Hello,
I am currently taking 1800mg of testosterone a week. My previous cycle was 1400 and minimal sides. Now I am getting “test” flu symptoms all the time and feel like shit, but strength skyrocketing! Anyone have any suggestions? Taking Anastrazol 0.5mg eod
Get bloodwork
Lower your dose
Here is your problem. I felt sick on anastrozole! The crazy high T dosage isn’t helping.
My first thought is: is your test pharma test (I’ll take a wild guess and at that high of a dose, probably not)? If not, perhaps either the oil used to make it is not agreeable with your system, or another good probability, perhaps the level of BA or BB used in production is too high. Often times, UGL manufacturers just dose way too liberally to hopefully kill any possible contaminants due to possible shoddy/dirty manufacturing conditions.
Not sure of your situation but if you can get ahold of either another UGL’s test and give that a try, OR if you do want to stay with who you use, perhaps get another test ester (if you have enanthate, get some cypionate, or vice versa. Or maybe a test blend if offered).
Regarding the anastrozole, even with that high a level of test, .5mg eod is more than likely still too much. Perhaps .5mg 2x/week would be enough (since you don’t want to destroy your estrogen, and at your current dose, that’s what, 2mg/wk?). As @s.gentz stated, you really don’t know what’s going on until you get your bloodwork, testing for TT, FT, SHBG, E2, T4/T3, etc etc. You can find the full panel of tests on here somewhere, but point being, you need to know ALL the different markers in your blood to get an idea of where you are at.
PLEASE don’t just brush the above off and not get it, if you have insurance it should be easily affordable to get bloodwork through your physician (just tell him you want a full blood panel, and be sure to indicate the specific endocrine tests) or if no insurance, you can do the whole go to a labquest thing and simply choose what tests you want run and go to one of their offices to do the blood draw. Going forward, you really should do bloodwork right before, a few times during, and once or twice after running a cycle so you can understand what’s occurring INSIDE your body. You obviously can use the mirror to see what’s going on, but you have NO idea what is happening to your body systemically. Running a cycle, even if test only, impacts a multitude of different body systems/organs.
Good luck.
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Sorry, I forgot to add, I wholeheartedly agree with @s.gentz as well, 1,800mg/wk is a VERY high dose! As in, that’s in line with what pro and national level competitors use and even then on the high end. Even personally competing as a SHW competitor on the national level, I never got close to using that much test and I stepped on stage in the high 240’s/low 250’s @ 5’11.
You really don’t need to even go above, max, ~800mg/wk and that would be for an experienced user. If you might say you don’t see any good/noticeable results at that kind of dose, then your stuff is severely under dosed as 99% of people WILL see very noticeable results from that level of test. But hey, just my .02 cents.
Agreed. If you still want more out of it you should add another compound at that point. Stack something synergistic with your goal, whatever that may be.
Good call @blshaw , I completely agree! One of my staples was Equipoise.
Thank you all so much! I will back off the dose to 800mg/week, and get bloods. I will also back off Anastazol, as I have been getting achey joints. Appreciate all the help!
1400 —> feel fine
1800 —> feel like shit
Isn’t the answer obvious for what to do?
My heart just exploded reading 1800. Is your blood the viscosity of peanut butter?
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I think a misconception people have regarding AI use with Testosterone is that E2 has a linear response to levels of Testosterone.
Credit to @anon18050987 for the graph.
This doesn’t have that many data points, but I think understanding to what extent E2 isn’t linear to TT is something guys who use AIs should understand.
For me, I’ll have a TT of around 1,000 ng/dL at 160 mg/wk Test E. I’ll be right around 5,000 ng/dL at 1,000 mg/wk (I was at 4500 ng/dL on 875 mg/wk, pinned EOD, measured in between shots). But I should expect my E2 to only be roughly 2.5X on 1,000 mg/wk compared to 160 mg/wk. If I assumed it was linear, I’d assume E2 was 6.25X on a gram a week, which might lead me to overdose the AI.
E2 is individual though. Some need more or less or no AI on a given dose. I’d be in the popular camp of recommending blood work.
I’ve mentioned that I notice things go in waves regarding AAS. Not too long ago I noticed a lot of dudes recommending just using enough T for adequate levels and then getting other compounds for growth or strength. It seems there has been a turn where ultra high test is becoming popular again. Two gym buddies are doing it or have done it with good success. Like north of 2 grams of Test. It doesn’t have the same look as Test / Tren, but they are getting bigger and stronger.
I think there is fairly good evidence that the returns from increasing the Test dose don’t diminish as much as most would think. I’ve heard that it’s silly to use more than 500, or 750, and that more will only get you slightly more gains. I don’t think that is true. There certainly is diminishing returns with increasing dose, but it is more like going from 500 mg/wk to 1500 mg/wk will get you twice the results, not slightly more. Triple the dose for double the results type thing.
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Im not sure about this. I read a study once that compared different doses of Test vs placebo. I’ll try to find it. In my experience there is an “effective” range for me from which past this range I didn’t notice a thing.
Just from experience I would still rather stack two synergistic compounds in effective ranges than double up on Testosterone. That’s just me.
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Found the study results
The administration of the GnRH agonist plus graded doses of testosterone resulted in mean nadir testosterone concentrations of 253, 306, 542, 1,345, and 2,370 ng/dl at the 25-, 50-, 125-, 300-, and 600-mg doses, respectively. Fat-free mass increased dose dependently in men receiving 125, 300, or 600 mg of testosterone weekly (change +3.4, 5.2, and 7.9 kg, respectively). The changes in fat-free mass were highly dependent on testosterone dose (P = 0.0001) and correlated with log testosterone concentrations (r = 0.73, P = 0.0001). Changes
Im interested in this discussion. When i read the first post in this topic i actually started to wonder, if maybe doing like 2-3gs of test is better than doing 1g of test and 1g of deca or something.
I also always believed in stacking, but i also have read some crazy guys just doing 1 drug for huge amounts.
I believe there was some dude named “Big 7” because he took 7 grams of test a week or smth.
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I’ve seen two studies that have done this.
What they don’t seem to account for is water weight. We know from the graph I posted that E2 will be very similar between 300 mg and 600 mg. I’d assume similar water retention on those doses because of that.
On top of that the 600 mg/wk group did have a change in “lean mass” that wasn’t too far off from linear from the 300 mg/wk group.
If water retention was actually very close to the same in both groups, this makes the case for less diminishing returns (than most people assume) as the dose of Test goes up stronger, as the water weight is a larger percent of the “gains” in the 300 mg/wk group than it would be in the 600 mg/wk group.
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I can almost guarantee that the test/deca would result in more mass than the test solo. I guess would have to consider the anabolic rating when also considering dose levels?
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This is he conclusion I remembered coming to. Further it’s interesting to see how effective the optimized TRT like dose of 125mg was compared to other regimens.
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No idea. Thats why i found this interesting. I have done grams of shit but have never actually just done same amount of just test.
What i found in my experience tho, is that test is probably the best for strength for me. Cuz when i switched from tren to deca on a blast i didnt lose any strength but when i lowered test, i did lose A LOT.
So somewhere in my mind the idea that i droped 700mgs of tren and nothing changed, left the idea that test is a better drug for me? No clue. I guess id just have to do some 3 grams of test to see, lol. I could probably set an e2 record of some 500 measuring units, when the norm is up to 38 lol.
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The question I’d have is what about after the blast? What are the gains that are kept like? Deca is notorious for putting a lot of size on while on it, but also notorious for those gains not being so loyal.
One of the guys I mentioned who uses much less now, said he had really good success with running a vial of Test E a week (2500 mg/wk), and then adding things in for 4-8 weeks now and then. Peaking for a meet, he would throw in an oral or Tren ace. I’ve seen the pictures. Dude was jacked AF for a powerlifter.
I think this approach (super high Test, with a bit added in here or there) was more popular with the powerlifting crowd. I think the BBers were typically stacking more compounds.
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Yea i also think abt sides. Deca has water retention, Tren has increased BP effect. If one is very ok on test, maybe doubling the dose actually gives less total amount of stress and sides than adding a gram of any other of the heavy drugs, huh?
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One of the huge positives in my mind with Testosterone is that one can control the side effects easily and cheaply. The sides are typically estrogenic or androgenic. One can use 5 AR inhibitors for androgenic sides if they care about that. One can use and AI for estrogenic sides if they need it (or a SERM).
We don’t really have much for combating the negative sides with other AAS.
Test with ancillaries can be an effective cycle free of things like acne, hair loss, excessive of water retention, high BP, etc… if one knows how to do it.