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.
His blood test revealed his testosterone measured 622 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL), 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/dL, 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/dL, and approaching the peak levels possible naturally. (Natural levels of testosterone max out around 1,400 ng/dL and overuse of TRT or steroids can send levels beyond 3,000 ng/dL, 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.”
