The Difference Between Total and Free Testosterone

Time to get a little scientific. I thought it was worth explaining the difference between total testosterone and free testosterone. Why should you care? Because you can have a really high value of total testosterone, but not be experiencing the known benefits of it – those benefits that make you manly!

Total testosterone is likely to be the result you’ll receive when you get a hormone test with your doctor. This is the combined total of all forms of testosterone in your body which involve three different forms;

Testosterone molecules bound to SHBG (Sex Hormone Binding Globulin),
Testosterone molecules bound to a protein called albumin, and
Free testosterone which isn’t bound to anything – thus, it is free.

The first two above, which are bound to either SHBG or albumin are not immediately readily available in your body. They’re essentially a reserve or bank or your testosterone.

Your hypothalamus part of your brain is responsible for the release of bound testosterone. You’ll experience its benefit when you’re able to do rigorous exercise at the drop of a hat, say do a 100m sprint or lift super heavy weights. You’ll experience a huge spike in testosterone as your the release of it is essential to combat the stimulation of your sudden exercise. In fact, if you hold a power pose for 2 minutes, you’ll experience an increase in testosterone of this of kind by up to 20%.

Finally, we have the unbound testosterone or free testosterone as it is also known. If you get a full male blood panel, you’ll get this result too. Since it is free and not bound to anything, it can circulate in your veins and it is readily available for use in your body, which makes this the most useful kind. I say useful, as it’s this testosterone that brings you the well known benefits of testosterone to a man, such as the ability to build muscle, burn fat, have increased sexual stamina, more mental and physical energy, confidence, motivation etc.

Coming back to my first point, you can have really high levels of total testosterone, but if most is bound to either SHBG or albumin, you would not experience the benefits. The next part is really interesting, which I have found from Anabolic Men;

But here’s where things get really interesting…

Your free testosterone usually makes up only around 2% of your total testosterone. Yes that’s correct, the very powerful free testosterone that creates all of those amazing benefits is only around 2% of the total T.

So it would make sense to increase the amount of free testosterone then? That would leave less testosterone to the bank, but more testosterone that could be rapidly used by your body right?

Correct, and how can we do that then?

Well that’s actually really easy, as research shows that about 60-70% of your testosterone is bound into SHBG which makes it “unavailable” and sends it to “reserve”.

So if you’re smart guy, you have probably figured this out already, but the thing we’re gonna do to have superhuman levels of “FREE TESTOSTERONE” in our bloodstream is to lower our SHBG levels.

That’s right guys, by lowering the levels of SHBG we can easily increase the amount of free testosterone that circulates in our veins, which will create huge benefits in no time!

At this point you’re probably wondering the same thing that I was when I figured all this SHBG shit out – “How to lower SHBG levels naturally?!”

See this post to see how to lower SHBG

Source: Anabolic Men