I’m definitely in favor of this attempt. Test won’t be low, estrogen won’t be high, the body doesn’t have to figure out what to do with a surplus and hematocrit and the organs don’t take a loading. Hope it’s a foot in the right direction
Thank you. Exactly right.
Some small portion of men will require higher doses while some larger portion doesn't need that high a dose but neither will they be harmed much or at all by higher doses. They get bigger, stronger, and hornier without catastrophic organ damage.
Then there are the 80% of men on the bubble of a Gaussian distribution who go beyond natural levels at their peril. They aromatize too much, their kidneys and livers and blood quickly start developing problems, etc.
Plus, maybe what is an optimal test level actually declines with age. So while I might have been good with 5.5 mg per day in my 20's, in my 40's 4.5 is optimal. I may only be producing 2-3 mg per day, but jumping to 20 mg per day (the amount of pure test I get from administering 200 mg of test E per week) is still far from optimal.
Further as I think about it, it takes weeks to shut down and the amount of shutdown is tied to how much I'm dosing. So I am still producing test endogenously, at least for a while. So I should start really lower than the target and titrate up as my HPTA winds down.
I have read many accounts of men feeling better in the first three weeks or so then returning to baseline in terms of mood and sex drive. Maybe they would have better results by adjusting the dose upward after their natural production stops being as robust as before they started exogenous testosterone.
Whatever. I do think HRT has been too influenced by performance enhancement thinking. Why else would "clinics" be pushing 250 mg/week of cyp along with an AI? That's 170 mg of exogenous test per week into a body that really needs maybe around 40.
Doctors like Dr. Crisler are ahead of their time with these recommendations of just 60 mg of test cyp (41 mg of pure test) per week to start.
If youre serious about real, therapeutic TRT, youd try TD. What I mean is, daily application of a gel will more closely mimic natural diurnal fluctuations (peaks/troughs) than any practical inj protocol could hope to achieve.
This is what I use for trt and prefer to inj for this purpose.... It's as if at a certain level the body won't absorb and use the test in a way that exceeds supraphysiological test levels.... In my opinion the tds put you closer to true trt levels. So in other words my body will tend to stay at levels of 7-800 ng/dl in my experience give or take, even if I increased dosage significantly.
Topical seems to be all over the place in terms of results. All the docs I follow prefer injections but subcutaneous over intramuscular.