TRT before SARMs

Hey guys, I wanted to address an issue I see far to often in the fitness community (not just here) This post is applicable to biological males on TRT. I frequently see guys asking about SARMs/Peptides to gain muscle. These guys are often running sub-optimal TRT protocols and IMO it would be in their best interest to find a Dr who knows what they are doing BEFORE adding any PEDs. By sub-optimal I mean: 1. A dose of less than 140mg/wk 2. Dosing less than 2x/wk. Here is why. First it is important to have an understanding of Half-Life. For those that don’t know, it’s the time taken for the dose to be reduced by 50%. Most TRT scripts are written for Testosterone Cypionate which has a half life of 8 days. This means that if you dose 1x per week your blood testosterone level will be reduced to about 60% of the initial dose by day 7. If you dosed 1x per month youd be down to about 8% of the original dose in your system before the next injection. Dosing 2x per week maintains fairly consistent blood levels. Testosterone converts to many other hormones and as you can imagine, the more they fluctuate, the harder it is to maintain stable physical and mental health. Each person has an ideal testosterone dose for their body depending on a number of factors such as body size/composition, genes, diet, activity level, sleep, how your body converts into each sub-hormone, etc. Simply “feeling good” is not an adequate indicator of sufficient or excessive testosterone levels. i.e. I feel like a God on 600mg/wk, but that results in High LDL, high blood pressure, high estrogen, thick blood, a butt hurt girlfriend etc, most of which can become life threatening if left un-managed. There are dozens of clinical trials on thousands of men ages 18-72 spanning decades, with TRT doses ranging from 30mg/wk up to 600mg/wk. The significant finding here is that most men dosed at or below 120mg/wk LOST MUSCLE during the trials. At 100mg/wk roughly 70% lost over 5lbs of muscle during the first 12 months alone. Only doses of 140mg+/wk showed consistent muscle maintenance, assuming a number of factors were met such as free test levels. Most men across these studies had negligible muscle gain until they reached 180mg/wk. Don’t forget that each body converts testosterone at its own ratio, so some guys may need tweaking to optimize other hormones such as DHT (important for sexual health), estrogen (which is important for muscle growth) etc just to name a couple. Granted, there are probably outliers who could maintain muscle on these low doses, but I’d bet your not one of them. An interesting note: with each reduction in dose (below 120mg/wk) there was a strongly corelated increase in mental and physical issues such as depression, ED, muscle loss, gynecomastia, fat gain, hair loss, skin issues and more. If you don’t optimize your test levels before a cycle, and you gain muscle, it is extremely unlikely that you will be able to maintain the new muscle, resulting in a loss of all muscle gains and you feeling like you wasted your hard-earned money. – Stay healthy! You only have one body to live in.