If youre a guy this is for you or send this to the man in your life 

Hey, 

This week I posted about a guy who trained five days a week, ate well, and still felt flat.

It's something I hear from men all the time:

"My doctor checked my testosterone. It was normal."

Or: "You're fit and healthy. You're too young to need your testosterone checked."

So I want to go a little deeper than I can in a carousel.

Because "normal" and "working well for you" are not always the same thing.

First, the piggy bank

I explain testosterone to my patients the same way I'd explain it to my kids.

Imagine all your testosterone is coins.

Total testosterone is every coin you own.

But a lot of those coins are locked inside a piggy bank.

That piggy bank is a protein called SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin). It grabs testosterone and holds onto it tightly.

Coins in the piggy bank are safe. But you can't spend them at the canteen.

Free testosterone is the coins in your pocket. The ones your body can actually spend: on energy, mood, drive, recovery, building muscle and making sperm.

So you can have a decent pile of coins overall…

…but if the piggy bank is too big and greedy, there's not much left in your pocket.

And if the piggy bank is too small, the coins get spent and lost too fast.

That's why I never like looking at one testosterone number on its own.

Then, the ruler you measure with

When your bloods come back, each marker is compared to a reference range.

A lab reference range is built from lots of people who got tested. It's really good at telling you whether you're unusual compared to everyone else.

But it doesn't tell you whether you're in the zone where your body tends to work at its best.

That's the job of a functional optimal range.

It's a narrower target. Less "are you sick?" and more "are you thriving?"

Neither one is "wrong". They're just answering different questions.

And if you feel flat, the second question is usually the one you care about.

The ranges I use for men

These are the functional optimal ranges I work with for adult men:

Total testosterone: 24.3 to 38.2 nmol/L

Free testosterone (calculated): 520 to 777 pmol/L

SHBG: 30 to 40 nmol/L

A few things I want you to take from that:

You can sit inside the lab range and still be below these.

Free testosterone is usually calculated, not measured directly. To calculate it properly, you need total testosterone, SHBG and albumin from the same blood test.

And a number is never the whole story. I always read it alongside how you actually feel, your sleep, your training, your stress, your weight, your alcohol and your history.

These ranges aren't a diagnosis. They're a clue.

Why this matters for fertility too

The pocket coins don't just run your gym sessions.

Testosterone is part of the system that helps the body make sperm.

So when a couple is trying for a baby, I want to look at both people's bloods. Not just hers.

Fertility is a two-person story. A lot of the time, only one person gets tested.

If you want to check yours, ask for these

Total testosterone

SHBG

Albumin (so free testosterone can be calculated)

And try to get it done in the morning, and the same way each time, so you're comparing apples with apples.

Then look at the numbers together, not one at a time.

Total tells you how many coins you've got.

SHBG tells you how big the piggy bank is.

Free tells you what's actually in your pocket.

I think this is one of the most common gaps I see in men.

They feel flat. They get one number. It's "normal". And they're told to keep going.

Most of the time, nobody's done anything wrong. The test just answered a different question to the one he was asking.

So the question I'd ask is:

Normal compared to who? And is it normal for you?

That's exactly what my Functional Blood Analysis is for.

We take your existing bloods, your symptoms and your history and read them against functional optimal ranges, like the ones above.

It's $284 (usually $384), $100 off for the rest of the month

And if you'd rather talk it through first, you can book an initial consult with me.

Start with Functional Blood Analysis

And if this sounds like your partner, your brother or your mate, forward it to him.

Georgia x