Wanted some thoughts on what blasts make sense for us guys blasting and cruising. When you cruise your genetic potential is different compared to natty. How high that potential is comes down to your cruise dose. Some of us are health conscious and want to cruise on TRT doses. Some of us less so, and will cruise on 300, 500, 1 gram+ per week. With some of these latter cruises, I could see large blasts actually making sense, as you are going to be able to hold a lot on those doses. With someone like me (cruise is 175 mg/wk split into EOD, shooting for around 1,000 ng/dL average levels), does it even make sense to:
Approach a gram of gear a week?
Run much other than Test? Sure other stuff will blow you up / make you strong, but it’s going to slowly fade away over time.
Is the recommendation of 2.5-3X your cruise dosage a good guideline? I am starting to think this is where it is at.
I guess my goal is to slowly reach my genetic potential on cruise. Maybe that is a lean 210 @5’10". Maybe I can do that in one big blast with Tren, Anadrol, and Test, but I think the dialing in the lifting, diet and lifestyle is missing there and that body wouldn’t be as sustainable as if I had built it with 3-5 blasts at around the 500 mg/wk mark?
Just wondering others thoughts, and I thought this thought experiment might get some of the TRT guys to rethink some bigger or harsh compound blasts. You just aren’t going to get huge if you are spending more than half your time on actual or close to TRT doses.
Then if we are basing blasting protocols off of cruising protocol, it begs the question, what are the steps one would take to balance out your cruise dosage for risk and reward. IMO, one would max out were they feel comfortable risk wise with Test being the only AAS. Then I would think GH would be the next thing to add. What would others do? I see more guys add stuff like Primo to their TRT than GH, so maybe this is controversial?
I personally think you’re going to need more than just 2.5-3x your TRT dose to get desired results in a short amount of time like that, or even over a few cycles. I don’t think you’ll lose all of your gains either when you come off blast. If you keep eating and training off cycle the way you did on cycle, most, if not all of it, should stay. This is, of course, until metabolic adaptation occurs and you just start getting fat from the surplus. but a smart way of doing this would be to slowly back the calories down. I think a lot of people lose all of their “gains” because they train eat and recover differently on vs off cycle
With that said, I guess I should ask, before making anymore assumptions, what protocols have worked for you in the past to add size?
I know you’re leery of nandrolone, but I personally love the stuff, and it is a fantastic mass builder.
The best gains were 5X the cruise dose and Tbol 40 mgs in the beginning and end of the blast (about 4 weeks each, but the latter might have been 5 weeks). That was 875 mg/wk. I made good gains. The thing is I tried to keep training like I did during the blast, and my shoulders started to get achy. I pulled back a little on pressing. I am past were I started the blast on pressing, but not where I was at the end of the blast.
But I think I have lost some of the size from that blast already. Especially in the shoulders. That makes sense though because I have focused more on back to allow the shoulders to recover a bit more. I am doing somewhere between 1/3-1/2 of the pressing I was on blast.
Nandrolone is tempting, I don’t know if I need it though. Seems a lot of people complain about losing the mass or the round look a few weeks after they are done?
In the short term - yes, if you use a cruise for health and to slow down the loss of gains, cuz you are getting ready for the next blast because you have some goal in mind.
If you cruise MORE time than you are on, dont plan on changing that, dont have a goal you NEED to achieve, then sure after you spend enough time on 175mgs/wk you will return back to where 175mgs/wk keeps you and there is no point to rent gains maybe.
From what i have seen of you, you have maxed that one out long ago imo.
Yes, i came to this conclusion a few months back. You are 100% right. Building serious size takes LOTS of time. And i dont mean 3 month blasts. I mean 3 year blasts and even then - it wont be an EPIC result.
I believe taking time off is important to see if you shit ever returns to normal, and to get all the organ checks with less shit in your system but once your are clear and you are ok, there is no point to stay on a cruise if you have a goal. Being on a cruise a day more than is needed to check all your shit, is not doing anything anymore, IMO.
After spending some time on around 250mgs of test only and checking all my stuff, and changing my views on this topic, i believe i am at the beginning of my next 2 year blast as i am the biggest and leanest now i have ever been, and all my organs checked out good.
If ill do a cruise it will be 500mgs at least, but for now i dont even plan to do that. What i learned from my own mistakes is that you need TIME to build muscle, and you need to get a bit FAT, which takes 12 months+ for me. Now when i see what i have actually done with that time, i am even more interested to see if i can do more.
As long as my health allows me to do it, i will. Shit in Ukraine changed my perspective on this “be healthy when you are 60” thing, so now i will enjoy the time i have, instead of obsess about a time that might never come for one reason or another. Same was with Covid, now there is some monkey disease bullshit starting…imma just do my tren and not worry about stuff, lol.
Ah yea, I can see how that would be an issue. What you could do is add tempo which will greatly decrease the weight you’re using. It’ll save the wear and tear, but you’ll still get the stimulus. One of the best training blocks I ever had was coming back from my lat tear. I set PR’s on damn near every lift, even several I wasn’t training. It was largely attributed to adding tempo (and by tempo I don’t mean timed eccentrics and all of that, I mean just being slow and controlled and not blasting through your reps) and gaining better muscle control and strength through the entire rep range
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll lose some size, but you aren’t losing muscle mass, you’re losing the glycogen and nitrogen that the nandrolone allows your muscles to hold more of. Overshoot your goal of 210 and get to 215-220 so when you come off, you’ll be more like 205-210
It might surprise you, but I post the “good” photos. IDK if you remember the beach picture I posted haha. National geographic contacted me for their special issue on beached whales.
I think a lot of the misconception on the timeline to build muscle comes from newbs running steroids and making epic gains. But at the end they are still small, because when they started they basically hadn’t built any muscle.
12 days for me haha.
For me, it is less on making it to a super old age, and more about not having to be at the doctor a lot in my late 40s and 50s. I see some of the guys that make it to upper 80s, early 90s. No thank you. All though, if you make it that long, you get your pick of the grandmas. I’ve heard polygamy isn’t that uncommon at nursing homes. There are so many old women and like one old dude, so the old ladies share the alive one haha.
I’ve had great success with this on deadlifts (at least I think that was the main driver of the progress). It is brutal on the sphincter though if I keep the valsalva maneuver though the whole set. Way worse than any type of yoga for farting.
I might just do some eccentrics on pressing though. I am planning on doing chains on bench to lower the weight at the bottom where it is tough on the delts. Kinda like a slingshot without the slingshot.
I have increased my deadlift without training deadlift before… but that’s largely because I have shitty ass hamstrings, so bringing those up helped a lot. I went have not having hamstrings, and now I have baby hamstrings. Still a WIP.
It really doesn’t take that much weight to be able to do a slow and controlled approach and still see significant benefits from it. I don’t think I deadlifted more than 315 when I was first coming back from the lat tear and I still made fantastic progress once I was let loose.
Slow eccentrics with 315 I think might be pretty tough if the sets are over say 8 reps. I was doing slow eccentrics with all my deadlifts. I think it made them harder, but I think muscle growth was a lot better.
The actual reason I stopped them though is the farting / sharting while doing them. I am going to need to invest in some depends if I add those back in.
I don’t think 3-5 second eccentrics are necessary, I just think you need to lower the weight in a slow and controlled manner. Both the eccentric and concentric should be about .75-1 second each.
I’ll give that a try on the negative. I always go for as fast as possible on the concentric (unless it is an isolation thing like a curl). My deadlifts on Wednesday are only supposed to be 455 lbs, so I should be able to manage that.
Since the bar is fatter, it pushes the center of gravity away from you, so you have to pull backwards a little harder. It is also harder off of the floor due to the zero flex. You have all of the weight from the start.
With that said, I think it could help make your noodle bar (haha never heard that one before) even better, especially off the floor.
I tried explaining this to someone, as do a deadlift with the bar an inch away from your shins, and compare the difficulty. I have a feeling it will be a lot harder.
I am strong off the floor. It is locking out that is my enemy.
I suppose the meaning of “cruise” needs clarification for me. If it’s true TRT, which is 140mg/wk test, I’d do:
200 mg/wk test
Plus a combination of injectable and oral anabolics to be between 200 to 300 mg/wk
Those for 8 week cycles
Once again my disclaimer: My dose recommendations are only pertinent for pharmaceutical grade AAS
That can be debatable here. I think it can be whatever one wants. I mean there are guys out there who cruise on 100 mg of anadrol a day with Test.
If it is TRT, I think this is too vague:
Some will be too high on that dose, some not be as high as they would like… I am not someone who thinks just increasing until no symptoms is wise, but I think there is a bit more wiggle room than 140 mg/wk only.
If I was going this route, I would just stick to my cruise of 175 mg/wk test and run Tbol or Tbol and Var together for 8 weeks. Probably just Tbol though. I get strong on it, and for me that seems to be what drives more muscle. So maybe 40 mg/day of Tbol for 280 mg/wk total, plus the 175 mg of Test.
I think that is actually in line with my thinking. Gains from the Tbol should be fairly maintainable off of it, and back to cruise of “just” 175 mg/wk. I think long term a blasting strategy like that could work to max out my cruise physique. As that happens, lower the frequency of blasts over time, and see if I hold.