Hello, I have read the stickies and have been a long long time follower. After a year of debate I finally decided to go on TRT. This was a great decision for me and I was very excited the first 6-8 weeks until I introduced anastrozole. My prescribed protocol:
40units of test cypionate twice a week. Tuesday AM and Friday AM
40 units of HCG once per week: Tuesday AM
After 5 weeks the doctor wanted me to take .5mg of anastrozole once per week to control estrogen.I decided to take it upon my self to divide the anastrozole into .25mg twice per week. The first two weeks of this I would take .25mg pill 24 hours after injections. Last week i decided to just take the .25 pills the same time as my injections.
The following day I had ZERO energy and my joints were popping/cracking like my grandmother. I am going to post my PRE trt labs and my current labs. Can someone let me know if something stands out to them? Should I even be taking anastrozole?
You are an AI over-responder and probably won’t be able to take it without encountering problems, just throw it in the garbage. An 1/8 of a 0.050 causes me big problems, my knees and hips are the first to be affected. You might even notice you metabolize all drugs a little too well.
Your only recourse to control side effects is to increase your frequency of dosing. I dose daily (using insulin syringes) to avoid getting to the point (no pun intended) of needing an AI. Frequent dosing will push testosterone higher and estrogen lower.
The HCG will push estrogen higher, so there may be a price to pay for using it. Some guys have a choice to make, shrunken testicles or high estrogen. Again you can find a balance by dosing frequently. A lot of guys feel better without HCG, some guys absolutely need it because TRT can reduce ejeculate volume.
It’s going to take a week for estrogen to start climbing again, how fast this happens depends on the individual. It can take weeks or months to recover from joint pain do to crashed estrogen.
Your dosage was too high given we had no idea how you would respond to it.
Thank you for the reply. Two weeks ago I split my HCG dosage.
Tuesday AM. .80mg Test Cyp + 20units of HCG
Friday AM. .80mg Test Cyp + 20units of HCG
I am going to stick with the following and discontinue the use of AI. What symptoms should I monitor for regarding high E2 and the need to reintroduce the AI?
I don’t want to scare you or anything, but for me the E2 rebound effect that anastrozole causes was pure hell! It was bad and why I threw it in the trash. When the medicine detaches from the aromatase enzymes, everyone is different, the estrogen will shoot higher than the estrogen was before taking the drug.
I thought I was going to have a heart attack, it felt like a heart attack.
The high E2 symptoms can be overly emotional (bitchy), teary eyes, but high testosterone can have symptoms as well. The high testosterone symptoms can be overly aggressive, irritability and an agitated state. Usually if you encounter symptoms, it’s related to both testosterone and estrogen.
You don’t reintroduce the AI unless you want your joints to pop and crack like your grandmother. If you experience symptoms, after 6 weeks of a dosage adjustment, then you decrease the dosage and/or inject with greater frequency and inject smaller doses.
Everytime you change your dosage, your hormone levels will be in flux and you may even feel at times like you did pre-TRT on and off for 6 weeks after which levels become stable and your body adapts over the next couple of weeks.
If you are the type of guy that can’t leave the dosage alone for more than a couple of weeks, I imagine you’ll be quitting TRT in the foreseeable future and not benefit much at all.
You likely won’t have any. It’s best to just get it out of your head and remember that even on TRT you’ll stop have bad days and they likely aren’t because of TRT.
You definitely crashed your estrogen. If you want to get it back up faster you can drink a beer or two before bed each night for a week. It cut recovery time in half for me.
