Cruise or Blast?

I am currently injecting 100mg of testosterone cypionate (50mg 2x/wk), subcutaneously.

My question is which revision of protocol would net the moist gains?

  1. Continue at current dose and then blast 500 per week for 16 weeks and returning to 100mg per week until enough test c bank away to blast again and repeat.

  2. Increase dosage to 200mg per week, indefinitely.

Are you at all concerned about your health? If yes, I would consider lower doses over a longer period of time.

If no, then blast away

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Testosterone probably has one of the worse benefits to risk ratio with increasing dosages. It is pretty safe at low doses but side effects increase quickly with an increase in dose without as much increase in benefits.

200mg is a dose that is sustainable for a very long time with a low risk of side effects.

Will 500mg/week give better results than 200mg? Sure. But not that much more. And if you factor in the course duration factor, you’ll probably win out with 200-250mg for a longer time. And your health will be better.

I believe that test should not be higher than 250mg/week and if you want to add milligrams, then you should go with another AAS.

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Thank you for your concern for my health, but you did not answer the question posed.

Coach,

Thank you, also for your concern for my health and for addressing the question I asked. I will take your advice and stick to 200mg/week long term.

Yes, I did. Healthy way to go is lower test for longer period of time. Fasted way is to use 500mg blast. I’m sorry you didn’t like that answer

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I’m not one to recommend increasing the dose for no reason (in fact, I don’t give PED prescriptions) but, for what you are looking for, 250/week might be better, and the safety profile is pretty much the same as for 200/week, unless you have a super high rate into either estrogen or DHT.

And let’s be honest, 200-250mg/week is basically TRT, or sports TRT (it will take most to slightly supraphysiological levels). You can “blast” for short periods of 6-8 weeks while keeping the 200-250 base even after the “blast”.

Say two hypothetical guys were taking 200mg/wk. On that dose one has a serum level of 2000 ng/dL while the other has around 1200. Would you say the risk from side effects would be greater for the person with higher levels? Or does the amount of total injected testosterone dictate the risk potential?

To make it more interesting, let’s say you don’t have access to other values (blood pressure, lipids, rbc etc), and only had total T, free T and e2 to work with. Would you still maintain that both doses are relatively safe, despite the difference in blood levels?

Most side effects do not come from the testosterone itself (well, an increase in hematocrit and blood pressure can be direct effects) but from the conversion into either estrogen or DHT.

So, one could argue that the lower levels of T can be due to a higher conversion into either estrogen or DHT in which case there might be MORE side effects in the lower T serum level dude.

BUT that is not necessarily the case, it could be that more drug is metabolized, in which case the lower serum T dude would have less side effects.

You can get E2 levels, which helps determine what is going on. But few tests measure DHT, so you don’t get the whole picture.

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If you want the “most gains” I would always recommend Anabolic steroids in addition to testosterone. Regrettably, it is typically the most toxic ones are the ones that provide the greatest muscle gains. But you can run shorter time periods than 16 weeks. I never went more than 12 weeks, and then only for the contest that year that I chose to give 100% effort. (I usually did 3 contests a year, one might be a warmup to the main one. I liked feeling very comfortable on stage to keep my anxiety down. I felt that anxiety caused fluid from my muscle to migrate to under my skin, and look flat. A very many people I knew looked much better Sunday morning than all day Saturday. Surely not all those people missed their carb loading by one day, and always the next day. But they were always more anxious on Saturday than Sunday.)

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I believe that cortisol is the main reason why people miss their peak. The cortisol spike the night before the contest is obviously caused by the anxiety.

Cortisol is water retentive AND decreases muscle glycogen levels (both by mobilizing glycogen, taking it out of the muscles and by reducing glucose uptake by the muscles).

Worrying or being anxious before a contest can easily lead to a watery, flat physique

My apologies…I see your point.

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Given the half life of Test C, would 6-8 weeks be long enough?

I primarily used half-life to help determine the frequency that I needed to inject to keep my anabolic curve fairly flat (I used orals to flatter the curve further.)

I used half-life also, to get an idea how long the steroid was functioning concerning the negative attributes. Example: for a contest I would stop the “wet” injectables 10 day to 14 days before to show, to allow my skin to “dry out”. The “dry” orals I would take up to the show. later in my competing I took testosterone suspension starting 10 days out. I felt it kept more hardness. I even took the last shot a couple hours before prejudging.

To specifically answer your question, the longer half-life simply allows you to taper “off cycle” more gradually than being on acetate injections or orals only. But for testosterone cypionate, I would consider that I benefited from its growth benefit about 7 days after the last injection. After those 7 days, I would consider myself “off cycle.”