Been On TRT For A Year. Is It Time to Add In Another Compound?

I personally prefer masteron over var. Has the same hardening effect with positive libido effects as well. Ive only used masteron enanthate thus far but just got my hands on some masteron propionate and I’m excited about playing with that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I have thought about this. Would it be worthwhile to split out this forum to have

one forum for anecdotal discussion of anabolic therapy using pharmaceutical grade AAS (Rx either through traditional or compounding pharmacy which use USP registered bulk ingredients)

vs

another forum which would cover UGL AAS which may or may not contain the API as advertised?

This approach would also deconvolute the issue with side effects / impurities associated with UGL products vs the side effect profile of legitimate Pharma grade medication. From an epidemiologic standpoint, may be useful, since many folks coming into this area have no idea the difference in risk/quality of Pharmaceutical grade vs UGL.

You’d have one group who only want to understand risk/reward with Pharma Rx AAS (what’s available depends on country), then you’d have another group who are willing to take that next level risk with UGL material that couples risk of the API (or whatever maybe substituted in place of claimed API) combined with risk of no GMP on the production. Calling out the difference may be educational and useful to the respective audiences but more work.

@Chris_Colucci any thoughts on this? Or am I just daydreaming at this point? I know you guys are already doing a lot just having this forum. Thanks for considering.

Maybe forever.

Tren is like a crazy girlfriend that will screw up your life but is wild in bed. :laughing: You think its worth it but its not. Especially for married guys.

@alldayeveryday is right, masteron is a great additive to test and I run it at low doses in my cruise. However, i still like to run a course of anavar a couple of times a year. @wholelottareps

How often are your labs. Tell doc you want to stay at 200. Drop to 150. Stock pile. If you feel good at 150. Tell him what you did and he will be happy. If you don’t like the way you feel. Restart 200mg 6 weeks before next lab draw.

I wouldn’t call T levels in the 900’s supraphysiologic. Even if he was slightly over 1000 ng/dl (with the missed injection) that would be borderline supraphysiologic. Depending on which ‘normal’ range you look at (and they seem to be inconsistent and changing) levels of 280 to 1,100 ng/dL are considered normal.

@dragon1952

What do you think his peak/trough are when he isn’t missing a week of injections? The assumption would be he typically isn’t missing injections otherwise he would not be doing 200 mg/wk of TC. He’d be doing something significantly lower.

Therefore, given the half life of TC and any range you want to use for TT, he’s running way above physiologic and this ain’t TRT unless he has androgen insensitivity syndrome that everyone seems to have nowadays :-).

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Without knowing how he metabolizes testosterone it would be difficult to predict what his levels might have been. Also we don’t exactly know what “after missing a week” means. Did he go an entire 14 days between last injection and blood work or did he miss his next injection and then go 2 days later for blood work? Without knowing it’s all just conjecture. Maybe he would have tested at 1100 or maybe 1300? One would be at the high end of normal and one could be considered low end of supraphysical.

I agree UGL is riskier, but I’m not sure if it’s as dramatic as 50-100x riskier. One can send samples out for testing (mg/ml concentration + testing for compound and heavy metal/potentially bacterial contamination). At-home test kits also exist pertaining to what the compound at hand is. Certain grey market manufacturers supposedly have fairly sophisticated labs set up.

I once saw someone come into the gym where I work out with a really bad looking abscess festering on his tricep.

That being said… Trenbolone probably fits into the 50-100x riskier than testosterone bracket… Or 100000x riskier. Nandrolone/c17-AA AAS probably fit into the 5-10x riskier category… I don’t think primobolan per se is 5-10x riskier than testosterone.

Have they stopped manufacturing oxandrin? Is oxandrolone currently manufactured anywhere besides the US? In Aus I think they’ve recently stopped manufacturing generic nandrolone. It was available in ampoules of 50mg/ml.

You’ve used oxandrolone before @readalot, do you think the high dosages people use is overkill? Literature seems to indicate oxandrolone is rather potent, yet we constantly see people using 50-100mg/day. If I was to go by literature, 20-25mg/day should be plenty for most.

If this is his nadir from 1x/wk, his peak is fairly close to and/or over 2000ng/dl.

I’ll fill in what I know. Zyzz was an Australian bodybuilder/influencer known for living a lavish, live fast and die young lifestyle.

His appearance was based on the classical concept of aesthetics (think Greek god type of look). He actually looked pretty good. He had a small waist, broad shoulders and a very conditioned/defined midsection.

If I recall correctly he spent much of his time when outside of gym partying, going to festivals and chasing girls. From what I could see within some of his videos, he seemed a little bit full of himself.

Unfortunately it appears he had an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. I believe he left to Thailand after his brother was caught selling anabolic steroids as there was quite the investigation going on at the time (not sure if he was involved and/or implicated).

Now, this was a twenty one year old male bodybuilder on his own in Thailand (I think Pattaya?)… A town full of booze, prostitution and legal steroids. He died while presumably on cycle due to cardiac arrhythmia. Its been said that there were recreational drugs involved alongside the lines of cocaine, MDMA, alcohol etc. Couple that with a heart defect, being in a sauna/hot-tub and it’s arrhythmia city.

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You are right to a small degree but kinetics a far more predictable than you think. If he tells us his dose, long he’s been on and what his plasma level is, we can fairly accurately predict what his peak was. The concentration after time “off” tells us how he metabolizes T.

@wholelottareps, what’s your injection frequency for 200 mg/week?

What was the elapsed time between your last injection and this blood test that came back around 900 ng/dL?

Based on the information you have shared thus far, the only input that I have to assume is injection frequency. If I assume as you stated that you had an extra 7 days “off” then…

every day injection…7 + 1 = 8 days since last injection
twice weekly injection…7+3.5 = 10.5 days since last injection
once weekly injection…7+7 = 14 days since last injection

Based on the

  1. elimination half life of TC being about 8 days based on wealth of pharmacokinetic data
  2. the information you’ve shared

Here’s my estimate for your ramp up profile on 200 mg/week for once weekly or once daily injections:

image

The green shaded area is reasonable physiologic range (let’s call it 250 - 1100 ng/dL). Based on you saying you came back at 900 ng/dL after “missing a week”, looks like you were above 1500 ng/dL a week before you typically test. From my graph above, that would imply you are injecting multiple times a week.

Thanks.

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That’s what I meant. Thanks for doing the work @readalot. Didn’t have the time.

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I actually inject once a week, so it would have been 14 days since the last injection. I think my previous test when I didn’t miss an injection, my levels were somewhere around what you graphed. It wasn’t that exactly, but I dont think it was too far off.

Thanks for that information. Actually, I was way off given that 14 days after your last injection you are measuring Total T of 900 ng/dL. To @dragon1952 's point, I was giving you the typical (mean) young guy’s SHBG of about 30 nmol/L and assumed multiple injections per week. See graph above where once daily trough at 1500 ng/dL.

But since you are injecting only 1 time per week, in order to fit your data point your SHBG must be about 50 or a little above? Do you have it? Using all your data now I put your peak at a little over 3000 ng/dL and trough at ~1600 ng/dL. If at your trough (1600 ng/dL, you skip another injection and then test 7 days later (total of 14 days since last injection), you will come back at ~900 ng/dL using a 8 day elimination half life.

image

All the confusion over “apparent metabolic clearance rate” comes typically from this paper where the authors fit the “apparent MCR” to total T instead of free T (which elimination would be based off in reality). I am guilty of using the term. Therefore, the paper gives the appearance that the clearance rate is a function of the SHBG. Instead, Total T is a function of SHBG and elimination rate based off free T (which if measured correctly using equilibrium dialysis) will be a function of your T dosage. Topic for another post. I conclude you are solidly in that “supra” zone.

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For whatever reason my doctor hasn’t updated my panels online in quite some time. The most recent panel she has listed (which is from October of 2019, right before I started the 200mg/week protocol) My SHBG was 21.9. I believe I was on 75 MG/week at the time and my test levels were still low. Im sure everything is higher now in correlation to the dose Im taking. I’ll give my doctor a call and see if I can get the most recent labs(which were from last month).

See my post above. What I was saying was that the pharmaceutical product “Anavar” no longer exits. Yes, oxandrin still on the market here. Would be nice to use the term oxandrolone instead of Anavar so guys don’t think they are getting oxandrolone with UGL. Unless they do their HW, they don’t know what they are getting.

You may enjoy this. This was US situation for pharmaceutical oxandrolone as of late last year:

image

You can see how expensive retail (even with 30% co-insurance) is compared to compounded.

Whether I used 7.5 mg/day (mean of 15 mg/day EOD) or 50 mg/day my HDL took a drastic hit. Others claim no such effect. I wasn’t comfortable with that but overall oxandrolone was a very compelling anabolic therapy. Like I’ve joked, my genetics may be more amenable to stamp collecting. Only “anti-aging” clinics here would prescribe more than 20 mg/day here for a full size human male. So oxandrolone is quite a conundrum for me. Pharma grade oxandrolone that I can’t take. Perhaps someone will enlighten me that 60-80% reduction in HDL-c and significant increase in LDL particle count really isn’t that bad on and off. My Lp(a) was almost zero. I’m not there yet.

Thanks for the interesting topics to discuss.

@mnben87 Also, here’s a better description of the “apparent MCR” we discussed above. I took some shortcuts in the description. The above is how it would actually work. The paper I mention in the above quote is linked in this post:

If you want to read an in depth review go over to ExcelMale and search for clearance rate and SHBG and filter by user “cataceous”. He really goes in depth and it’s a nice summary of the whole thing. Then you get into accurately measuring free T and the typical Vermeulen calc vs the new Tru-T calc which better fits the equilibrium dialysis data for free T. Really depends how far you want to get into this :-).

Thanks for bringing these points up. That’s a real issue when you have to commit two felonies instead of just one every time your order UGL (first you order then you ship for testing). That’s what I call a catch-22 for the diligent and careful user.

I won’t link the ROIDTEST page here since it will get deleted but look at the colormetric instruction sheet they provide. This is very rough qualitative check and you get no impurity check.

I’d love to see ROC curve for the typical UGL products when these kits are put into the hands of an inexperienced user vs someone with some chemical education/training.

I guess if you are dead set on using some of these compounds then these tools are better than nothing, but if you have access to pharmaceutical products given the appropriate medical indication it seems like a no brainer to go this route. I’d love to hear folks thoughts on this.

How long do you run your mast cycle for? What benefits do you see compared to just running test.