Generally speaking there are long chains of biochemical processes between an input (e.g. t- booster) and the output you want (more muscle mass), so if you keep the same input constantly for a long time, changes in the way your body regulates those biocehmical processes will mean you get less efect from it.
This is why people become less sensative to alcohol/drugs when they use them for a long time.
So for the period that I’ve been considering t - boosters I’ve always assumed that i would cycle them. Do you not cycle them, and if not why not?
The dosage protocol on Alpha Male specifically directs 5 days on/2 days off for this very reason. I’m curious why you’d want to cycle it on top of that.
I didn’t see that on the uk biotest website (oddly they had 5 -2 on the tribex page instead).
I have a biochemistry Phd - but i mainly worked on processes related the immune system. My impression of drugs that the body isn’t going to have a more complex dependancy on is that in general if you ere on the side of cycling thats better than ereing on the side of keeping a dosage constant.
I’m sure there are people on this site that know the processes around testosterone better than I do - but I would be worried about the things that your body does to get rid of what it might percieve as excess testosterone; e.g. turning it into eostrogen and making your prostate swell up, so you have trouble peeing.
If lots of people have cycled alpha men 5/2 for years and are fine, then i’m happy to follow their example- but pretty much any compound I came across unless you absolutely needed to keep it constant (like for example an immunosupresant thats needed to stop someone from rejecting an organ) I would assume it was better to cycle on/cycle off.
I can’t imagine Alpha Male is going to have one produce excess testosterone: otherwise, it’d be a controlled drug and not something you could sell legally over the internet. It’s testosterone support.
There is a lot of money in medicine, but not in sports so the research that would tell you how bad or good something is is generally not done till many years later [othrwise i would have just looked at papers on the long term effects of alpha male rather than starting this thread], and even when the research is there, the government make odd decisions on what to restrict.
This means that there are weird scenarios - where things like HGC which is not dangerous at all end up being illegal, but you can buy all the SARMs you want (at least in the uk) even though they might kill your liver.
Since it’s not fully understood what the exact mechanisms or enzymes reduce its effectiveness one could always try drinking some grapefruit juice a half hour or so before taking it to increase or restore effectiveness.
Even if it doesn’t work, the grapefruit juice is pretty good for you.
Like Pwn said, Alpha Male doesn’t create “excess testosterone”. It essentially stimulates your body to produce more Test on its own.
FWIW, I’ve been using Alpha Male, Rez-V, and ZMA for well over a year straight (following the 5/2 for Alpha Male) and bloodwork showed roughly a 45% increase in Total T, bringing me from below-normal up into low-normal range.
Many supplements do not fall into that category. Caffeine being one popular example. I believe the idea behind the “weekly” cycling of Alpha Male is to kinda-sorta replicate the body’s natural Test fluctuations to an extent. Rather than trying to coax the body into producing more T 24/7/365, it’s basically telling things to work harder 6/5/261 (if my math is right).
I didn’t say anything about “excess testosterone”; I said “what your body percieves as excess testosterone”. Someone might think 1500ng/dl is a perfect amount, but the aromatase your endocrine system produces might have its own ideas.
I’m not sure why you brought up Cafine. Its a perfect example of a compound that exposure to will reduce your sensativity to. If you want to be sensative to it, its a good idea to take breaks.
Anyway I’m not going to contribute to derailing this thread via a pointless argument.
I appreciate the anecdote and the thoughts on why Biotest recomend the cycle they do. That makes a lot of sense.
I’ll clarify, Alpha Male doesn’t create what the body would perceive as excess testosterone because the increase is endogenous.
I did misunderstand what you were getting to regarding cycling, but I’m still not sure why you don’t consider 5 days on/2 days off to be, exactly, cycling on and off.
Who’s arguing? The discussion seems pretty well on-topic.
Its a dosage thing. If you put 10x or 20x the amount of any hormone in your body than the normal upper limit for healthy people, your body is going to stop producing that hormone and work as hard as it can to get rid of it.
I don’t know how much of an increase from a t-booster is reasonable to expect. The truth is most hormonal concentrations vary a lot depending on your day (for example its in the hormone chain for sex and arousal) but the concentration I gave above would be high for a teenager to maintain for any real length of time (but certainly possible) and a little higher than what a very fit man in his 20s could hope to sustain.
But because biology doesn’t always want the things you want- even for a guy at peak condition in his 20s some of that T may be doing things he doesn’t want- like promoting prostate growth and making him bald.
That being said if you have a ton of muscle, you also have a ton of T- receptors on your muscle, [And this relationship may be better than linear so 2x the weight of muscle → over 2x the number of receptors etc]. A large number of T receptors on muscle probably means that there is less of it moving freely in your system and getting into places where it can cause trouble.
As a result my attitude is that, whilst I like T enough to take a supplement, I’m still conscious that biology is weird enough that I need to also be making sure I’m treating these complex systems with a lot of respect, and being conscious of anything that might bite me in the ass in 40 years time.
I am 50 y/o. I have taken Ashawagandha twice a day, High Potency Fish Oil twice daily, B Complex and extra B 12, Magnesium Citrate after each meal, Vitamin D 5000 IU daily, whole eggs and Pomegranate Juice daily have help me along with loosing 45 lbs with a 1600-1800 kcal diet to bring my T Levels from the 280s to the 700s in over 1 1/2 years. I hope these list helps you.
