Does Masturbation Really Cause Muscle Loss?

 

As a gym-going, gains-chasing, muscle-pumping dude, you would have always wondered or maybe even researched about this topic - "Does masturbation affect my gains?" or "Does masturbation reduce testosterone?" And there is a good chance your gym 'trainer' might have told you that do not masturbate as you will lose testosterone and in turn not gain muscle or even worse, lose your muscle mass. 

Is this true? And if yes, then to what extent? 

If you may have researched about this yourself, you'd have read about things like how testosterone is affected by ejaculation. And testosterone, as we know (or may not know), is an androgenic hormone that plays a major role in muscle building. Testosterone elevates muscle protein synthesis after a workout, thus allowing for repair and growth of the damaged muscle tissue. 

Both men and women have testosterone. Men have 15x more testosterone compared to women, allowing men to be bigger in size and gaining more muscle mass. The general belief is that by ejaculating, your testosterone levels go low and as a result, you do not make enough gains or you lose gains. One study did show that not ejaculating for 7 days increased testosterone and then it had a dip in the following days, sometimes even lower than the normal levels. Another one showed that abstaining from ejaculating for 3 weeks or more increased testosterone slightly. But when you look at it in the long term or even the studies comparing the effects of ejaculation on moderate to high-intensity exercise performance, masturbation had no detrimental nor beneficial effects on the same. The effects of masturbation on testosterone were also non-existent. 

As far as masturbation and testosterone are considered, the current data indicates that abstaining or ejaculating has no beneficial or adverse effects on your testosterone. 

Approaching it from an altogether different angle, what happens when you ejaculate?

- Your hormone prolactin goes up

- Your dopamine levels goes down

These two in conjunction suppress your sexual desires and your heart rate goes up for a few hours. You also end up feeling exhausted and desire getting some sleep. When and if you work out after this, there are chances that your heart rate will get elevated further. 

Ejaculating can also give you a feeling of being tired, mainly due to elevated prolactin, and this, in turn, will lead to you being non-motivated. So if you see that doing this kills your desire to get into the gym and lift weights, it is definitely going to affect your muscle gains. Also, talking about testosterone in general, it is affected by a lot of other factors. A few things that are associated with positive testosterone levels are:

1. A healthy diet

2. Regular exercise

3. No existent nutrient deficiencies

4. Proper sleep

5. Lower stress levels

Masturbation or ejaculation seems to be the least of your concerns. So to answer the question that does masturbation affect your muscle gains, the answer remains the classic 'it depends'. 

And yes, moderation is the key.