The human growth hormone HGH is something we all want more of
It builds muscle, burns fat, helps you resist heart disease, and protects your bones — among many other health benefits. By exercising and increasing your muscle mass, growth hormone raises your resting metabolic rate and gives you more power for your workouts.
It also helps you tap into your fat stores for fuel and discourages your fat cells from absorbing or holding on to any fat floating around in your bloodstream.
In addition to these amazing feats, growth hormone helps your liver synthesize glucose, and it promotes gluconeogenesis, a natural process that allows your body to create carbs out of protein. This helps you lose fat faster while providing your brain and other tissues with the energy they need.
As with so many other beneficial hormones, production of growth hormone declines with age, and many things we do speed up that decline. Here are three things that you can do to slow down that decline:
More Sleep
We deprive ourselves of good-quality sleep. The growth hormone is released in adults in an average of five pulses throughout the day, the largest of which happens during deep sleep. Shortchange yourself on sleep and you’ll shortchange yourself on growth hormone.
Better Diet
We eat too many low-quality carbs and need a good diet. Refined carbs, such as those in white bread and white rice, keep our blood sugar and insulin levels high, which suppresses the release of growth hormone. Protein, on the other hand, can facilitate the release of higher levels of growth hormone.
More Exercise
We don’t exercise enough. When you don’t exercise and your muscles become insulin-resistant, you increase your level of circulating insulin, which further suppresses growth hormone. Exercise will help capitalize on this self-made natural healthy hormone!
One great way to turn our bodies into growth hormone factories is through intense exercise. During intense exercise, and especially during interval training, growth hormone encourages the body to use fat as its fuel instead of glucose. Not only does this help you burn fat while you exercise, but it stabilizes your blood glucose level so that you have the energy to keep exercising.