Dr. Duncan French

Likewise, likewise.

Thank you.

I don't often have many Stanford professors in the Performance Institute, so I'm really excited.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a stress response, right?

It's mechanical stress and it's metabolic stress.

And these are, you know, the downstream regulation of testosterone release at the gonads comes from many different areas.

You know, my work primarily looked at, you know, catecholamines and sympathetic arousal.

Yeah, epinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, how they were signaling cascade using the HPA axis, releasing cortisol, and then looking at how that also influenced the adrenal medulla to release androgens and then signaling that at the gonads.

Absolutely.

I mean, that is the only area of testosterone release for females.

And yes, it's the same downstream cascade.

Obviously, the extent to which it happens is significantly less in females.

But there's good data out there that shows

know females can increase their anabolic environment their internal anabolic milieu um using resistance training as a stressor and then they get the consequent muscle tissue growth um you know whether it's tendon ligament adaptations you know the the beneficial consequences of resistance training which is driven by anabolic stimuli yeah i have two questions about that the first one is something that you mentioned which is that the

The field is divided presently in as much as understanding the acute adrenergic response in terms of anabolic response to exercise in an acute phase and the exposure to...

a stimulus that is stress-driven, which might be partly from the adrenal glands, partly from the gonads, versus a longitudinal exposure to anabolic environments, which is primarily driven by, obviously, the gonads and the release, the endocrine environment from testosterone release at the gonads.

So the field is split in terms of how exercise is promoting hypertrophy, muscle tissue growth, and whether that is very much an adrenal stimuli or if that's significant enough in these acute responses versus the longitudinal exposure, just elevated basal levels of anabolic testosterone habitual levels.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the testosterone hormone is, I mean, listen, there's androgen receptors on neural tissue, on neural axons.

Exactly.