#26 Weed and testosterone: what heavy use does to male hormones and how it recovers
Quit Smoking Weed | PodcastShow Notes
Weed and testosterone: the signalling chain from brain to testes, what heavy daily use does to it, and how much of it comes back after quitting.
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▬▬▬▬ In this episode ▬▬▬▬
Training regularly, eating decently, and still flat: no drive, no progress, no appetite for much. The blame usually lands on work, sleep or age. This episode covers the hormonal variable that rarely makes that list.
- The hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis as one continuous signalling chain, with cannabinoid receptors at all three stations. - Luteinizing hormone as the work order from the pituitary gland to the testes, and THC jamming the line. - Acute use lowering LH temporarily, daily use making that suppression persistent. - Whether cannabis moves testosterone at all is where the literature splits, and why pooling weekend users with daily heavy users hides the effect. - The consistent signal at the heavy end: use more than weekly linked to lower testosterone, chronic daily use to reductions in the range of ten to twenty percent. - Why a daily smoker with strong genetics still builds muscle, and what a chemical parking brake on the natural baseline means. - The second, indirect hit: most daily testosterone release happens during slow wave sleep, which chronic use degrades. - LH released in pulses synchronised with deep sleep, blunted or missed when that stage never properly arrives. - Nine hours of sleep and still needing a nap, the good sleep illusion. - Fertility as the least ambiguous data: lower sperm count, worse motility, altered morphology, and what each of those means. - Recovery of LH and testosterone typically within weeks to months, sperm parameters over roughly three months. - Why hormones get oversold as the explanation for feeling lazy, when dopamine down-regulation drives most of that. - The resilience phase from day five through about three weeks, when the interference is gone but nothing has rebooted yet.
This is general information, not medical advice.
▬▬▬▬ Chapters ▬▬▬▬
00:00 Training hard and still flat 01:06 The signalling chain from brain to testes 01:47 Headquarters, factory floor, work orders 02:28 THC jamming the phone lines 03:09 The guy who smokes daily and still lifts 03:49 Why the research looks contradictory 04:31 Where the signal actually shows up 05:11 The chemical parking brake 05:52 Sleep as the hormonal production window 06:33 LH pulses and slow wave sleep 07:55 The two-fold suppression 08:16 Fertility: count, motility, morphology 10:19 What recovers, and how fast 11:21 Testosterone is not the whole story 12:43 The resilience phase and the illusion
#weedandtestosterone #malehormones #quittingweed #fertility #cannabiswithdrawal
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