Hey everyone,
I’m planning to start my first cycle around late spring/early summer. I’ve been researching and have mostly settled on what I should use. My main point of contention is with HCG, as I’ve seen a lot of conflicting information. My planned cycle is as follows:
Week 1-12: Test E 500mg/week (250mg bi-weekly)
Week 1-14: Arimidex 0.5mg/EOD (as needed)
PCT
Week 15: Nolvadex 40mg/daily, Clomid 100mg/daily
Week 16: Nolvadex 20mg/daily, Clomid 100mg/daily
Week 17-18: Nolvadex 20mg/daily, Clomid 50mg/daily
*Note: I’m planning to use both nolvadex and clomid since I’m currently on a low dose of sertraline, and SSRIs can reduce the effectiveness of nolvadex by inhibiting the CYPD26 enzyme. Sertaline has a moderate effect on this enzyme. There’s some information on this here: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/antidepressants-and-tamoxifen If anyone has opinions on this I’m happy to hear them.
Now with the HCG I’m not confident whether it’d be best to include as:
Week 1-12: HCG 500ui/week (250ui bi-weekly)
or
Week 12-14: HCG 500ui/week (250 bi-weekly)
or if I should just exclude it from my cycle all together. If anyone with more experience can share some info on this or has any general feedback on my cycle I’m planning that’d be awesome. Thanks a lot.
What’s the reasoning behind wanting to use hcg on cycle?
I’m wanting to minimize side effects and recovery time as much as possible. So it’d be mainly to prevent any testicular atrophy and to help my natural testosterone return more quickly.
I’ve also read anecdotal reports that it can help with retaining muscle gains after a cycle. But I’m not really sure how credible these claims are so that wouldn’t be my primary reason for using it.
Just blast it in the 2 weeks between your last pin and pct. Finish up a few days before you start your nolva. Just use the 5000 iu spread over that 10-11 days, so roughly 1000 eod and that should suffice if aiding in recovery is all your looking for.
The only reasoning I can see for it helping to retain muscle post cycle is getting your own test back up and running faster, so spending less time with low T. For an older guy this might make an appreciable difference but if your younger then I doubt it would do a whole lot as things tend to come back on line quite fast anyway from what I understand.
I see, thanks. I’m 27 and healthy, so maybe it wouldn’t be all that necessary. At this point I’m sort of leaning towards excluding it all together. It seems like it might just complicate things unnecessarily.
I’m 25 and running the last few weeks of my test e cycle. Havent used hcg and wont be at the end either. My nuts did shrink a bit, left more so then the right but nothing extreme. Just dont touch them and you wont be alarmed haha.