Truth about Testosterone’s Effect on Athletic Performance

If you give a person testosterone, society considers it a performance enhancer. If you naturally have lots of the hormone, though, it’s a competitive advantage—if you’re a man. But if you’re a woman, at least according to some of the biggest sports associations in the world, it’s just plain unfair.
Female athletes like champion sprinters Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand have had to fight in recent years for their right to compete as women because their natural testosterone levels are far higher than the average woman’s. Organizations like the International Association of Athletics Federations and the International Olympic Committee have put hard limits on the amount these women are allowed to have in their bloodstream on the grounds that it enhances their performance in a way that’s unfair to their fellow competitors. But every time a new ruling comes up, a debate flares in its wake.
Many researchers agree with the IAAF and IOC, but many also think separating men and women by their testosterone levels alone flies in the face of scientific evidence. Despite all the debate, though, there hasn’t been much of any conclusion about what the science actually says about testosterone’s effect on women’s athletic performance. And that’s for a good reason: there isn’t much conclusive evidence at all.
When it comes to nailing down a link between testosterone and athletic performance, part of the problem is that, to put it simply, human bodies are complicated. We know that among elite athletes, men seem to have a consistent 10 to 12 percent athletic advantage over women. Lots of people chalk that up to testosterone alone, but the truth is there are many other factors, from other hormones to societal conditioning, might boost athletic performance, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what testosterone does for athletes. But one option to try to isolate testosterone’s effect is to give people extra hormones and look to see what impact that has on the person’s performance.
One recent study showed that female runners given topical testosterone cream increased their time to exhaustion, one measure of athletic ability. The study got a lot of traction for supposedly showing how high testosterone would give women a competitive advantage. But studies like these aren’t really that relevant to a discussion of hormones naturally produced by the body. Adding extra testosterone, called exogenous testosterone, is essentially just doping. “In the broadest sense, we’ve always known that doping increases athleticism,” says Katrina Karkazis, a senior research fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University and co-author of Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography. “While the molecule is the same, it’s not the same to put T in the body as it is to have exogenous T. When you add it, you get more bangs for the buck, because the body isn’t used to it.”

By – Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.popsci.com/story/science/testosterone-effect-athletic-performance/