What did @mrjabarov actually say?
The claim is simple and bold: stand in an expansive pose for one minute, visualize success, and you will "decrease your cortisol and increase your testosterone significantly." He argues the body sends signals to the brain just as strongly as the brain sends signals to the body, and that sustained open, confident posture can produce long-term hormonal and neurochemical shifts that move you toward being a "high testosterone man."
He's drawing directly from the "power posing" hypothesis popularized by Amy Cuddy's 2010 research, even if he doesn't cite it. The core idea, that your physical posture feeds back into your endocrine system, is a real area of scientific inquiry. The problem is the evidence for it is far messier than this video lets on.
Does the science back this up?
Partially, but not the way he frames it. The original Cuddy et al. (2010, Psychological Science) study reported that two minutes of expansive posing raised testosterone by about 20% and lowered cortisol by about 25%. Those numbers went viral. Then came the replication crisis.
Ranehill et al. (2015, Psychological Science) ran a larger, pre-registered replication with 200 participants and found zero significant hormonal effects from power posing. Credé and Phillips (2017, Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology) reviewed 33 studies and concluded the hormonal effects were inconsistent at best. Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) argued the original findings were likely false positives. Even Cuddy's co-author Dana Carney publicly distanced herself from the hormonal claims in 2016.
Where the evidence does hold up somewhat is on subjective feelings. Some studies find people report feeling more confident after expansive postures, even when testosterone doesn't budge. That's not nothing, but it's a long way from "your whole neurochemistry is gonna change."
What did they get right, and where did they go wrong?
Credit where it's due: the bidirectional body-brain relationship is real. Embodied cognition research, including work by Niedenthal (2007, Science) and Barsalou (2008, Annual Review of Psychology), confirms that physical states influence mental ones. Smiling can mildly shift mood. Slouching can worsen affect. This isn't fringe science.
He also isn't wrong that chronic stress postures, rounded shoulders, collapsed chest, are associated with elevated cortisol in observational data. The directional causality he implies, however, is where things get shaky.
What he gets wrong is the specificity and certainty. Saying posture will "significantly" increase testosterone is not supported by the current weight of evidence. Promising a specific hormonal shift in "one minute" is the kind of precision that the data simply does not back. And the leap from a one-minute pose to "becoming a strong masculine high testosterone man" long-term is not a chain of evidence, it's a chain of speculation. Real testosterone optimization involves sleep quality, body composition, resistance training, and in cases of clinical hypogonadism, medical intervention. Posture is not a substitute for any of that.
What should you actually know?
If your testosterone is genuinely low, no amount of manspreading will fix it. Hypogonadism is a clinical condition diagnosed with blood work, not body language. The symptoms, low energy, reduced libido, poor recovery, mood changes, require proper evaluation. Lifestyle factors with real evidence behind them include resistance training (Raastad et al., 2000, European Journal of Applied Physiology), sleep optimization, body fat reduction, and stress management through validated methods like cognitive behavioral therapy or structured exercise.
The posture advice isn't harmful. Standing tall, keeping an open posture, and working on self-presentation have plausible benefits for confidence and social perception. But packaging that as a testosterone intervention is misleading in a way that could cause people to underestimate genuinely low T and delay getting tested.
If you're consistently tired, struggling with mood, or noticing changes in body composition and libido, get your labs done. A posture check won't tell you what your free testosterone levels are.