First post on T Nation - well, we all have to start somewhere, so here goes;
Background: My body and me have had a love hate relationship, since I can remember. I saw a Homer Simpson Tee Shirt once which stated “The liver is evil…it must be punished” and I totally get that . I have spent a good deal of my 46 odd years either treating my body like a landfill or alternating back to ‘buddist temple’ at regular intervals.
So in my teens I smoked, drank and tried just about every substance I could get my hands on and in return my body gave me a thumbs up by Olympic standards ED and a huge gut 95-98kgs .
20’s was the buddist temple phase - fit as a butchers dog , Karate, long distance swimming etc etc - weight was about 86 kilos - still the ED and regular injuries - pulled muscles , chronic back issues (mawashi geri’s are great to look at but they knock the crap out your spine)
30’s was not quite ‘landfill’ again but you know, kids, mortgages, wife , self employed , not exactly a recipe for getting ripped. Regular exercise took a major hit as did energy levels - but you kid yourself “any day I want I can go back in the gym and get it all back” . ED and 100kgs and nothing in the wardrobe fits anymore!
40’s - Graphs down on all fronts and time to start figuring some of this stuff out . Testosterone was always on my radar but its hard to pin this stuff down and as most of you on TNation will vouch for , the medical community are set up for volume production , "pack em and bag em and get that sucker out the door… there’s a queue outside " . I shouldn’t bitch because I’d probably be running the same racket myself if I had MD somewhere in my title.
Read a guy called Nelson Vergel - Testosterone: A Man’s Guide, and he pulled a lot of stuff together - hey I rate a guy who’s doing his research because he’s as good as on death row. He made the point that for a HIV guy serious muscle loss was the last stage before you checked out, and the converse was that lots of lean muscle was an insurance policy when you had a life threatening illness.
So had my bloods done and here’s some of the stats; (I have to apologize in advance for the variation in the SI units - I’m convinced the labs deliberately mixed up the conversion units just to piss me off)
TT; 9.2 nmol/L -doc said I was just a fraction low
FT; .41ug/L (thats Di-OH Test)
DHEAS 4.8umol/L
T4 ; 13.2 pmol/l
TSH; 1.43 mIU/L
E2: 133 pmol/L (I asked for estradiol -report just says ‘OEST’. I only paid â?¬450 for the bloods - that’s what you get when you go budget )
PSA; .51 ng/ML
That’s the endocrine stuff dealt with so what else is going on under the hood;
Uric acid gets gold at 492 umol/L
Cholesterol is fighting for medals at ;
Cholesterol 7.6nmol/L
HDL 1.0 nmol/L
LDL 5.2 nmol/L
Triglycerides 3.47 nmol/L
Now I know you’re probably thinking , what does those stats actually feel like ?
It’s like swimming in molasses with a breeze block on your head.
So the plan is (compliments of Nelson Vergel) to try get FT back up using something like Test E at say 250mg IM every other week and 50mg Clomid to mitigate the E2 - Logic there, to get some energy back and then get back into the gym to start putting on some ‘lean and mean’ .
Kudos for reading this far , I do rant on bit
Lardlad