Does everyone on a cycle donate blood to lower RBC?
I’m on test E 500mg/week - 2 of12 weeks.
Var- 30mg ed
Proviron - 50mg ed
If you have high RBC then donating blood is the simplest method of lower it (outside of lowering your T dosage).
Doesnt everybody get high RBC on Test cycle? I wasn’t going to get blood test until after I finish my PCT bc I’m in a foreign country and it’s a pain in the ass.
Everyone’s bodies respond slightly differently which is why folks here preach about getting blood work done before-during-and after your cycle to know and learn how your body is responding.
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Not everyone gets high RBC/HCT on cycle (HCT is a more accurate marker of checking in my opinion), it’s individual as to how sensitive and individual is to the erythropoietic effects of anabolic steroids.
You see erythropoietin is a hormone released by the kidneys that stimulates bone marrow to produce red blood cells. Right, hematocrit is the ratio of total blood volume to red blood cells.
The reason/ mechanism behind why anabolic steroids increase RBC to my knowledge isn’t fully understand, but we know this, anabolic steroids exert many of their effect via interaction/ binding to the AR (although some anabolic steroids exhibit many of their actions largely independent of the AR (stanozolol, derp). The kidneys contain androgen receptors, so it’s possibly AR mediated. What we do know is that testosterone and other anabolic steroids increase the output and effectiveness of erythropoietin, hence why AAS have been and or may still be used to treat certain forms of anaemia.
Hope this helps
The issue with donating blood on AAS is that if you are using injectable AAS without a script, you have to lie on the blood donation forum, which is an immoral (in my opinion) thing to do, not to say I’m not going to exactly that but I don’t think it’s ethically/ morally correct. You see the concentrations of androgen in the blood are too small to really make a difference, they’re looking for people to eliminate from donating who have a risk of transmitting blood bourne parasites, and since many believe AAS users share dirty needles… You get the drift. That being said (and I said this earlier) if I had a daughter who was sick, I wouldn’t want her getting a blood transfusion from a guy on tren, because even in trace amounts who knows what that’ll do to a child lolololol. Although if possible I’d get therapeutic phlebotomies (money isn’t an issue, I’d rather pay an assistant of money and not lie on forums than lie, I hate lying, although sometimes it’s for the greater good, like when a young impressionable teenager is like “unreal, howd you bulk up so quickly? It’s amazing, how can I do it” and I have to say " well everyone responds differently to weight training, my genetics may be better than yours, you could do the exact same diet, workout routine and have the exact same sleep pattern as me and still not make nearly as much gains" when the truth is “well I’ve been injecting somewhat/slightly higher than normal doses of test, I previously had hypogonadism and therefore the change accompanied by diet and exercise helped me bulk up rapidly, I’ve also tried Anavar and nandrolone in the past briefly at low doses”… Because then the kid will be like “fuck yea let’s use some deca” and then you’re like “nooooooooooooo”
Thanks for the replies. I think I just have to make the extra effort to get bloods at 6 weeks. As this is my first cycle, I want to see exactly how my body is reacting.
Get before bloods too, so you have a baseline hormonal status and other health variables that I’ll put in later but I’m going to sleep now
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With the right dosage, of course everyone does because that’s one of the effects of testosterone.
Does it matter if your rbc is high? The answer is no, not really. Most do not do anything to try to lower rbc and they are fine.
It improves performance, pumps, etc. The side-effect is a slightly increased risk of stroke which is also true for high estrogen.
To touch briefly on @unreal24278 point about having to lie in order to donate blood, it’s true that you would have to do that in order for organizations like the red cross to take your blood…I’ll let you make your own call on that. What I do, or to be perfectly exactly what my Doc does, is to order a therapeutic blood draw right in his office. I don’t know if they use the blood for anything but I really don’t care. It keeps by rbc down and we’re both happy. Consider that route.
Lastly since you mentioned this being your first cycle I really want to point out that you should consider dropping the other compounds your on and stick to just the Test…that way you can learn how your body responds to it before adding extras. If you were to experience side effects right now you really wouldn’t know which one was the culprit would you?