We are going to talk about the effect of weight training on hair loss. Many people are concerned about this; just to recap, we know that testosterone gets converted into dihydrotestosterone and if you’ve got a lot of dihydrotestosterone at the follicular level. More specifically, if you’ve got the gene for hair loss, it causes the hairs to thin and fall out in a predictable pattern, hence male pattern hair loss.
So, what is the effect of weight training?
Well, the reality is we don’t know.
Some people do a lot of weight training and will lose more hair. One of the theories to postulate about that is that by doing more weight training, you’re stimulating the muscle, and by doing that, you’re stimulating testosterone production.
If you have more testosterone, you’re driving the equation over from the testosterone to the dihydrotestosterone (DHT) side.
Does that happen at the follicular level?
Maybe, maybe not, we don’t know, there’s not a clear-cut way to measure, but even more importantly, the issue is that it is not going to cause hair loss in everyone because you need to have the genetics for it, and that’s the x-factor so to speak.
Not everyone that weight trains will progress in their hair loss. Some people will do a lot of weight training, and because they have the genetic propensity and potentially the higher levels of DHT may aggravate their hair loss.
There are people who do no weight training whatsoever and, regardless, still lose their hair, so I don’t think it is something that I would necessarily decide based on should I weight train or not but just be mindful of that. And again, speak to your prescribing physician about it because it may well be that it’s fine to do your weight training, but you may need to be on a small dose of finasteride to try and stabilize the system to lower those levels of DHT in the system.
