How do you make a hormone? - Part 3: Growth hormone and IGF-1

Back with the third instalment of this series with new information on all the great things your hormones do and the the same shitty joke as the last two articles.

This one has taken me a while for a couple of reasons, first I thought I'd do a surface skimming article that didn't really say a whole lot, then, being a perfectionist tool, I refused to let myself do that and endeavoured to research deeper. Upon doing this I realised I was in way over my head in terms of endocrinic knowledge and decided to revert to the originally planned, superficial, easy-reading article. At this point the perfectionist tool side of me chirped up again and I lost approximately 9 days of my life learning about growth hormone, the functioning of the HPTA axis, exogenous HGH use, general PED use, AAS, SARMs, Myostatin Inhibitors, SERMs, peptides and any and all other science shit that gets people huge.

That's science. Trust him, he's a Doctor.

In short, I nerded. I nerded really hard. Now my head is full of loads of information ranging from the mundane to the really quite exciting, from the legal and advisable to the shady to the down right scary. Now, armed with these masses of information, I feel equipped to write a magnum opus, DC's War and Peace on natural and chemical hormone optimisation, a work more seminal to the development of the human race than the The Bible, The Qur'an, The Bhagavat-Gita, On The Origin of Species, Principia Mathematica, Relativity: Special and General Theory, Nuts magazine and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics, all rolled into one. That, however, is not what you will be getting here; what you are getting will in fact be a brief skim over the topic at hand, hopefully with a few little funnies and some inappropriate photos thrown in for good measure. Shall we?

Human growth hormone (usually just called HGH, but also known as somatotropin or somatropin; I'll probably be using different names as my mind meanders) is a 191-amino acid long single chain peptide that is secreted mainly by your pituitary gland. It gets released in 'pulses' every 3 to 5 hours when the pituitary is stimulated by growth hormone-releasing hormone which is in turn released from your hypothalamus.  As implied by the name, it is responsible for the growth and regeneration of your body's cells, as well as promoting the breakdown of fat. Without HGH you would never get jacked and tanned, which of course would be devastating, but it's also important for your brain, bones, regulating your metabolism, stimulating your immune system and other stuff that doesn't really matter as much as good looking muscles.

Obligatory picture of good looking person to somehow prove my point

When it comes to muscle building, it isn't HGH itself which gets the magic done; GH is only active in your blood stream for a matter of minutes before your liver sucks it all up and spits out a bunch of 'growth factors'. Of these, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) is the star. It's like Nicole Scherzinger to the Pussycat Dolls; it does all the important stuff that actually matters, the others just dance around in the background looking pretty. IGF-1 is anabolic as hell, so goes ahead and does it thing: making your muscles big and making your life better.

Seriously, can anyone name any of them?

You don't have a whole lot of this magic HGH juice circulating in your body post-puberty (which if you remember, was a time when a lot of things grew a lot and was generally fun for all involved); 20-something men have around 5 nanograms per millilitre of blood between pulses and women have about twice that amount because something to do with having children (sometimes I'm bad at science) and levels only decrease as you age. Anyway, they are average person levels. Who wants to be average? Not me, and hopefully not you, so lets look at how we can supercharge our growth levels, and by extension IGF-1, levels.

"The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I'd hate that." - Arnold. Enough said.

As I said before, growth is released in pulses; the largest and most predictable of these pulses occurs about an hour after you hit the hay, with further pulses through your sleep accounting for over 50% of total release. This leads to our first strategy for optimising HGH release. Sleep. Sleep long enough and sleep well. Cutting your sleep short or having your sleep disturbed means you are likely missing out on these growth pulses and all the benefits that come with them. Learn to develop your own bedtime routine to help you relax and get quality sleep, humans tend to respond well to learned patterns, whatever it is, glass of milk, little meditate, rub one out...

Put your issues in some tissues.

Intense exercise is a factor we can easily control, which signals the body to release HGH. The exact nature of the exercise you are partaking in will affect how your GH levels respond. As is almost unanimously the case, hitting the weights is the best option here, with heavy lifting using compound movements (those which involve multiple muscle groups) shown to spike GH. If we are going for absolute optimal hormone manipulation, it appears that pump style training consisting of lower rest periods (in the region of 30-60 seconds) and reps in the 10-15 range leads to larger GH spikes. There is also evidence that supplements which help induce the pump (and are likely included in your standard pre-workout formula) such as arginine, betaine and taurine, will facilitate a larger GH response to exercise (and also probably give you spontaneous erections).

I thought a picture of Frank McGrath's ridiculous forearm pump was more appropriate than a picture of a boner.

There is some good news here for the cardio lovers too, aerobic training, when done right, can lead to GH releases, which lead to a healthier and better looking you. What constitutes 'done right'? Studies suggest that performing exercise above the lactate threshold for at least 10 minutes leads to the largest HGH releases, but long duration, steady state, hamster-in-a-wheel type cardio can actually decrease GH levels. In practice, this means that HIIT is potentially a smart way to go, as is just hopping on a piece of cardio equipment and going balls-to-the-wall for 10-15 minutes then getting out of there.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, fasting can increase the frequency and amplitude of GH pulses. It may seem a bit strange that after not eating, your body releases a hormone to make you grow, but when we remember that HGH also stimulates the break down of fat and reduces liver uptake of glucose (preventing you passing out from super low blood sugar), this makes a little more evolutionary sense. So if we use controlled fasts (which luckily for you, I've written all about here) we can reap the gains of all natural boosts in GH.

In a way hand-in-hand with the last point; studies have shown that hyperglycaemia (high-blood sugar) severely blunts your natural GH pulses. This means (as has been mentioned many times before), stuffing your face with carbs all day is a poor, poor idea from a hormonal optimisation standpoint, and as such a body composition standpoint, and as such a getting laid standpoint. Carbs aren't the devil, but a constant, sustained intake of carbs does you absolutely no favours. As such, carb intake should be controlled and preferably targeted around the time of your workouts.

Lastly, don't be fat. This one again. Fat people have lower circulating GH and weaker GH pulses. I'm not trying to be mean, biology just doesn't like fat people and seems intent on really kicking them when they're down. For any readers wishing to lose weight, this is a good place to start.

Twins may be one of the best songs ever, but Big Pun and Fat Joe should only set an example of impeccable flow, not body type (or fashion sense).

There we have it, another article on the board; I hope you enjoyed it. My apologies if you didn't, or if you thought this was a little too similar to the last. In truth, some minor nuances aside, most hormonal optimisation boils down to things that we already think of as 'healthy'. Eat well, exercise, sleep. Get lean, get jacked, get tanned, get money.