How to Increase Testosterone After 40? 10 Ways Worth Trying

This article is deliberately practical. We won't re-explain here what hypogonadism is, how much testosterone actually declines with age, or how to tell a mild, expected decline apart from a state that needs treatment — we break that down in detail in a separate article, "Low Testosterone After 40 — Normal Aging or a Problem That Needs Treatment?". If you don't yet have a confirmed blood test result and are wondering whether your symptoms are even hormone-related, start there — the rest of this text assumes you already know (or suspect based on symptoms) that it's worth taking action.

The 10 ways below aren't a ranking of testosterone 'boosting' supplements — we already evaluated those separately, honestly separating what works from what's mostly marketing, in "How to Raise Testosterone? What Actually Works and What's Marketing?". Where this article overlaps with that one (sleep, reducing body fat, strength training, zinc, vitamin D), we summarize the topic in a paragraph or two and link to the full version with studies. Instead, we focus on what wasn't in that roundup but is especially relevant in the 40+ decade specifically: interactions with alcohol, prescription medications, sleep apnea, and the pitfalls of restrictive diets that men in this age bracket reach for more often.

As always on this blog, each of the 10 ways is tagged with an evidence level — from studies with concrete numbers to actions based on a well-established mechanism but without a precisely measured effect in men over 40. Some of these will be surprising: one of the most commonly repeated pieces of advice (treating sleep apnea as a 'cure' for low testosterone) performs considerably worse in rigorous studies than you might expect — and we show that honestly instead of skipping the inconvenient result.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is common in men over 40, especially with excess weight, and correlates with lower testosterone — repeated episodes of oxygen deprivation and fragmented sleep disrupt nighttime hormone release, including testosterone, most of which is released during sleep. The intuitive conclusion is: treat the apnea, and you should get your testosterone back. Reality, as shown in a meta-analysis of experimental studies, is less dramatic.

This doesn't mean diagnosing and treating sleep apnea is worthless — quite the opposite, untreated OSA is an independent risk factor for hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and drowsiness-related accidents, and treatment genuinely improves sleep quality and wellbeing. But it's not enough to treat CPAP as a reliable way to raise testosterone — if you snore, wake up unrested despite long sleep, or your partner reports breathing pauses at night, a sleep study is worth pursuing for health reasons broader than hormone levels alone.

This is one of those topics where it's easy to fall for a myth in either direction — on one hand the popular belief that 'beer lowers testosterone because of phytoestrogens' (a mechanism that's practically marginal at typical intake), on the other, dismissing the topic entirely. The newest and largest meta-analysis on this to date, published in 2024 in the journal Andrology, gives a clearer picture than individual, smaller studies.

The practical takeaway: it's not the occasional weekend beer that's the problem, but a regular, daily or near-daily drinking pattern — and the mechanism isn't limited to the liver alone. Alcohol simultaneously increases aromatase activity (the enzyme converting testosterone into estrogen, which we also discuss in the context of body fat in way 4), lowers SHBG, and directly affects the Leydig cells in the testes that produce testosterone. For a man over 40, who already has a smaller hormonal safety margin than at 25, regular drinking is one of the factors that's easy to change without a prescription or a supplement.

This one sounds counterintuitive in a list of 'how to increase testosterone,' but it matters precisely because many men over 40, trying to improve their physique and how they feel, go on a restrictive diet without realizing that the effect of a calorie deficit on testosterone depends heavily on starting body composition.

In other words: the same aggressive calorie deficit that would likely raise testosterone in a man with obesity (mainly through less aromatization in fat tissue — see way 4) may lower it in a lean or normal-weight man of the same age. The mechanism involves the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis reading a state of 'energy shortage' — in response to too large and too prolonged a deficit, the body lowers LH, which limits testosterone production. This applies especially to very restrictive diets (below roughly 1,200-1,500 kcal, severe carbohydrate or fat restriction) sustained for weeks without a break — common among men in their 40s trying to quickly 'lose the belly' before a holiday or a check-up.

This is one of the few items on this list with truly strong, repeatable research support — fat tissue, especially visceral fat, contains aromatase, which converts testosterone into estrogen, and obesity is also linked to insulin resistance and chronic inflammation that suppress the hormonal axis. The effect is more pronounced the greater the starting excess of fat tissue, and is practically absent in men with a normal BMI — which is exactly why we place this way right after the warning about the trap of too-aggressive dieting: the key is a moderate, long-term deficit, not drastic, short-term restriction.

The full breakdown of the evidence on this, along with specific clinical studies showing the scale of the effect of weight loss on testosterone, is in our article "How to Raise Testosterone? What Actually Works and What's Marketing?" — there we cover this topic as one of the interventions with the strongest evidence overall, alongside sleep.

Worth honestly correcting a popular belief right away: a single resistance session triggers an acute, temporary spike in testosterone, but it doesn't translate directly into a permanently higher resting level — a meta-analysis in older men found no significant effect of short-term strength training on baseline testosterone. The benefits of strength training for the hormonal system after 40 are therefore largely indirect: better body composition, higher insulin sensitivity, better sleep, less visceral fat — mechanisms that genuinely support testosterone over the long run, even if the training itself doesn't 'inject' the hormone permanently.

After 40 there's an additional argument unrelated directly to testosterone: the natural, age-related decline in muscle mass (sarcopenia) accelerates past this decade, and regular resistance training is the most effective known intervention to slow it. If you're looking for a concrete, practical program tailored to this age group, we develop one in a dedicated article, "How to Increase Strength After 40? 10 Ways Backed by Research."

Most of the daily production of testosterone happens during sleep, and experimentally shortening sleep to 5 hours a night for a week in healthy young men lowered daytime testosterone by 10-15% — a decline comparable to natural aging by a decade. This is one of the few items on this list where the evidence is strong and consistent enough to be practically uncontroversial, while the intervention is entirely free.

We don't repeat the full mechanism and source study here — we cover it in detail, along with practical tips, in "How to Raise Testosterone? What Actually Works and What's Marketing?", in the section devoted to sleep as the highest-quality-evidence intervention. If sleep itself has become a problem for you past 40 (trouble falling asleep, frequent waking), also see way 1 above — for some men, worse sleep and lower testosterone share a common, reversible root in undiagnosed sleep apnea.

This way matters especially in the 40+ decade, because that's when many men pick up their first chronic prescriptions — for pain, blood pressure, reflux, or insomnia — that people rarely think about in a hormonal context. The best-documented and clinically most important group is opioids, including those prescribed chronically for back or joint pain, not just after surgery.

Besides opioids, it's worth asking your doctor about chronically used glucocorticoids (e.g. for asthma, autoimmune conditions) — these also suppress the hormonal axis through a similar, though distinct, mechanism. This isn't a list of 'stop these medications yourself' — many of them are essential and don't have an equally effective alternative. It's a list of topics to bring up with your prescribing doctor: whether the dose is optimal, whether an alternative with less hormonal impact exists, and whether this should be factored in when interpreting a testosterone result, instead of automatically blaming a low number on age alone.

Magnesium is a cofactor in many enzymatic reactions, and one hypothesis linking it to testosterone involves limiting the hormone's binding to SHBG, which theoretically increases the pool of biologically active free testosterone. The evidence is much thinner than for sleep or fat loss, but worth a brief mention — especially since magnesium deficiency is common in a Western diet, and the supplement is cheap with a good safety profile at reasonable doses.

This is preliminary evidence, not confirmation in a large, independent trial — which is why we place magnesium low on this list in terms of certainty, despite its low cost and risk. If you train intensely (and so sweat heavily and lose magnesium through sweat) and your diet is low in whole grains, nuts, or leafy greens, reasonable supplementation (typically 200-400 mg/day, in a well-absorbed form like citrate or glycinate) is a low-risk option worth trying — but it shouldn't be treated as a reliable 'booster' on the level of sleep or fat loss interventions.

Cortisol and testosterone remain in a relationship endocrinologists sometimes describe as a 'see-saw' — the two hormones partly share steroid precursors, and chronically elevated cortisol (as opposed to a brief, acute spike from stress or exercise) suppresses GnRH secretion in the hypothalamus, which indirectly lowers testosterone production in the testes. This is a well-documented physiological mechanism, though harder to measure precisely under chronic, everyday work or family stress than in a controlled lab experiment.

Rather than repeat generic advice like 'reduce stress' here, we point you to our full, ten-point guide, "How to Lower Cortisol Naturally? 10 Ways That Actually Have Evidence" — where we evaluate each specific technique (from sleep, through exercise, to breathing techniques and adaptogens like ashwagandha) for strength of evidence in the same way as in this article. For a man over 40, often at the peak of both work and family demands at once, chronic stress can be as significant a factor as diet or training — and it's often the one most overlooked in a conversation about testosterone.

Zinc and vitamin D make this list with an important caveat that's easy to lose in supplement marketing: both interventions affect testosterone only in men with a confirmed, real deficiency — not in everyone who simply starts supplementing 'just in case.' In a man with normal 25(OH)D levels or normal zinc status, rigorous placebo-controlled trials show no additional effect on hormone levels.

Since we already cover this topic in detail elsewhere, along with specific studies showing this conditional effect (and a study where high zinc doses without indication turned out harmful), in "How to Raise Testosterone? What Actually Works and What's Marketing?", here we'll just underline the practical takeaway: before supplementing either of these micronutrients with testosterone in mind, get a blood test. It's cheaper and safer than supplementing blind, and with zinc — at high doses without indication — you also avoid the risk of secondary copper deficiency.

If we had to name three starting points for a man over 40 who wants to act today, they'd be: cutting back on regular alcohol drinking, consistent 7-8-hour sleep, and — if applicable — reducing visceral fat if overweight. These three have the strongest, most consistent evidence and essentially no risk with a sensible approach. The rest of the list — magnesium, a medication review, stress management, and any correction of zinc or vitamin D deficiency — should be treated as a supplement to those three basics, not a substitute for them. And if symptoms don't improve despite consistently implementing most of these ways for several months, that's a signal it's time for a conversation with an endocrinologist, not a search for an eleventh way.