Testosterone After 40: What It Means for Male Skaters
Physiotherapist and skater. Came back to skating at 49 and hasn't stopped.
This site already has a piece on perimenopause and joints for the hormonal changes women navigate returning to skating in their 40s and beyond. Men go through their own gradual hormonal shift over the same decades, and it gets talked about far less — usually either ignored entirely or wrapped up in TRT marketing that oversells what’s actually going on. Here’s the practical, non-hyped version, and what it means for the specific demands skating puts on your body.
What actually happens
Testosterone doesn’t fall off a cliff the way estrogen does around menopause. It’s a slow, gradual decline that typically starts in your 30s and continues at a modest rate — commonly cited estimates put it somewhere around one to two percent a year on average — through your 40s, 50s, and beyond. There’s real individual variation: sleep quality, body composition, chronic stress, and underlying health conditions all move the number around, and some men in their 50s test well within a normal range while others test low.
The changes that matter for an active adult, and for skating specifically, show up gradually rather than suddenly:
Slower tissue repair, for some men. Testosterone plays a role in how efficiently the body repairs muscle and connective tissue after load, so for men whose levels have dropped meaningfully, that can be part of the picture. It’s one contributor among several, though, not a guarantee — plenty of the same fall or hard session shaking off in a day at 30 and taking three at 50 comes down to ordinary aging, training load, sleep, and recovery habits, with or without any change in testosterone specifically.
Gradual bone density changes. Testosterone supports bone density in men the way estrogen does in women, just less abruptly. Combined with the ordinary age-related bone density decline everyone experiences, this is part of why impact-bearing activity — which skating provides in a useful, moderate way — matters more, not less, as you get older. See the osteoporosis and bone density piece for more on that side of it.
Changes in muscle mass and fat distribution. Lower testosterone is associated with a gradual shift toward less muscle mass and more fat mass at the same body weight, which is part of why maintaining strength — not just cardio fitness — takes deliberate effort rather than happening automatically the way it might have at 25.
What the evidence actually supports doing about it
Resistance training is the highest-leverage lever you control. Don’t count on regular strength training to meaningfully raise a low resting testosterone number — the evidence for that is weak, despite how often it gets repeated. A 2018 systematic review and meta-analysis in Frontiers in Physiology (Hayes and Elliott) pooled trials in men aged 60 and over and found resistance training had no measurable effect on resting testosterone, even though the same men still gained muscle and strength. What it reliably does is counteract the muscle-loss and bone-density consequences of lower levels directly, regardless of what your actual number is, which matters just as much. This isn’t specific to skating — it’s general exercise physiology — but it stacks well with skating, which builds balance and joint control without doing much for raw strength on its own. The strength training piece covers the specific muscle groups adult skaters tend to undertrain.
Sleep matters more than almost anything else here. Testosterone production is closely tied to sleep, and sleep loss suppresses it faster than aging does. In a University of Chicago study published in JAMA in 2011 (Leproult and Van Cauter), one week of five-hour nights lowered daytime testosterone in healthy young men by 10 to 15 percent — roughly what a decade of normal aging takes off. If you’re skating regularly, sleeping poorly, and feeling like recovery has gotten harder than it should, sleep is worth fixing before you look anywhere else. The sleep and recovery piece covers the recovery side of that.
Body composition and chronic stress both move the number. Carrying significant excess body fat and running under chronic unmanaged stress both correlate with lower testosterone levels, independent of age. Neither is a quick fix, but both are levers that respond to the same training and lifestyle changes that help everything else on this list.
Alcohol is worth being honest about. Regular heavy drinking measurably suppresses testosterone and also degrades the sleep quality that supports it. If you’re already managing a slower recovery curve, this is one of the more controllable variables.
When to actually get tested
Fatigue, a real drop in strength or motivation, reduced libido, and mood changes that persist for weeks rather than days are the signals worth taking to a doctor, not something to self-diagnose from a symptom list. A blood test gives you an actual number rather than a guess, and it’s worth ruling out other causes — thyroid issues, depression, sleep apnea, and several other conditions produce overlapping symptoms — before assuming testosterone is the explanation.
Testosterone swings with time of day, food, illness, and normal day-to-day variation, so a single result isn’t a diagnosis. Levels are highest in the morning, which is why the test should be drawn then, and fasting — a meal beforehand can temporarily suppress the number. The Endocrine Society’s 2018 clinical practice guideline on testosterone therapy asks for exactly that: a fasting, early-morning total testosterone, confirmed with a second fasting, early-morning test on a separate day before anyone treats it as a real finding rather than noise. Around 30 percent of men whose first result comes back low test normal on the repeat.
If a confirmed test does come back low, that’s a conversation to have with a doctor who can weigh the actual risks and benefits of treatment for your specific situation, not something to self-manage based on internet forums. TRT is a real medical intervention with real trade-offs, not a supplement.
The skating-specific takeaway
None of this is a reason to worry, and it’s definitely not a reason to chase a hormone number instead of just training well. The practical version is the boring one: lift something heavy twice a week, protect your sleep, keep drinking in check, and let skating do what it already does well — build balance, coordination, and moderate impact tolerance that supports the bone density this whole picture depends on. The men who handle this transition best aren’t the ones optimizing a lab number. They’re the ones who kept training consistently through it.