CrossFit South Bend

Why stress is killing your sex drive and gains in the gym-CFSB Wellness Wednesday

If you ask most people whether stress affects sex drive, mood, and gains in the gym, they’ll almost certainly say “yes!”

However, very few people would be able to tell you WHY that’s the case. Furthermore, it’s really important to understand the biological reason why this is the case in order to actually fix the issue at a root cause level and not just pay for a bunch of band-aid supplements for the rest of your life.

In short, when you are chronically stressed your body preferentially makes cortisol, your master stress hormone, instead of DHEA, your master anabolic hormone. Why is that important? Because DHEA is the parent of the estrogens and testosterone, and those both directly impact both sex drive and gains in the gym.

Taking hormone replacement supplements or testosterone boosters are just temporary bandaids that do not fix the underlying issue AT ALL. Unless you get a handle on your stress and cortisol levels you’ll never get to the root cause of sex hormone deficiencies, which cause lower libido and fewer gains in the gym.

P.S. I mistakenly wrote down the wrong test number down on the whiteboard for the salivary hormone test. It’s the BioHealth 205 test not the BioHealth 401H, which is a stool pathogen test. We run both BioHealth 205 salivary hormone panel and the DUTCH urinary hormone profile here at CrossFit South Bend through our Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® program.