What “Optimizing Testosterone” Actually Means (It’s Not What the Supplement Industry Wants You to Think)

• The word “optimization” has been hijacked by the supplement industry to mean “raise your total testosterone number.” That is not what optimization is. Optimization is the alignment of how you feel, how you function, how you recover, and what your bloodwork shows – not the size of one number on one line of one lab.
• I have coached men with total testosterone of 720 who felt like garbage and men with total testosterone of 520 who felt like they were 25 again. Total T in isolation is one of the lower-resolution markers on the panel. Free T, SHBG, estradiol, prolactin, DHEA-S, and the metabolic context around them are what matter.
• The supplement industry sells optimization as a stack-and-number game because that is what they can charge for monthly. Real optimization is mostly free, mostly slow, and mostly invisible from outside until the second year.
• This article is the framework I use with every new client to decide what we are actually trying to change. It is the conversation I wish more men had before they spent their first $200 on a “T booster” they did not need.

“Optimizing testosterone” is a phrase that has been emptied of meaning in the last five years. I hear it from new clients in the first ten minutes of our conversation almost every time. I want to optimize my testosterone. When I ask what that means to them, the answer is almost always some version of “I want my total T higher.” When I ask what they expect that to give them, the answer is almost always some version of “I want to feel like I used to feel.”

Those are two completely different objectives. They sometimes overlap. They often do not. The premise of this entire article – and the premise of how I run client work at PowerandBulk.com – is that the second objective is the real one, and the first objective is a marker that sometimes correlates with the second one and sometimes does not.

This is a piece I have wanted to write for a while because the gap between what I do with clients and what the broader supplement industry sells under the same word has gotten wider every year. I had a conversation with Joey, a formulator I respect, about the inside of the industry that crystallized a few things I had been circling. This article is where I want to lay it out for the reader.

The Aaron Pell Problem

Let me start with the case I built this framework around. Aaron Pell came to me at 31. Financial planner in Denver, married, planning for his first kid. Looked great on paper, ate well, trained intelligently, lean and athletic. His total testosterone was 720 ng/dL. His doctor had told him he had the bloodwork of a 25-year-old.

And he felt awful.

His exact words to me were “I had the bloodwork of a 25-year-old and felt like a 60-year-old. I needed a coach who’d look past the headline number.” Slow recovery, brain fog, low libido despite a great relationship, motivation flattening. He came to me because his GP could not explain why he felt the way he felt when his total T was so good.

I ran a fuller panel. The full male hormone panel I run on every new client, not the abbreviated three-line version his GP had ordered. Aaron’s free testosterone was 8.4 pg/mL, which is genuinely low for a 31-year-old. His SHBG was 78 nmol/L, which is high end of range. His TSH was 3.4 with a low-normal free T3. His magnesium intake from food was near zero, his red blood cell magnesium was low. His estradiol was fine. His DHEA-S was fine.

Aaron’s total testosterone was 720 because his SHBG was binding most of it up where his receptors could not use it. His SHBG was high because of subclinical thyroid suppression, low magnesium intake, and a genetic tendency to run high. His thyroid was suppressed because of a years-long pattern of underfueling on training days, which is a thing I see in conscientious lean athletic men all the time.

I have written about Aaron’s case in detail in the SHBG piece. The relevant point for this article is the headline. If “optimizing Aaron’s testosterone” meant “raise his total T,” there was nothing to do. His total T was already excellent. He needed exactly the opposite of what most men think they need. He needed his SHBG to come down. The “T booster” stack the average supplement company would have sold him would have done nothing for his free T and might have made his SHBG worse.

We added boron 9 mg, magnesium glycinate at bedtime, addressed his thyroid nutrients, and pushed his caloric intake on training days. Four months later his SHBG was at 48, his free T was at 21.2 pg/mL, his thyroid markers were clean. His total testosterone had actually dropped to 680. By the supplement industry’s logic, Aaron had moved backward. By every measure that mattered to Aaron – sleep, recovery, libido, motivation, mood, gym performance – he had moved forward dramatically. His wife was pregnant by month eight.

What “Optimization” Actually Refers To

Optimization, properly defined, is the alignment of four things. The number on the lab. The feeling in the body. The function of the system over time. The long-term markers of health that predict how your sixties and seventies are going to go.

When these four things align, you are optimized. When one of them diverges from the others, you have a problem to solve. The problem is rarely the lab number itself. The problem is almost always somewhere upstream of the lab number, and the lab number is downstream evidence of it.

This is why I push so hard on the reference range versus optimal range framing. Reference ranges describe what is statistically common in a sick population. Optimal ranges describe what aligns lab numbers with how a healthy man actually feels and functions. The supplement industry sells products against reference ranges because that lets them define “low” as broadly as possible. I evaluate clients against optimal ranges because the goal is not to escape the bottom of a sick population’s distribution – it is to function like a healthy man.

Optimization is also temporal. It is not “what is your testosterone right now.” It is “what is your testosterone going to look like in five years if we continue the current trajectory.” A 41-year-old running a total T of 620 with declining SHBG, declining fasting insulin, improving lipid markers, and consistent training is in a different optimization state than a 41-year-old running a total T of 720 on a synthetic stack with rising estradiol, rising hematocrit, and metabolic markers that are slowly drifting. The first guy is optimized. The second guy is heading toward a problem the lab number is not flagging yet.

What the Supplement Industry Is Actually Selling

I want to be careful here. There are formulators who do real work. There are supplements that move bloodwork meaningfully in the right context. I have written specific reviews on boron, vitamin D, and magnesium precisely because those minerals do real work in deficient bodies. The problem is not the existence of supplements. The problem is the marketing premise that has been built around them.

The marketing premise goes something like this. Your testosterone is low. Low testosterone is the cause of how you feel. This stack will raise your testosterone. Therefore this stack will make you feel like you used to feel. Buy the stack monthly forever.

Every link in that chain is partially false. Most men told their testosterone is “low” are actually in normal range relative to age and would not be flagged as hypogonadal by any endocrinologist. Low testosterone is usually a symptom of something upstream, not the root cause of how a man feels. Most stacks do not move bloodwork meaningfully outside of replacing actual nutrient deficiencies. And how a man feels almost never tracks total T as closely as the marketing implies – I just walked through Aaron Pell’s case where a 720 total T felt terrible.

I have torn apart the studies behind this marketing in the fake-studies article. The short version is that the studies cited by most multi-ingredient T boosters are either rat studies, infertility-population studies, or studies on populations whose baseline is so different from the average customer that the results do not transfer. The “clinically proven to raise testosterone by 42%” line is almost always referring to a population that started at clinically deficient levels, supplemented for eight weeks with a single ingredient that the customer is taking a fraction of the studied dose of, inside a proprietary blend.

Joey, the formulator I talked with, was honest about how the inside of the industry works. The economic incentive is to make products that produce a feeling – usually from stimulants, adaptogens, or ingredients that affect dopamine or cortisol acutely – and let the customer interpret that feeling as “my testosterone is up.” Most customers do not retest bloodwork. The ones who do retest and see no change usually blame themselves, not the product. The product keeps selling.

The Markers That Actually Matter

If total testosterone is not the optimization target, what is? Here is what I look at on every client panel, in rough order of how much I weight them when evaluating whether a man is “optimized.”

Free testosterone. Calculated free T (using total T, SHBG, and albumin) is the better proxy for what your receptors are actually seeing than total T. LC-MS/MS direct measurement is even better when available. A man with a free T at the top of the optimal range almost always feels better than a man with the same total T and a lower free T.

SHBG in context. SHBG is not good or bad in isolation. It is a context marker. SHBG that is rising while total T is also rising suggests metabolic improvement. SHBG that is high in isolation usually points upstream to thyroid, insulin, liver, or specific micronutrient deficits. The boron, magnesium, and protein adequacy levers all touch SHBG in predictable ways.

Estradiol. Optimal estradiol in men is not “as low as possible.” It is in the 20-30 pg/mL range for most men, with some individual variation. Crashed estradiol from over-aggressive aromatase inhibition is one of the more common reasons men on TRT feel terrible despite great total T numbers.

Prolactin. Prolactin is one of the most overlooked numbers on the panel. Elevated prolactin can blunt libido and erectile function independent of testosterone status, and is one of the markers I look at hardest when a client reports specific sexual function problems despite otherwise good numbers.

DHEA-S. DHEA-S is the upstream hormonal substrate marker. Low DHEA-S in a younger man often points to chronic stress, HPA axis dysregulation, or adrenal underperformance secondary to long-term overtraining.

Fasting insulin and HbA1c. These are not technically hormone markers, but they predict hormonal trajectory better than almost anything else. A man with rising fasting insulin is on a path toward declining T regardless of what his current total looks like. A man with declining fasting insulin is moving in a direction his T will eventually follow.

HRV trend. Heart rate variability tracks autonomic recovery, which tracks cortisol pattern, which tracks T more closely than most men appreciate. HRV is not a hormone marker. It is a hormone proxy that updates daily while bloodwork updates quarterly.

How you actually feel. Subjective markers – sleep quality, morning erections, motivation, libido, training recovery, mood stability – are not soft data. They are the actual outcome variables. The lab numbers are downstream evidence of whether the body is operating well. If the lab numbers look good and the man feels bad, the lab is incomplete, not the man.

The Trevor Halsey Lesson

Trevor Halsey came to me at 36. Structural engineer in Houston, methodical, organized. Wanted “the optimal protocol.” His total testosterone was 540, which his GP had told him was fine. Trevor did not feel fine – slow recovery, motivation tanking, brain fog.

Trevor wanted a 14-page protocol. He wanted every micronutrient, every adaptogen, every advanced lever. He had been reading Reddit and Twitter for months. He had a spreadsheet of stacks he wanted to try. He wanted to “optimize.”

I gave him a two-page protocol. Sleep, food, walking, two-day-a-week strength training, vitamin D, magnesium, boron. No adaptogens, no exotic herbs, no peptides, no advanced anything. Run it for six months without modifications.

Trevor hated me for the first three months. He kept texting me about Tongkat ali variants and Fadogia dosing and whether he should add Cistanche. I told him no, hold the line, run the protocol. By month four he had stopped optimizing-shopping. He was just running the program. By month seven his total T was 720, his free T was where I wanted it, his recovery was clean, his mood was stable, and he texted me “I wanted complexity because I thought complexity was the answer. It was the obstacle.”

That sentence is the entire thesis of how I run optimization. Complexity is usually the obstacle. The supplement industry profits from complexity. Consistency is unprofitable to sell.

What Optimization Looks Like When It Is Working

I will tell you what an optimized man looks like on bloodwork and in life, because this is the picture I think most men are actually after when they say they want to “optimize their testosterone.”

On the panel: total T somewhere in his personal optimal range, which depends on age and individual baseline but is usually 600 to 900 ng/dL for a 30-to-50-year-old. Free T in the upper third of the lab’s range. SHBG between 25 and 45. Estradiol 20 to 30 pg/mL. Prolactin under 12. Fasting insulin under 8. HbA1c under 5.4. Vitamin D above 50 ng/mL. Ferritin between 80 and 200. Thyroid markers clean.

In life: sleeps seven to eight hours, falls asleep within 15 minutes, wakes without an alarm most days. Morning erections are consistent. Libido is stable, not driven by external stimulus or stress. Recovers from a hard training session within 48 hours. Has stable mood and motivation across the week without coffee crashes. Can hold a conversation in the late afternoon without brain fog. Body composition is stable or slowly improving without aggressive dieting. Training numbers are slowly trending up. Doctor visits are uneventful.

That picture is what I am building toward with clients. The total T number is one of about a dozen inputs to that picture. It is not the picture.

The Andre Whitlock Counterexample

Andre Whitlock, 47, sociology professor in Boston. Came to me at total T 420 with vitamin D at 14, which is severely deficient. The case I want to use to make the opposite point.

Andre’s optimization problem was the opposite of Aaron’s. Aaron needed his lab numbers reinterpreted around how he felt. Andre needed his actual lab numbers moved, because they were genuinely below the threshold for normal function. Severely deficient vitamin D is a hormonal problem in itself – vitamin D operates as a hormone, not a vitamin, and a 14 ng/mL level is the kind of deficiency that suppresses testosterone production directly at the Leydig cells.

Andre’s protocol was simple. Vitamin D 5,000 IU daily with K2. Sleep cleanup. Three-day-a-week strength training. Six months. His vitamin D climbed to 58. His total T climbed to 660 within six months, without a single other supplement and without any of the optimization-shopping Trevor had wanted to do. The vitamin D move alone was responsible for probably 80 points of the 240-point T climb.

That is a real optimization. A genuine deficiency was identified, corrected, and the body responded the way the body responds when you give it what it was missing. The supplement industry would have sold Andre a $90/month T booster stack. What he needed was a $9 bottle of D3 with K2 and the discipline to actually take it daily for six months.

What I Tell Every New Client

I have started telling every new client some version of this in our first conversation, because I have gotten tired of relitigating it after we have already started work.

Stop chasing the total T number. It is a downstream marker, not a goal. Chase the way your body wants to function. Build the conditions under which the hormonal output of the system aligns with how a healthy man feels. Let the lab numbers be the report card on that process, not the project itself.

Stop trusting marketing copy that promises a specific number gain. The men selling you optimization are selling you a feeling, and the feeling does not require the hormones to move. Test before, test after, hold the product accountable.

Pay attention to context markers. Your fasting insulin is more predictive of your hormonal trajectory than your current total T. Your HRV is more responsive to protocol changes than your total T. Your sleep architecture is more directly upstream of your testosterone production than any supplement you can put in your mouth.

Take the slow path. The men who chase fast results burn out, plateau, and end up on TRT they did not need. The men who build the underlying conditions over twelve to eighteen months have hormonal profiles in their fifties that look like other men’s profiles in their thirties.

This is the framework underneath the Anabolic Alchemy program at Anabolic Alchemy. It is not a stack. It is a way of thinking about what optimization means and how to actually pursue it. The hormones are the result. The conditions are the work.

If you are reading this with a recent panel in front of you and your total T is “fine” but you feel like garbage – you are Aaron. The panel is incomplete. If you are reading this with a deficient panel and you have been buying T boosters instead of fixing the actual deficiency – you are Andre, and the answer is simpler than what is being sold to you. If you are reading this with a spreadsheet of stacks you want to try – you are Trevor, and the spreadsheet is the obstacle, not the answer. The work is the same in every case. The work is most of what optimization actually is.