Seven hours of jogging a week can do more hormonal damage than doing nothing at all

Most men over 40 who feel off — flat, foggy, soft around the middle — are already training. Some are training hard. Running. Cycling. Hitting the gym. Doing everything they were told to do.

And making it worse.

Here's what most people don't know yet. Chronic steady-state cardio — the long, grinding, hour-plus sessions — drives cortisol up. Sustained. Repeatedly. And when cortisol goes up in a man whose biology is already under pressure, testosterone comes down. Not as a side effect. As a biological trade-off. The system is working exactly as designed — prioritising stress management over performance, every single time.

The result is a man who is training more and recovering less. Carrying more fat around his abdomen despite the kilometres. Losing drive and not understanding why. He thinks the answer is to push harder. It isn't.

The research backs this. One hour of targeted sprint intervals per week produces comparable results to seven hours of jogging — and without the cortisol load that makes a compromised biology worse.

What I see consistently is this: the men making the least progress are often the ones working hardest. Not because effort is wrong. Because the effort is pointed at the wrong problem.

More effort is not always the answer. Sometimes it's the problem.

What if the training itself is the variable nobody has thought to question?