Barbell Medicine

We left this week's episode on Mark. 45 years old. Total testosterone 240. A wellness clinic gave him an injection and called it a day.


Whatever was actually driving his number down isn't a testosterone problem at all. It's a condition his wife had been complaining about every night for years. His clinic never asked.


We come back to Mark next Tuesday. Episode 3 of 4 in the Signal launch series.

What do you think drove Mark's T down?

2 days ago | [YT] | 13

Barbell Medicine

Final clip from the overtraining series dropped yesterday. Jordan walks through the three things that are almost always actually wrong when a lifter says they feel overtrained:

1. Programming-test mismatch — your training doesn’t match how you’re measuring progress
2. Monitoring too often — you’re reading normal day-to-day variability as regression
3. Load-recovery mismatch — and this can go in both directions (too much OR too little)

Which one applies to you right now?



If you’re stuck and not sure which one it is, the Training Plateau Action Plan walks through it step by step. It’s free — link in the description of the latest video.

4 days ago | [YT] | 5

Barbell Medicine

From this week's episode: Austin had a patient worried about his testosterone, which was definitively in the normal range. The workup turned up iron deficiency.


How many of those workups do you think the wellness-clinic model is missing right now?

What would you most want covered in a future episode on "things that look like low T but aren't"?

6 days ago | [YT] | 7

Barbell Medicine

When you last saw a physician for a physical, did anyone measure your waist circumference ? Or was it weight, height, and BMI only? How long did the body composition part of the visit take?

6 days ago | [YT] | 4

Barbell Medicine

Episode 2 of the Signal launch series is live. It's the testosterone diagnosis episode: how the HPG axis actually works, what your lab number is really measuring, why the saturation model means "higher" isn't always better, and the EMAS finding that should be on the wall of every wellness clinic and isn't.


Plus the trial that asked whether standard TRT actually beats exercise in middle-aged men with low-normal levels. The answer is in the episode.


Watch / listen now. Link in the channel.

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Barbell Medicine

If you've ever filled out a low-testosterone questionnaire at a doctor's office or online, the list of symptoms looks something like this: Fatigue, depressed mood, irritability, loss of concentration, sleep disturbance, putting on weight you can't lose, etc.


Researchers across eight European centers asked which of those symptoms actually correlate with low testosterone. They studied more than 3,000 men. They tested 32 different complaints.


The result is in tomorrow's episode. It's not what the wellness clinic down the street is telling you.



Have you (or a guy in your life) ever been told you have low testosterone?

1 week ago | [YT] | 9

Barbell Medicine

Question! How much does your wearable influence your training decisions?



1. I check it daily and adjust training based on it
2. I look at it but don’t really change anything
3. I wear one but mostly ignore the recovery scores
4. Don’t use one

We just dropped a clip on what HRV, cortisol, and your Whoop/Garmin recovery score are actually measuring vs. what they claim to measure — and why session RPE outperforms all of them. Worth 10 minutes if you picked option 1.

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Barbell Medicine

If you have had your testosterone checked in the last five years, do you know whether your lab used immunoassay or mass spectrometry? Has any physician ever told you the difference matters for how the result should be interpreted?

1 week ago | [YT] | 1

Barbell Medicine

If you have had testosterone tested more than once, did your number move significantly between draws, without any treatment in between? How far apart were the tests, and what was going on in your life the week of each draw?

1 week ago | [YT] | 4

Barbell Medicine

What is the most aggressive-sounding testosterone booster on your local supplement shelf right now? Drop the name below!

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0