Abstinence for bodybuilding

Dopamine is critical to strength, and porn and edging will desensitise and down-regulate your D2 receptors. So if your goal is to watch porn or edge without cumming to try to get some perceived bodybuilding benefits - you're actually going to do more harm than good.

The most well respected study on the matter finds a brief spike in testosterone on the 7th day of abstinence, but this spike doesn't reoccur, and it's very brief. So using NoFap for size gains is a little silly, you're not really going to put on muscle any faster.

However, NoFap will help you with strength and endurance in your workouts, and as we all know, if you progress in strength faster, you'll gain faster too. So it can help, just not in the way people expect it to help.

How can it help? Well, watching porn causes an excess amount of dopamine, which desensitises your D2 receptors, causing them to down-regulate, decreasing the effects you can feel from dopamine. This means when you need that dopamine boost to help you get through a tough set, even if your brain releases a normal amount of dopamine, the effects it produces aren't as strong, so you won't be able to push yourself as hard.

If you're also abstaining from orgasm, then you'll up-regulate androgen receptors in the brain which are down-regulated after each orgasm. These androgen receptors are of course where testosterone, DHT, etc bind, but these are NOT receptors in muscle tissue, just in the brain. So up-regulating these receptors won't increase muscle growth (in fact, you could even argue for a slight decrease, since more testosterone occupying brain receptors means less free testosterone than can bind to muscle tissue and promote growth) - but it will help you feel more psychological effects with the same amount of testosterone, meaning: more energy, more strength, more confidence, etc.

But in short, for progress in the gym: Abstaining from porn is most important, then abstaining from masturbation, then least important is abstaining from orgasm, although all three have their benefits.

 

^ From the paper you linked itself, it says that it wasn't higher during arousal at all in their study, in fact it remained unchanged. It was however higher in general (both before and after arousal) for people who had abstained from sex or masturbation for 3 weeks.

Regardless though, other studies haven't found quite the same results, so the information out there is inconclusive.

Even if it does conclusively raise testosterone, that doesn't mean anything for gains.

Steroids for example raise testosterone in the region of 500-1000%.

Here we're talking about say a 10-30% bump, at the most. Which simply isn't enough to affect muscle gains in the slightest.

If it was enough, you'd see people getting past the usual natural limits by simple taking testosterone boosters.. but you don't, because, even a 40 or 50% boost to your testosterone wouldn't be enough to really do anything for your gains.

 

thanks info....

 

You're not gonna see much change in results if any