The Men Obsessed With ‘High T’ | WIRED

Overview

Mark Holman was skinny and depressed when he was working a 9-to-5 job as an air quality engineering consultant in 2018. “I felt weak, like a boy,” says the 33-year-old New Orleans native.

Determined to turn things around, he spent the next few years becoming a health coach and getting chiseled abs. But in 2021, after becoming perplexed as to why he was disinterested in sex with his partner at the time, he decided to test his testosterone levels.

Details

His blood test revealed his testosterone measured 622 nanograms per deciliter (ng/d L), which is considered healthy by doctors, but certainly not “High T.”

Convinced it would make him happier, more decisive, and more masculine, Holman devoted himself to naturally raising his body’s supplies of testosterone, or “T-maxxing.”

Low testosterone was once thought of as an issue largely for older men, but there is now a growing collective obsession with having “High T,” fueled by manosphere influencers and closely tied to the Make America Healthy Again movement. Both podcaster Joe Rogan and US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. have said they have taken testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) drugs; more than 11 million men in the US were prescribed the drug in 2024, up from 7.3 million in 2019, according to health care research company IQVIA.

In some circles, men now test their testosterone every six months—swapping numbers in locker rooms and group chats the way they compare bench press stats—as they try to counter a significant decline in average testosterone levels in recent years.

But the trend also risks making healthy, younger men pathologize over their levels of the still little-understood hormone.

Holman generally considers taking TRT “cheating.” Advised by his “holistic” health coach, and thanks to going down T-maxxing rabbit holes online, he ate a diet filled with eggs, red meat, brazil nuts, and oysters to increase his production. He consumed plenty of supposedly “testosterone-boosting” herbs and supplements like tongkat ali, fenugreek, pine pollen, boron, and zinc. He also continued pumping iron in the gym.

By March 2025, he says he’d almost doubled his T to 1,104 ng/d L, a screenshot of his test result shared with WIRED shows. That’s well above the normal range for all men of 350 to 800 ng/d L, and approaching the peak levels possible naturally. (Natural levels of testosterone max out around 1,400 ng/d L and overuse of TRT or steroids can send levels beyond 3,000 ng/d L, which can bring about the fabled “roid rage” as well as other potentially serious strains on the body.)

Holman, who has long blond hair and bulging triceps, says his physique got “ridiculously shredded very easily” once he started boosting his testosterone and that his life changed drastically. “To feel the difference was night and day,” he says.

He was single when he learned that he was High T and said he felt more at ease pursuing women. “Out-competing other men makes more testosterone,” he says. (One leading testosterone influencer, Derek Munro, bears the handle @moreplatesmoredates on Instagram.)

Now Holman is himself a men’s “holistic” health coach, focusing on helping guys T-max. He refers to himself as a “High T stud” and posts scientifically-questionable Instagram reels linking High T to “true masculinity” and waking up with “morning wood.”

“The major mental effect of testosterone is that it makes effort feel good,” neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman told Rogan during a 2021 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.

“Males of a given species have to overcome the fear of pain and punishment, and the surge in testosterone is what causes the shift to the willingness to engage in battle,” Huberman said, explaining that there are testosterone receptors in the brain’s anxiety center, the amygdala. “Leaning into pain and challenge actually has the effect of making the body feel soothed.”

Rogan, 58, has said he started a TRT regimen at 40. “It makes you feel way better, it makes your body work way better, [and] you can avoid a host of ailments and conditions related to your body breaking down due to age,” he said in a 2018 episode on his podcast.

TRT first became popular in the US among men in their fifties and sixties about 20 years ago to help avoid “male menopause.” The at-home shots and gels are now marketed in algorithmic masculinity content loops on social media by clinics who urge men to “get your spark back” and “be the hero of your life again.” Some telehealth startups dole out potentially lifelong supplies of the treatment on the basis of a single test showing suboptimal levels.

Like with all supposed elixirs of life, there are trade-offs. TRT suppresses natural testosterone production and can render men temporarily infertile, even shrinking the size of their testes. Other potential side effects include baldness and increased risk of tendon stiffness, while many men feel worse when they stop TRT due to how the therapy increases dopamine signaling in the brain.

“When you take testosterone, it suppresses the activity of one's own testicles,” says Adrian Dobs, who researches endocrine gonadal function at Johns Hopkins University. “I'm not against treatment with testosterone, but I do think you have to be careful on who you give it to.”

But the push for High T has supporters in high places. Testosterone levels are “central to the health and well-being of many Americans,” Food and Drugs Administration commissioner Marty Makary told the agency’s expert panel on TRT for men in December. “In a study, over a third of men over age 45 have a testosterone level less than 300 ng/d L … and if we listen to them we will see that they report a decrease in vitality, decreased strength, decreased libido, and even depression.”

The fact that testosterone levels have been falling has been politicized by Donald Trump supporters, who claim a link between liberalism and low testosterone, although experts largely credit the decline to obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and poor sleep quality. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary The End of Men blamed all of society’s ills on a lack of testosterone while featuring men swinging axes, drinking raw eggs, and tanning their testicles (it's called “bromeotherapy”) to boost their stores of the hormone.

In a January podcast interview with Katie Miller, RFK Jr. extolled Trump’s apparently high testosterone levels for his age; in a 2016 appearance on the Dr. Oz Show, Trump’s testosterone levels were at 441 ng/d L. Last month it emerged that deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein’s testosterone levels for the decade until 2016 varied between 65 to 150 ng/d L. “You can’t trust a man with low testosterone,” Holman said in an Instagram reel about Epstein.

For many, starting TRT is viewed in existential terms.

“TRT literally saved my life,” says Gareth Hoernel, a 38-year-old executive security protection officer and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. He believes that brain injuries he suffered from jiu-jitsu and playing rugby caused his levels of testosterone to become severely depleted, leaving him not “feeling like a male.” Hoernel was depressed, he says, with a testosterone level of about 230 ng/d L when he was 29. “At times it was hard to get out of bed, but within a few weeks of getting on TRT all of those symptoms diminished.” His “libido, drive, concentration, and focus” promptly returned.

Mohit Khera, a professor of urology at Baylor College of Medicine, coauthored a 2023 study which noted that TRT moderately reduces depressive symptoms. “Men with low testosterone are much more likely to suffer from depression,” he says, while cautioning that suboptimal levels of the hormone are unlikely to be the sole cause of mental health issues. “We should be checking testosterone levels in all men over the age of 40 and tracking them over time,” he adds. “Men with low testosterone are much more likely to have increased mortality.”

Yet what begins, for some men, as a medically supervised response to genuine deficiency can morph into something closer to a hormonal arms race—just like the use of steroids, which are chemically modified testosterone molecules.

On a recent episode of the podcast Stavvy’s World, a trans man caller shared that he suspected his roommate, who he works out with, had become jealous of his muscle mass gains and started “munching on” his supply of testosterone. “I think I’m missing a few vials,” he said. “He’s also been putting on a lot of extra muscle recently … in a short amount of time.” (Twenty-seven states have banned gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary youths, which can include testosterone therapy, and a new proposed federal law would make it illegal nationally.)

Whether the roommate was actually siphoning off vials or not, the anecdote captures something real: In a culture obsessed with optimization, testosterone is no longer seen as just a hormone, but a potent shortcut to making yourself great again.

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Key Takeaways

Mark Holman was skinny and depressed when he was working a 9-to-5 job as an air quality engineering consultant in 2018
Determined to turn things around, he spent the next few years becoming a health coach and getting chiseled abs
His blood test revealed his testosterone measured 622 nanograms per deciliter (ng/d L), which is considered healthy by doctors, but certainly not “High T
Convinced it would make him happier, more decisive, and more masculine, Holman devoted himself to naturally raising his body’s supplies of testosterone, or “T-maxxing
Low testosterone was once thought of as an issue largely for older men, but there is now a growing collective obsession with having “High T,” fueled by manosphere influencers and closely tied to the Make America Healthy Again movement