Training and Hormones

Your training needs to be of higher intensity if you want elevate many of the hormones involved in reshaping your body. The training needs to be of high enough force/power output to recruit a large number of muscles and a large percentage of those muscle fibers. What does this mean? Well, of course this is relative to your fitness level, but it usually involves lifting a weight heavier than 10 pounds or strolling on the treadmill.

Your training needs to involve some sort of strength training or power training, like sprinting. It needs to involve all the large muscle groups and needs to be done using enough resistance to use the larger fibers (type 2) in the muscles. When this is done, important muscle-building hormones, such as Testosterone, Growth Hormone, and Insulin-Like Growth Factor rise in the blood after your workout. Other hormones, such as Epinephrine, increase, too and prolong the elevated metabolism that is associated with high-intensity training.

Lower-intensity exercise, while providing other health benefits, doesn't have the same impact that higher intensity training does on changing your body composition. Lower-intensity exercise is important, but a good training program will have a good balance of high and low- intensity exercise training.