Health and Fitness
Here’s How to Boost Growth Hormone in Three Steps.
Powerful tips from personal experience and literature review to increase growth hormone and improve health and well-being
Redesign your health and longevity goals.
Do you want to boost your growth hormone by almost doing nothing?
Then I have two powerful and proven tips for you.
Do you want to increase your growth hormone, have an awesome body, and boost your feel-good hormones?
I have another tip for you.
All of them are natural and almost cost nothing to you.
These three tips can help you redesign your health and longevity goals.
To remember these three tips easily, I created a “triple I mnemonic”, Intermittent, Intense, Improved.
The first two tips are very easy. You don’t have to do anything. And they cost nothing. They even help you save money.
The third one requires effort. If you do the first easy ones, you can create substantial growth hormones by being lazy.
The Importance of Hormones
Hormones play a critical role in our health and well-being. They determine our metabolic, neurological, and endocrine health. Growth hormone is critical while we are growing and in our adult years for several good reasons. This hormone also plays a role in healthy weight management and longevity.
First, most of us don’t need supplements or medications to increase growth hormone secretion unless there are underlying medical conditions. We can increase growth hormones naturally. The pituitary gland makes growth hormones in the brain.
The growth hormone is known as the longevity hormone. The natural production of this hormone is desirable because the synthetic one causes problems with several side effects, and its potential side effects are still not thoroughly understood by scientists.
In the literature, using a synthetic version of growth hormone may cause health conditions such as high blood sugar, high cholesterol, fluid retention, joint pain, and muscle pain.
We usually experience increased growth hormone levels naturally during childhood and puberty, when we need our bones to grow. However, it starts reducing after the 20s. Growth hormone regulates muscle, fat, bones, and metabolism in adulthood years.
We can get our growth hormone levels tested as referred by physicians. These blood tests are helpful in finding out if our body is creating a normal amount of this hormone.
These tests are covered by medical insurance in some countries. It is essential for our children to identify growth hormone deficiency as it affects their growth and especially delays puberty. There are also tests to detect gigantism in children and acromegaly in adults caused by too much growth hormone secretion.
Boosting growth hormones is not difficult for adults. It requires simple lifestyle changes, which can be gradually improved. I introduce three proven and effective ways of increasing growth hormone naturally.
1 — Intermittent Fasting
Fasting has a long history. Major religions and several cultures recommend fasting annually. Long-term fasting is usually undertaken with medical supervision and control.
I tried long-term fasting initially with the supervision of healthcare professionals. My purpose was autophagy, which I introduced in an article recently, Three Tips to Initiate Autophagy: Autophagy is an essential contributor to longevity and healthy life.
I fast intermittently every day, as eating one meal a day is a lifestyle choice for me. Intermittent fasting means skipping one or two meals a day. From my experience, cutting snacks is important to stay in a fast state. We cannot consume calories in the fasted state. However, we can drink as much water and other non-caloric drinks.
Many athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and bodybuilders practice intermittent fasting regularly. One of the popular ways of practicing intermittent fasting is eating in an eight-hour window and fasting for 16 hours.
Beginners may need supervision by their physicians for intermittent fasting. However, healthy adults can manage intermittent fasting by following health principles and fundamental rules. For example, electrolyte balance is critical for our health.
In the beginning, for me, the easiest method of intermittent fasting was skipping breakfast and lunch. I documented my experience in an article titled “Breakfast Not Necessarily the Most Important Meal.
While growth hormone secretion during fasting is essential for keeping my lean muscle mass, the most crucial reason is staying in ketosis for cognitive and neurological reasons, such as having clean energy from ketones for my brain. In addition, reducing inflammation is one of my primary health goals.
We have known the impact of fasting on growth hormones since the mid-1980s. For example, this paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 1988 observed that fasting enhances growth hormone secretion and amplifies the complex rhythms of growth hormone secretion in men. You can access the scanned copy of the paper free of charge at this link.
2 — Improved Sleep Quality
Growth hormone significantly increases during a night of restful and restorative sleep. Circadian rhythm plays a critical role in releasing growth hormones.
This study investigated secretory patterns of growth hormone and cortisol concerning sleep and wakefulness. Researchers demonstrated that the nocturnal growth hormone surge was largely sleep-dependent; temporal associations between growth hormone and slow-wave sleep were unreliable after sleep deprivation.
They also found that the cortisol rhythm was not sleep-dependent. Sudden changes in sleep patterns may influence the timing of the cortisol rise in the sleep-wake schedule.
Another study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation examines growth hormone secretion during sleep.
Researchers found that altered hypothalamic activity associated with sleep initiation resulted in a significant peak of growth hormone secretion unrelated to hypoglycemia or cortisol and insulin secretion changes.
From my experience, reducing cortisol substantially before going to work significantly increases sleep quality as it increases melatonin secretion for restful sleep.
I explained the relationships of these hormones in this article titled The Critical Role of Cortisol in Sleep Disturbances: The higher cortisol (stress hormone), the lower melatonin affecting sleep quality.
3 — Intense Exercise
Intense workouts can significantly raise growth hormone levels.
This study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology investigated the impact of acute exercise intensity on pulsatile growth hormone release in men. Researchers hypothesized that the growth hormone secretory response to exercise would be attenuated until an exercise intensity equal to or greater than the lactate threshold was reached.
Researchers in this study compared the growth hormone response, including the immune functional growth hormone response, between an acute bout of aerobic and resistance exercise in the same subjects.
Researchers conclude that the growth hormone secretory response to exercise is related to exercise intensity in a linear dose-response pattern in young men.
There is significant evidence of the favorable effects of intense exercise on growth hormone secretion in the medical literature. The movement has many benefits for several health and longevity reasons, and intense workouts are helpful to get growth hormone naturally.
Supplements to Increase Growth Hormone
There are, of course, many supplements fitness enthusiasts use. As a well-balanced diet includes most of them, I don’t use supplements to increase growth hormones.
For example, arginine increases growth hormone, but my diet includes so much arginine that I don’t need to supplement with this amino acid. If your diet does not provide essential nutrients, you may consider supplementing with advice from your qualified healthcare professionals.
As pointed out in this paper, for young people, arginine is an essential amino acid for optimal growth and development and must therefore be provided in the diet.
For adults, arginine is a conditionally essential amino acid, especially in such conditions as trauma, burn injury, small-bowel resection, and renal failure.
This paper points out that we need arginine because “it is the precursor for the synthesis of proteins and critical molecules such as nitric oxide, ornithine, polyamines, agmatine, proline, glutamate, creatine, dimethylarginine, and urea. In addition, L-arginine administration improves cardiovascular, pulmonary, immune, and digestive functions and protects against the early stages of cancerogenesis.”
I introduced the importance of nitric oxide in the attached article.
Takeaways
An adequate amount of growth hormone is essential for our health and wellbeing. To increase growth hormone naturally, you can take these three actions and make them habits in the New Year.
Reduce food intake by cutting snacks and skipping a meal with advice from qualified healthcare professionals.
Improve your sleep quality by reducing stress.
Consider intense aerobic and anaerobic exercises mainly in the form of high-intensity interval training and compound resistance training such as weightlifting and calisthenics.
Please get advice from your physician before starting any intense workout as they put excessive stress in the body and may cause complications for some people espcially for those having underlying health conditions.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
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Besides aiming to increase the hormonal intelligence of my readers and writing about neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and histamine, one of my goals as a writer is to raise awareness about the causes and risk factors of prevalent diseases that can lead to suffering and death for a large portion of the population.
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