gonadal development which is like kind of uh you know demeaning potentially if you're somebody who is like already obviously insecure about what's happening and then you're just subjected to some sort of like subjective analysis of like an expert who determines if you've had sufficient enough like male sexual secondary characteristic development

But in general, there are proxies for activity.

And, you know, if you're somebody who has...

Like if you looked at blood work, for example, some individuals think, oh, the guy with a natural like 1300 total T, that's probably great.

That guy is like an outlier genetic phenom.

Oftentimes it's a reflection of some sort of problem.

Like they need to produce more to reach adequate activity.

So like sometimes the body is screaming at the testes because it's not getting adequate production to do what it needs to do.