If there is one thing that you need to have in place if you are going to see optimal results with your workout program and being able to elevate your testosterone levels, good recovery is it.

Make no mistake, you can’t take this lightly.

Now I know many of you are highly motivated to get into the gym and train hard.

And that is GREAT. There is nothing I love more than meeting very motivated people.

But there is a catch.

If you train too hard, too often, especially as you get older and beyond the age of 40, it will come back to haunt you.

Let me share with you a little story of myself.

Back in my 20’s, I used to hit the gym daily. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Six, if not seven days a week, I was in the gym, going hard. For a while, it worked great. I saw progress, it fed my need for gym time, and I was happy as could be.

In my 30’s though, my gains started to slow. My body got used to this style of training and soon, I wasn’t seeing the progress I was before. In fact, I started losing progress.

You can imagine how devastating this was. I knew something had to change, but yet, I wasn’t quite ready to face it yet.

My love of the gym kept me going more often than I should all through my 30’s until my 40’s hit and I was forced to slow down.

Muscle aches, joint pain, and lack of motivation all started to set in, not to mention I just wasn’t progressing. Frustrating as it was, now it was time to change something.

It was during my 40’s I learned the importance of enough recovery for muscle growth, fat loss, and optimization of testosterone.

Many people think that being recovered just means eating well, when really, it also means sleeping well, resting up, and creating a stress-free environment as well. If you’re highly stressed each day, you can rest assured you are not getting the recovery that you hope you are.

Keep in mind your body can only take so much intensity when it comes to exercise.

If you are doing hard strength training sessions each week, you can’t also be doing multiple interval training workouts and metabolic conditioning as well. Something has to give.

When the body isn’t in a recovered state, you’ll be producing more cortisol than normal and cortisol is essentially opposite that of testosterone.

So in the end, your testosterone levels decline, which causes fat to be gained and muscle to be lost.

All that ‘hard’ training you thought you were doing is actually working against you. It’s not just your muscles that need adequate rest.

We all know the 48 hour rule: you must let a muscle rest for 48 hours before working it again. While this is great, it doesn’t take into account the CNS. Your central nervous system also needs a rest as well. Any sort of intense exercise is going to stress your CNS.