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Are hot balls killing your testosterone? Over 24 years ago, I was watching this TV show called The King of the Hill, and I was completely puzzled by this one scene. Research shows that heat lowers fertility. One way to increase the number of healthy sperm is to lower the temperature in your pants. Why would cooling your balls make them work better? A year later, in 1999, The Simpsons had Apo chilling his balls to make him more fertile. Chilling my loins, I increase the chances of impregnating my wife. Except, of course, fertility isn't the only thing the balls are important for. Four years later, in 2003, another King of the Hill episode aired about the other important function of balls.
Testosterone could have elevated Hank's mood, improved his whole outlook. In Japan, the word that they use is the golden balls, which refers to how important they are for health and fertility. Except all across the world, men's golden balls are in crisis. Testosterone and male fertility rates have been dropping rapidly. Since 1973, sperm counts have dropped around 50%. And some estimates put testosterone dropping as much as 1/3 over the past 30 years. Sure, alcohol, poor sleep, endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics, weight gain, a sedentary lifestyle, stress, various features of our extra convenient modern lifestyle can wreck your testosterone. But no one's talking about
how convenience stores have a cheap allnatural item that could raise your testosterone. You've probably heard of the physical benefits of testosterone, like making it easier to put on muscle and lose fat. But several lines of research also show that testosterone has a significant effect on mentality, improving libido, confidence, anxiety, and mood. Increased testosterone is intimately linked to the feeling of being a winner and vice versa. That is, losing at something has been found to decrease men's testosterone. And lowering testosterone is accompanied by feelings of being loser, feeling more submissive, unhappy, and unconfident.
Testosterone is very important for the body and mind. So, we need to talk about the balls because this is where testosterone is made. Derk, why'd you take your pants off? My balls was hot. The first question is, why are your balls outside of your body? If you think about it, it doesn't make any sense. This vital organ that ensures the continuation of our species isn't protected by bones, cartilage, or muscle. They just dangle there defenseless. Well, here's the thing.
Your testosterone and sperm factories don't work as well when they get too hot. So why? Well, the reason basically every single land mammal except elephants and rhinos have their balls outside their body is that they need to keep them cool. As research shows, heating the balls can dramatically worsen their function, worsening sperm quality and testosterone levels. Man spreading is when a man take up as much space as humanly possible. So why do men spread their legs out so much when they sit down? Well, the balls don't need that much space, but the balls do need to be cool. So, this is likely an instinct to keep our balls away from our warm thighs. When you sit down, this pushes the balls close to your hot body, and they can heat up. A
study from the year 2000 found that extended periods of sitting in your car seat can heat up the balls an entire 2° C. It's been proven multiple times that heat is terrible for sperm and male fertility. But what about testosterone? A 2020 study found that heating up the balls of bulls by only 3° C induced a profound t-fold reduction in testicular testosterone concentrations. Here where I live in Japan, everybody loves a nice hot bath at the end of the day. Getting in a hot bath almost every night is a very common tradition in Japan. Also, Japan's birth rate has consistently been lower than say America and Canada for the past 50 years. The Japan Times says that of course the usual suspects like
work life balance or state support for child care are at play here, but they say it's about time to consider that male infertility might be a factor. This makes me wonder if heating up the balls every night has anything to do with this. Then we've all heard about how sitting for hours on end is offer for our health and makes us fat. But we also know that lowering testosterone makes it harder to put on muscle and easier to put on fat. So, what if all this sitting nowadays is heating up men's balls, reducing their testosterone, and making them weak and fat? The boy's got no fight in him. I don't get it.
Maybe he's missing something like testosterone, energy, confidence, aggression, agility, muscle. Around 2018, this rumor that Chinese powerlifters ice their balls as part of their training regimen to raise testosterone started circulating online. Eventually, various biohackers started talking about how icing the balls was a good way to increase testosterone. So, is this just bro science or can icing the balls really increase your testosterone? Hold up. We need to dig into the research a bit further to solve this puzzle because there's not too much human research on how hot balls lowers your testosterone. Most of the research on ball temperature is looking at fertility. Here's one example to show
you just how bad heat is for sperm. In a 1967 paper, researchers wanted to see the effect of heat on men's balls. They increased the ball temperature of 10 men by a mere 0.8° C for 15 hours a day for 2 to 3 months. This reduced the men's sperm count by 80%. Another 1985 study increased the ball temperature by 2° C, and this led to a 90% reduction in sperm count. Here's where it comes back to testosterone. Even if you're not trying to have a baby, consider that testosterone is necessary for the production of healthy sperm. And for example, in this study where they corrected an iron deficiency in men, they found a clear correlation between increases in total sperm count and increases in testosterone. So we may expect that things that are going to be
good for fertility are going to be good for testosterone. There's actually a study in the Scottish Medical Journal saying that a kilt should help men's fertility because it will keep their balls cooler. A 1984 study had 64 subfertile men wear a ball cooling device for 16 weeks. The ball chiller improved the sperm quality of 65% of the men and 26% of the men had their fertility improved so much that they got their wives pregnant. A different study looked at 25 of what the researchers specifically called hardcore infertile couples. This meant that they were not able to get pregnant for more than 6 years. Just 15 weeks of ball chilling allowed six of these hardcore infertile couples to finally get pregnant. This is
why Hankill's doctor told him to cool his balls so he could have another baby. Here's where the puzzle of ball temperature and testosterone gets a lot more interesting. Research suggests that anywhere from 4 to 30% of men suffer a condition called varicoseil. Varicosil is an abnormality in the spermatic cord. This is basically where the veins in the scrotum are swollen and this can impair sperm as well as testosterone production. H looks like there's a jam in delta sector. A 2022 paper explains that patients with this simple defect in the veins of the balls on average have lower testosterone. This can lead to the various symptoms of testosterone deficiency. Decreased libido, erectile
dysfunction, fatigue, depressed mood, increases in weight gain, and insulin resistance. Among infertile men, the incidence of varicoseil has been observed to be as high as 35 to 40%. A 1984 paper tested a ball cooling device on men who had some form of varicoseil. Cooling the balls improved the semen quality of many of the men enough to lead to successful pregnancies. This study implies that perhaps one of the effects of these varicose seals is that they prevent the testicles from regulating their temperature properly and they get too hot. This is really interesting because it suggests the varicose lowers testosterone because it makes the balls hotter. So if that were the case, we should guess that removing a varicoseil
would cool the balls and lead to higher testosterone. That is if varicosil leads to hotter testicles and then leads to lower testosterone then removing the varicosil should lead to cooler testicles and therefore higher testosterone. Indeed the data suggests just that surgery removing the varicose seal decreases ball temperature and increases serum testosterone levels. This paper from 2020 found that 60 to 80% of men with low serum testosterone will exhibit normalization of testosterone level after varicose repair. Now you might assume that it's for a different reason that fixing the varicosil improves testosterone. But research has specifically observed that men with varicoseil have hotter balls and that surgery to remove the varicoseil
restores the balls to a proper cooler temperature. There's a reason why your balls are positioned outside your body. For the balls to produce healthy sperm, they need to be 2 to 6° C below the core body temperature. So, what you need to do is to keep your balls from overheating for extended periods of time at all costs. There are tons of studies finding that cooling the scrotum has an improvement on semen parameters. This is huge for couples because considering in about 50% of cases, couple infertility is attributable to the male partner, mainly due to a failure in sperm production. as well as sitting wearing tight underwear can increase the temperature of the balls because it presses them against your warm body.
It's also well accepted that it's best to have the bedroom cool for better quality sleep, but it's also a good idea to make sure that your crotch isn't getting too hot overnight. So, there might be something to that rumor that Chinese powerlifters ice their ball holes. While there isn't research specifically on how much ball icing improves testosterone in already healthy men that I know of, many guys, including myself, report feeling a bit more energy and libido from icing their balls regularly. So, if you want to try experimenting with this, you can try placing an ice pack on your balls, but make sure it's over your underwear or over a cloth and not directly on the skin. You don't want to make it
uncomfortable or numb down there. I found about 8 minutes at a time, two to three times a day, to work pretty well for me. Now, while the anecdotal reports are exciting, there is reason to make sure you don't overdo it. Some research suggests that excessive cold exposure to the body in general can actually lower testosterone. Of course, if you're taking a lot of hot baths or going in the sauna a lot, it would be worth cooling the balls down afterwards. Another thing with the sauna is that you're going to be sweating and losing a lot of electrolytes, which are also important for energy levels.
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