Hi. I am seeking advice on a first cycle. At first I was planning to follow the testE only cycle described here Steroid Newbie Cycle Planning
But I am considering going with an even smaller dose considering my goals are probably more modest than most, and need advice on how PCT needs to change accordingly
I am 30 years old, 6’0 tall. Have been training regularly for about 2.5 years. Focusing on compound lifts. I am what you would call a hard gainer. I started at around 151lbs and 9% bf and now I am at 162lbs and 11% bf.
I believe my training is generally good, but my diet is lacking. I am usually too busy to prepare clean meals and do not have much of an appetite anyway so I end up relying on supplements. Improving my diet is not feasible for the time being and I am not quite satisfied with the pace of my gains, hence why I am looking into using steroids.
I would like to add 5-10lb lean mass and be able to keep most of it post cycle. I have two questions:
1- Would this be achievable using 250mg per week TestE only cycle. And if yes, what is the recommended dose for Al and what is a good PCT
2- How much of the gains can one expect to keep? And if I keep training hard after the cycle can I expect to see more gains without having to get on steroids again?
Help appreciated! Thank you
If you’re unable to fix your diet, there is no point. No amount of drugs will make you grow if you aren’t eating enough. Lean mass doesn’t appear out of thin air, your body needs the calories, protein and fat to grow, taking drugs doesn’t change the realities of thermodynamics, your body needs more energy to make more tissue. Don’t bother until you an eat more, and can do it consistently for a while, I mean like a year minimum. You can gain A LOT more naturally.
1 Like
Those guys are right. Like…100%. If you had said that you ate clean but didn’t have much appetite then maybe I would say that running test could help you. But the way testosterone interacts with leptin and gherlin is complicated and for some guys the changes are more of a reversion to the mean. But if you’re not able to eat properly then a cycle will be waste.
You get some points for being honest about your diet. When we are willing to be critical of ourselves we tend to learn more than when we just assume that what we’re doing is perfect. So good on you for being straight about your diet. If you had lied about that you might have gotten totally different advice and maybe it wouldn’t have been all that valuable. Best of luck to you, man.
1 Like
I appreciate the honest advice! I want to clarify a couple of things though
I can eat clean, just not much. To “deal” with this I am relying on supplements to get enough calories, micros and macros. I know this is not ideal but I don’t foresee this changing any time soon.
I am ok if the cycle ends up going to waste, as long as it is done safely. This is why I am looking for proper PCT advice for the reduced dose etc.
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. Let me see if I can distill it down for you.
Nothing you take in the realm of pharmaceuticals is 100% safe. Everything has some side effects, some trade offs. Now when the side effects are minor—like with ibuprofen or something like that—we tend to realize that the trade off is worth it. Maybe ibuprofen bothers your stomach a little bit, but that’s preferable to the headache that it makes go away.
Testosterone, although very safe and effective, has some side effects. One of them is the complete shutdown of your natural testosterone production. That happens when you run exogenous test, irrespective of dose. If you run a 10 week cycle it kind of doesn’t matter if it’s 250mg/wk or 500mg/wk. Your body will stop producing on its own. Period. So your pct won’t necessarily be any easier than if you were running a higher dose of test. You’re still trying to restart your natural production.
So knowing that you’re going to have to run your pct anyway, and knowing that you’re always at some risk of side effects from the whole process, why would you agree to make that trade off in exchange for what you know may very well be a wasted cycle? What benefit do you imagine you’ll get vs the potential downsides?
It doesn’t matter if you are eating “clean” if you are not eating enough, testosterone might not even make you hungry. There is no such thing a “safe” cycle, as the other poster explained, there is no difference between 250mg, 500mg or 1g of test other than the potential side effects ON each (and potential lipid issues the higher the dose) you are still going to be completely shut down from any of them, and PCT is the same.
If you can’t force yourself to eat more (which by the way, you aren’t a hard gainer, by your own admission you just don’t eat enough), and are absolutely set on using supplements, look into mk-677 or GHRP-6, but really don’t take anabolics if you can’t eat enough to gain naturally, they won’t make you gain.