The day starts like any other; alarm ringing, eyes squinting then finally opening, and a boner beneath the bed sheets. This, however, isn't how most men "rise" in the morning, and for a while it's something - the boner - that was missing from my morning ritual.

Why is this important?

Well, an erection when you rise is a sign of healthy and high testosterone levels, and optimal testosterone levels indicate a healthy man, a man who's able to burn fat and build muscle and a sexually healthy man as well.

Morning wood = health is good.

Testosterone helps us burn more fat - actually killing our fat cells - and build more muscle, which you may already know. But testosterone is far from the rage and pimple-producing hormone that the media has portrayed it as. Testosterone helps reduce the likelihood of cancers, like prostate cancer, as well as heart disease.

Where testosterone helps men most, though, may be mentally, as it's been shown to reduce our likelihood of experiencing depression, and with men's suicide rates 3 times higher than those of women, testosterone becomes not only vital to our bodily health and performance, but our mental health as well.

This, however, doesn't have to be your reality. In this article I'll show you how to once again wake up as that healthy, virile man you once were, by naturally increasing your testosterone levels with 3 simple, easy tricks.

This ripped the building blocks of our testosterone levels from our diets and replaced it with things that actually lower our testosterone levels, like soy and phytoestrogens and fried foods and a dramatic increase in our highly glycemic carbohydrate intake.

Remember when your wife, mom, or girlfriend – whatever lady was running your life at the time – tried to force-feed you soy, thinking she was making you healthier?

It was the next super food, it had protein and it was so bland and boring tasting that it had to be healthy. Well soy increases estrogen levels in both men and women and combats testosterone levels in men.

If you want to produce more testosterone, step one is to eat like a damn man!

Your diet, however, isn’t the only thing you need to be changing.

The strength training will help you build lean, metabolic and anabolic muscle. The jogging will help you increase your cortisol levels, helping that lean muscle disintegrate.

Don’t just get off your ass, get off your ass and into the gym. Again, not just the younger guys, but those starting to see these morning boners come less frequently.

2. Know your environment.

Plastics are a relatively new innovation in our society. The majority of them that we use as bottles and tupperware are also highly estrogenic (they increase your estrogen levels - NOT GOOD).

Of course, estrogen is a hormone that men need, but in such small amounts that we have it automatically and we need no help in increasing it. Actually, the majority of us need to decrease our estrogen levels, and this can be accomplished by knowing your environment.

A few things to remove:

1. Plastic water bottles – switch to glass bottles and containers. Go buy a bottle of Peligrino and use that as your water bottle from here-on out.
2. Fried foods – stop cooking with olive oil (its make-up changes when heated), but also avoid fried foods all together.
3. Your cell phone – this is more of a sperm count issue, but carrying your cell phone in your jeans pocket is a great way to kill sperm. Put that thing in your jacket pocket for safe keeping.

3. Get some sleep.

Cortisol is one of the biggest enemies of testosterone when its levels start to rise. It’s a stress hormone, that is, when you’re stressing, your cortisol levels will rise. They also increase when you’re not getting enough sleep.

So, if you want that morning wood showing up under the sheets like a well pitched tent, then get some sleep.

The most important thing to take care of with your sleep isn’t sleeping in, it’s routine. If you want to get up early like many successful people do – not all, but many – then go to bed early. Don’t burn the candle from both ends. It’s admirable that you’re hustling and working your ass off in those long hours of the day and well into the night, but if you get a higher quality of sleep, not only of will the quality of your work increase, but you’ll get more work done, you’ll be able to focus for longer periods, and you’re going to positively effect your testosterone levels.

The Quick Fix

Now, we here in the west have become infatuated with quick fixes. They rarely work, but they sell. In this case, though, there are a few quick fixes that will actually help immediately.

The first is a cocktail to take in the morning and before bed:

The Testosterone Boosting Routine

Besides Boners

So the morning boner is a way of knowing that your testosterone levels are still healthy and thriving, but are there other ways to test this?

Indeed, for one, go to your doctor. The best way to test if your testosterone levels are healthy are to actually get them tested.

Keep in mind that it’s not just your overall testosterone levels that matter, it’s your “free testosterone” levels that matter most. So while vegans and vegetarians can have high, overall testosterone levels, their free T levels are typically lower, actually, MUCH lower.

From Androgen Deficiency in the Adult Male, by Malcolm Carruthers:

Strict low cholesterol diets have been shown to lower total and free testosterone levels by 14%. Vegetarian diets, especially low in protein, can increase SHBG, further reducing FT [free testosterone]. However, men put on a low fat, high-fiber, vegetarian diet have a 18% reception in both total testosterone and FT, which is reversed when they go back on a normal diet…

So go get tested, just don’t take the testosterone injections that he may or may not prescribe. All that T injections will do is create a dependancy on a bioidentical form of a hormone that your body produces naturally.

So, if you want to wake up with a morning boner, take the steps outlined in this article:

• Fix your diet so your body has the building blocks of testosterone on a regular basis (cholesterol).
• Get off your ass and start a strength training program.
• Clean up your environment and start avoiding plastics.
• Get a higher quality of sleep.

If you want to wake up with a boner, check out the Man Diet. It’s a diet I’ve created only for men, it’ll help you knock down the barriers standing between you and your ideal body, and those optimal testosterone levels you want.

There’s also an option to add, the Man’s Guide to an Epic Sex Drive, on the back end, if you want to naturally increase your sex drive, I highly recommend adding that to your order.

Want to learn more about how to naturally increase your testosterone levels?