Reviewed by MD. Catarina Costa, Internal Medicine · Medical Advisor at Octo HealthWe have spent thousands of hours across hormone research, clinical literature, and practitioner resources. Octo Dial reads the endocrine system as one connected whole, the thyroid, adrenal, and gonadal axes working together, for any sex. This is the distilled version: the markers that actually matter, the context your standard bloodwork never comes with, and the evidence-backed changes that move the needle.
Start here: three free things you can do today
- Protect 7 to 8 hours of sleep, every night. Most daily testosterone is secreted overnight, coupled to sleep architecture. One week at 5 hours is associated with a 10 to 15% drop in young men.
- Do two to three compound resistance sessions a week. Squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses produce the most consistent testosterone response of any behavioral change.
- Keep dietary fat above the synthesis floor. Testosterone is built from cholesterol. Diets below 15 to 20% of calories from fat are associated with lower testosterone in men.
Free, and the highest-leverage changes on this protocol. The full 90-day plan below turns these into a routine you can keep.
Why this matters
The clinical conversation about hormones in adults over 35 has a structural problem, and it applies to every sex. Hormones are read one at a time, against wide population ranges, while the thyroid, adrenal, and gonadal axes that actually regulate energy, mood, and body composition work as a single connected system. A result of "normal" on any one of them says little about how the system is performing together.
Take the marker most often misread. A man with total testosterone of 310 ng/dL sits inside the clinical normal range and is told nothing is wrong, yet the standard hypogonadism threshold of 300 ng/dL marks where diagnosable disease begins, not where symptoms begin. The same logic applies across the board: research on quality of life, libido, body composition, and cognitive performance consistently places the functional threshold above the disease threshold, in both sexes.
The markers that matter
Total testosterone (men)Optimal 500 to 900 ng/dL (≈17.4 to 31.2 nmol/L) · Standard 300 to 1000 ng/dL
In plain English. All the testosterone in your blood, bound and unbound together.
The most commonly ordered sex hormone marker, and the most commonly misinterpreted. The standard clinical threshold for male hypogonadism sits at 300 ng/dL, which is where diagnosable disease begins, not where symptoms begin. The functional range research associates with optimal energy and cognition often sits within, but toward the upper half of, the standard reference range. A total testosterone of 500 ng/dL in a man with SHBG of 65 nmol/L produces a free testosterone profile consistent with deficiency. The number requires context before it carries meaning.
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Your whole body, on one timeline.
Every lab, every wearable, every check-in, tracked over the years and read as a system.