Working out to Increase Natural Growth Hormone Production

When it comes to sports, most athletes know that it is best to have the highest natural human growth hormone (HGH) levels as possible. This is because HGH is so instrumental in the development of muscle and muscle strength.

A lot of athletes have turned to HGH supplements to increase their HGH levels, but there are a few simple workouts that can achieve the same effect. When looking at these different workouts, they all boil down to one thing: lactate threshold.

Understanding the Lactate Threshold

When start a workout, you probably start with a quick warm-up. This might be on a treadmill or a stationary bicycle and will usually last for about 10 minutes. During this warm-up, your body produces lactic acid.

In actuality, your body produces lactic acid for pretty much every movement you make. Checking your mail? Lactic acid. Making your bed? Lactic acid. Walking the dog? Lactic acid. I think you get the point.

The reason that you don’t feel sore in the morning after these activities is because your muscles are able to clean the lactate out of your bloodstream quicker than your body can produce it.

Going back to your workout, let’s say that you were to decide to do a thirty minute timed run after your warm-up. As you run, your heart rate increases as it works harder to pump oxygen to all of the muscles that are working hard. At the same time, your lactic acid levels increase as well. Unlike in your warm-up, however, your body starts to produce much faster than your muscles are able to clean up. At this point, you have reached your lactate threshold.

Simply put, the lactate threshold is the point when lactic acid begins to collect in the bloodstream. When you reach this point, you can count on feeling the effects in your muscles for the next two days.

When this lactate threshold is breached, your muscles get bogged down with the demands placed upon them as well as the excess lactic acid in the bloodstream. Once you have exceeded this threshold, you will only be able to maintain your pace for 30 minutes at the most.

Your Lactate Threshold and HGH

In order to perform exercises that cause an increase in HGH production, it is necessary to exercise above the lactate threshold. This is because all of that lactic acid signals the brain to produce increased amounts of HGH in order to minimalize pain and repair any muscle damage done while exercising.

Also, HGH is closely involved with muscle development, meaning that working out above the lactate threshold will actually result in larger muscle mass.

Your Lactate Threshold

In order to find out what your lactate threshold is, you can either go to a lab and have a test performed, or perform a test yourself.

If you are figuring this out by yourself, all you need to do is exactly what was described above: run for 30-minutes as fast as you can. You can’t slow down at any point, so make sure that you start out slow enough to maintain the pace you started with. Make sure to use a heart rate monitor as well.

After your run, look at your heart rate results for the last 20 minutes. The average of all of these numbers is your lactate threshold. Once you know this, you can pay attention to your heart rate and know for certain which exercises push your heart and lactate production so that you can increase HGH production as well.