Tips on building lean muscle mass Testosterone is a steroid hormone that helps you increase lean muscle mass and bone density – and beyond simply helping you have a nice body, it’s also crucial for good health.

1. Tip #1: Sprint Try performing several sprints on the treadmill after you’ve lifted weights at the gym, or just head out into the backyard, a park, or your neighborhood block and do a few sprint repeats on your days off from weigh training. You can even do your sprints on a bicycle or elliptical trainer

2. Tip #2: Lift Heavy While you can do high reps with low weights or low reps with high weights, studies have shown that it definitely takes heavy weights to significantly boost testosterone. Full body, heavy exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and Olympic lifts should ideally be used, at 85-95% of your 1RM (or one repetition maximum).

3. Tip #3: Use Long Rest Periods Scientists have studied the effects of very short rest periods on testosterone and found that longer rest periods of around 120 seconds between sets are better for building testosterone (although you can still build other hormones, such as growth hormone, with shorter rest periods).

4. Tip #4: Do Forced Reps To do a forced repetition, you perform a weight lifting exercise for as many reps as you can, and then have partner (a “spotter”) assist you with completing several additional repetitions (anywhere from 1-5 extra reps). Research shows that this type of forced rep set generates more testosterone than simply doing as many reps as you can do by yourself.

5. Tip #5: Use Your Legs In another study that investigated the hormonal response to weight training, participants were split into an arm-only training group and a leg-plus-arm training group. Testosterone increases were significantly higher in the group that added lower body training to their upper body training.

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