How Triathlon Training Might Be Ruining Your Libido

Triathlon is getting faster. Professionals are pushing the boundaries and breaking new records. Projects like sub 7 and sub 8 are shattering what we thought were possible.

YouTube content documents the journeys of professional and amateurs alike and we get a constant stream of motivation to encourage us to train. More hours. Harder sessions. Sweat and make it count...

But is this motivation always a good thing?

If you’d like to watch a video format of this blog article then you can by watch the video above!

Well, maybe not. And we’re going to talk about that today, and more specifically around sex drive, or libido, and its link to endurance training like triathlon.

There was a super interesting study which I read and wanted to share the results with you, because I think they are truly important.

Before we do, let’s just cover what the basis for all of this is.

The organic super computer

Now your body is a complex organism.

It’s got so many processes and systems going on and we want to keep it ticking over happily, and to be able to do so it needs food to supply energy and nutrients.

So the premise there is simple, you eat and you provide your body with the fuel to work as it wants to.

But when you add exercise in there, especially as much as we triathletes like to, you can start to throw things out of kilter. Your immune system might get affected and you get sick easier or don’t recover as well, you can get mood changes and become irritable when you wouldn’t normally, and like we’re talking about in today’s article you can have sexual or reproductive dysfunction too.

The exact reasons why these things happen are complex, and in truth we’re still trying to understand it fully. We’ll talk about this more a little later in the video when we go over ways to stop these things from happening, but for now let’s say there is mounting evidence to link exercise to certain health problems.

So onto the study that I wanted to talk to you about. We’re going through a paper which looked into sexual libido in male endurance athletes.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28195945

It used an online survey to gather data with all of the normal demographics like age, height and weight. But it also included information on training volume, intensity, method, years of training and whether they had completed events like triathlons.

This is important by the way because triathlons are specifically mentioned and has some significant data.

The survey also comprised of questions around sexual libido and sexual desire. The authors used questionnaires which had already been developed and undergone tests for validity, and if you’re interested in it a bit more I’d encourage you to check it out yourself.

On that vein, we’re not going to go through all of the results of this study but keep it relevant for triathletes.

The first and main thing here is thr, taken from the study:

‘In this cross-sectional survey study, we found that an in-verse relationship exists between endurance exercise training factors and male libido scores. Specifically, higher amounts of intensive training or training involving greater amounts of duration within the endurance program were associated with lower libido scores.’

So put another way, what they’re saying here is their results showed the more you trained, or the harder you trained, the more likely you were to have a lower sex drive.

The table below is also super interesting; it’s the values behind what I just mentioned, but also includes chronic duration of training and that it seems to be associated with libido.

Metrics like training hours and intensity

The more you have trained overall, as in years and hours per week, the more likely you were to have a lower libido.

Now let’s highlight another bit of critical information, and it’s that those who had completed a triathlon were more likely to have a lower libido as well, and there didn’t seem to be a difference based on how many you had completed.

Whether participants had completed a triathlon, and how many triathlons they had completed

Now in my opinion this sort of data is so interesting and I think super important for triathletes to hear. I love triathlon as a sport and the community, but I also care a lot about people’s health.

Often we just hear or watch a lot of stuff which is highly motivating. We don’t get the harsh realities and well, the balance.

Now before we move on to ways to prevent health problems associated with training I think we need to just talk about some limitations of the study and what we can actually infer.

How far can we extrapolate the data?

Firstly, the study was all online and relied on accurate history from the participants. There’s likely to be some error with this as subjective reporting commonly isn’t as accurate, but I don’t think it’s a biggie.

More importantly, because it was all online there were no objective measurements. So, the sorts of things you would normally measure here like testosterone or other hormone, resting metabolic rate, weren’t measured.

This means we’ve got to be careful in saying exactly why the results were what they were because we don’t know the full story. There’s lots of research going on into hormones like testosterone and how levels can change in endurance athletes, and what significance it has.

Along with what I just mentioned, the study didn’t discuss food intake and this is super important.

Calorie intake, and calorie deficits, seem to be a huge drive for the negative consequences from endurance training. That is, if you don’t eat enough to fuel your training, your body compensates by shutting off bits of it to decrease its energy needs.

Whilst I can’t say this and be sure of it, I suspect chronic calorie deficits and negative energy balances play a huge part of low libido in endurance athletes and I hope that further evidence shows this...

There’s still reason to be positive

Now it’s not all doom and gloom! There are things that you can do to prevent your triathlon training having a negative effect on your health! I can’t say that this will completely stop it because I don’t have all the answers, but I can do my best to help you.

The first, and most important thing, is to fuel your training and your recovery. I know this sounds so basic.

But honestly, a lot of triathletes who I have worked with in the past just aren’t aware quite how much energy they need to fuel their training. It’s pretty common for them to regularly be in a calorie deficit, and this can lead to long term problems.

So my biggest advice is to really make sure you make nutrition your priority. Fuel long sessions well, eat promptly after training and eat sufficiently over the day, that sort of thing. I have done various videos on these topics so feel free to browse through them if you’d like.

My next bit of advice would be to make sure you focus on the other things which are going to help you recover properly from your training.

So here we’re thinking about getting enough sleep, having a proper training plan and zones. Your body needs to recover and it can’t go hard all the time, otherwise you’ll just explode and have to take a long time out from training because you’re sick or injured.

That’s actually one of those things which Instagram and YouTube isn’t great for. You often just see the hard efforts and think that’s what pros do all the time - it really isn’t.

I know it’s very tempting to, but what I can promise you is that if you focus on nutrition and the other recovery aspects then you will be able to train harder and more consistently over the longer term, you’ll recover better and reduce your risk of illness and injury.

And that, really, is the key here.

If you have any features of sexual dysfunction then I would suggest you get in touch with your family doctor to discuss it. It’s worth making sure that there aren’t any other causes or things to consider.