Intro and First Cycle Questions from a Beginner

Pharma / TRT
1

Hey guys, first ever post here and I’m looking forward to gaining some knowledge. I’m 27 and I’m a novice when it comes to lifting/PED’s. Well I have some very very important questions I do wanna ask, things that are causing quite a bit of chaos in my head at the moment about my test usage.

Test usage story so far

Bear with me as I have a lot to explain. So I’m 27 yo, 185 pounds, 5’11, 17% bf, 27 BMI. I’ve always been skinny fat. My goal is to get bigger arms, shoulders, chest and wider back. Basically v-taper. My total test level came out at 360n ngdl in a blood test in jan this year, which explained a lot of my symptoms mentally and physically over the last 5 years. Upon which I started using ugl test at 250 to 300mg a week in may this year after failing to get prescribed T or any real help from docs and TRT clinics while doing my research on this stuff jan to may. I was prescribed topical cream in this time, which didn’t work and I ended up wasting a lot of money. I was ready to do a cycle in may when i got my hands on t vials, but thought against it and went for a safer trt dose as I was worried about my organs.

I did my 250 to 300mg a week protocol for 12 weeks. I did 2 injections weekly, split into 125mg or 150mg each. I got tested in august again, my total test was 1300ngdl but I saw no muscle gain, fat loss, or energy increase or motivational drive boost. My shbg got tested for the first time as well. It was low at a level of 13. I asked the guys from The TRT and hormone optimization YouTube channel on what I should do for this test to kick in, they told me I should pin more often and Lower my dose. For the last 4 weeks I have been doing 200mg a week, split into 4 injections of 50mg each. This Is my story of using test so far. (On a concerning note, my LDL-p came out at 1675 nmol, crp cardio at 6.4 mgl, mcv at 106 fl, mchc at 29gdl, HDL at 20 umoll, estradiol at 76 pgml, potassium at 5.3 nmoll, in the August full comprehensive male panel test) I was advised to fix diet, do more cardio based on these alarming numbers. Although my BP came out at 122/72.

First ever Cycle thoughts and questions…

My strength is also the same, progressing slowly as it always does. Using trt dose changed nothing. Thinking about a higher dose cycle now as I have test, AI on hand. I have never done a cycle before. Also bought nac, coq10, fish oil, longvida curcumin, digestive enzymes + probiotics, low dose 81mg aspirin for cycle support. I take vit d3 at 20000 iu per week as well, my levels have gone from13 to 45 ngml so at least that’s improving. I’m planning on a 500mg test e cycle for 12-15 weeks. Pinning 4 times a week split into 125mg shots cuz of my low shbg of course. I don’t plan on doing a PCT, I simply intend on cruising on a trt dose as my natural production is already dead. I don’t know how much I’ll gain and keep after coming off, as my confidence is shot and my expectations have been lowered listening to an IFBB pro on youtube say thaty 500mg a week for 12-15 weeks will only give “meh” gains, even on a perfect diet. He advises long esters like cyp or en only work if its higher than 500mg a week doses done for like 18-20 weeks. But I’m concerned about organ safety, improving my bad numbers from the test in august so idk what cycle length or dose I should do now…?

This is my workout routine:

3 sets of 5, 8 and 12 reps for bench and shoulder press. 3 sets of 5, 6 and 8 reps for deadlifts and squats. As many reps as possible in a row for pullups. Progressive overload on all.

Mondays- squats, bench press, pullups

Wed- deadlifts, shoulder press, pullups

Friday- bench press, shoulder press, pullups

Swim 3 times a week, but not too intense as I’m a beginner. Just a few laps of breaststroke. No other cardio. I have a desk job.

My 5 rep maxes for everything:

Bench 175 pounds
Shoulder press 135
Deadlifts 375
Squats 320
Pullups, no weight yet, bodyweight 10 in a row.

Diet

I was eating low protein before the august blood test, taking 120 to 140g protein per day and eating 2400 to 2700 cals a day. I’ve really worked into fixing this and over the last 4 weeks with my new trt protocol, I’ve been eating 2100 to 2400 cals a day, 200g of protein and I’ve cut out most carbs.

I have so many questions…Is my 500mg a week for 12-15 weeks cycle idea good/safe? Should I lean bulk, cut or recomp during it? Maintainence cals, some caloric surplus or drop some bodyfat with a deficit? I do want a bigger upper body but I am a bit hesitant as I’m 17% and 27 BMI, I’m already kinda fat but skinny arms shoulders, b**ch tits and love handles. Any suggestions would be great. Thank you for taking the time to Read this torture. Last 9 months have definitely been a mental torture for me trying all this and nothing working…

Please ask if I missed on a certain important detail or more…

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No. Diet and workouts need work first. If you didn’t gain during your “TRT” phase when TT was 1300ng then you’re doing something wrong. Adding more test isn’t going to fix that

3

Who is this YouTube IFBB pro dispensing such knowledge?

4

  1. That was not a trt dose, that was a lower dosed cycle

  2. It changed nothing because you fucked up somewhere along the way, either diet or training (my money is on both)

If you can’t make substantial changes on trt as a functionally untrained individual then you need to start over again entirely.You’ll be just as disappointed on 500/w as you were on 250 because you’re not doing anything to actually utilize that extra testosterone you’re giving yourself.

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5

I agree with the answers so far. You dont know how to train and eat. Your numbers tell us that. Adding steroids to such weak base will result in bloat and temporary strenght which will go away as soon as you stop taking this dosage. If you cant gain shit now, the problem is not steroids. Steroids dont magically create anything. They optimize what you do. If what you do does not work, then all you get is double of the same nothing.
1300 test is way OVER the normal range, isnt it? People live with 300-800 just fine. Genetic freaks have 900 natty. Your lifts are weaker than mine when i was 18 before i ever used anything and i do have bad genetics and i was not very well informed about training back then(im still not, lol).

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First, welcome to the board. Thanks for taking the time to give background info. It helps us help you.

Dude there’s so much here to unpack. I don’t know where to start, so I’ll address each of the variables that affect results, in their order of importance.

  1. Genetics. The fact that you’ve been lifting for years and still have a skinny-fat (your words) body and modest lift numbers, tells me your genetics aren’t optimal. Welcome to the club! But we can’t change our genetics. So why am I telling you this, then? I’d advise you to, at least initially, moderate your expectations. With drug assistance, you’ll be able to build a pretty darn good physique once you dial everything in for a few years, but it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever be a lean 210+ monster, like you are probably aspiring to be, unless you juice yourself to the gills(not recommended).

  2. Sleep. How’s your sleep? For optimal results, it should be 8+ hours at night, and a nap during the day. Anything less and your results will be less than optimal. Not saying you can’t progress on no sleep, but Stan Efferding, one of the smartest, strongest bodybuilders on the planet says it is the #1 most important factor within your control and I believe him. On the rare occasion when I get 10+ hours on a weekend night, I feel like a different person in the gym. That’s one night! I can’t even imagine what happens when you do that for days, weeks on end.

  3. Diet. I think I read above that you’ve been on 2100-2400 calories??? Man, you gotta eat A LOT more than that to gain KEEPABLE muscle. I understand that you are skinny fat and afraid of getting fatter. But if you are afraid of calories, you will never grow more than a few pounds of muscle. If you’re concerned appearance and with fat, do a cut on TRT dose, or slightly higher,and get rid of the fat. Then, blast and bulk. Because, so long as you are afraid of calories, you will not reap the full benefits of high doses. Food is the most anabolic part of any cycle. Sumo wrestlers do no barbell training whatsoever and have the greatest amount of fat-free mass of any athletes on the planet. You Don’t have to take my word for it, look it up. 5,000 calories on 250mgs of test will build far more muscle than 2,500 calories on 500mgs of test. Never forget that.

  4. Drugs. I’m concerned that your UGL gear is bunk, or at least underdosed. Not only because you didn’t get results, but Because….if you were borderline hypogonad, I think you said like 360 ng/dL? and you started shooting 250-300 test a week, you should have noticed an immediate, dramatic increase in strength. I experienced this when I started test and many, many others on the web have said the same. Within a week or two of your first pin, you should have felt like a god in the gym and been repping your previous 1RM with ease. Test gives you a certain amount of neuromuscular stimulation and in my experience, and the experience of many others, this is the first effect you should have noticed from it. Of course you don’t continue that rate of gain after the first month or so, but if you are hypo and start injecting, the sudden onslaught of strength is incredible! The fact that you didn’t even mention it has me thinking your gear is crap. Please try Pharma grade test. Dosing will depend on what your goals are and what you chose to do about #4 above. If you’re gonna cut first, I recommend a max of 200/wk. if you’re willing to eat and you’re gonna bulk, AND YOU HAVE TRUE PHARMA LEGIT TEST, I’d start with 300 and give it a few weeks.

  5. Training. You’re doing full, full, upper, MWF. That’s not optimal but could work. Just Make sure you are pushing really, really hard. Training program pails in comparison to all the factors above. Dial in all the above, train hard, and you’ll grow.

Standing by for questions!

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7

Did you say how many years you have been putting forth an effort to get stronger by lifting weights?
Your 5 rep maxes are not that bad for lifting less than a year.

8

If lifting less than a year then he has no business in doing steroids.

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10

Fixed it.

Of course I’m joking. This is personal thing. But I honestly think with the right diet and exercise you wont hit a major sticking point for 2 years. And you should be able to get over the first one or two stalls before playing the PED card.

11

I agree 100%, but I looks like the OP has totally annihilated his endrocrine system. He seems destined to TRT the rest of his life. Now he needs to assess the benefit/risk ratio to determine which is most important: striving for a good physique or living past his early 60’s.

12

Oh. If he said that, I missed it. I tried to concentrate on everything he said but it was a lot to take in.

Regardless, he’s done some high doses and said he has no interest in PCT and intends to B&C, so my advice to the dude still stands.

13

Yeah I’ve been on that workout program for 16 months total, mid 2019 to early 2020, then early 2021 to present (I built my home gym in late 2020)

14

Hey guys, thanks for all the advice so far. Especially professor hulk, really detailed and nailed some brutal realities for me that I need to face.

I am indeed fearful of gaining fat but I want to get rid of that mindset now. I have been eating at a 100+ cal surplus last 3 days instead of my usual deficit, all clean foods, 2750 cals a day and 220g protein. Taking probiotics and digestive enzymes as well as I’ve never consumed this much protein. Will ramp the calories up more soon as I make more recipes that involve clean ingredients or sugar free stuff coming in from my online orders.

I haven’t come up with a workout routine as of yet. But thinking of doing something similar to a 5 day split that’s PPLPP. Will include anything I can as my home gym is limited. Isolation workouts, compounds, more sets and more reps. Cardio on saturdays and sundays on my elliptical.

Also, do I need PCT if I go on a TRT dose after cycle? I don’t intend on having kids or anything really. My natural system is already dead after 4 months of trt dosing.

As for my training, I was on and off in the gym for my first 5 years, 2011 to 2016. I was more out of the gym than In lol. Mostly 5x5 programs that I would half ass. It was a total “hang out with friends and work out” thing. From 2016 onwards, I joined a crossfit gym where I wasted tons of money for a lot of monkey cardio. I had stamina, but looked like a skinny fat stick with no muscle whatsoever. I did this for 2 and a half years. Stopped for 6 months altogether as I hated the sight of a gym. In Mid 2019 I started again with a friend and got serious about eating more, was making good progress strength-wise until feb 2020 (when corona hit and closed gyms). But I never noticed any change in physique, no definition, hard muscle gain or anything in this period. I did what I could at home until I built my garage gym in late 2020. Have been going on since then fortunately. I had other low t symptoms from last 5 years other than just the inability to gain lean muscle, lose fat. Just never really looked into it as I thought I’m a young guy who should just get on with it instead of complaining and showing weakness. But the blood test in jan 2020 showing my total t levels at 360 really opened my eyes. I tried getting prescribed T but failed. Topical cream I did get and try, it didn’t work. The recent test in august did show my total t levels at 1300, so i obviously respond to this shit. Just that I saw no muscle gain, fat loss. I do feel better somewhat mentally, but I attribute that towards me getting a fantastic start to my new career that I recently finished studying/getting certified for. But yeah, like hulk and co said, the diet and training needs fixing, which I am already on the way to fixing atm.

15

No you have not.
If you believe that it is possible to measure food and measure caloric expenditure so precise, you are a bit more dumb than you seemed when you just wanted to take steroids for no reason.

Also, you liked Hulks answer because its what you wanted to hear. You want to take steroids, so any steroid recomendations will seem a better answer. Sure, do em… Nobody cares… But im sure you will just waste them, fuck your cholesterol, quit and never report back any progress, just like 99% of people who start doing steroids instead of learning how to train and eat… 100kcal surplus… myea…

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He said he’s going to do AAS anyway. So I’m trying to help him, to ensure this isn’t his fate.

OP, if you’re T levels are really currently 1300-ish and you’re dead seat on eating 2,700 calories at the moment, do the slow cut I talked about before. Lean out a bit, so that you’re not afraid to eat big. At your BW, Blasting on anything less than 3,300 calories is a waste of your time.

Once you’re leaner and willing to eat big, you could go take a conservative approach and crank calories up to 3,300 and Test up to 300/wk, try that for a couple months until gains dry up. Then, increase calories till gains dry up again, then increase Test to 400/wk, until gains dry up again, and so on, and so on for as long as you are willing to push it. Below 600mgs/wk, test has been proven safe for 20 weeks. If you want to stay healthy, I’d cut it off around there and cruise low for a while, then restart same approach again, after some time cruising. This is the conservative way to slowly step up your AAS use. Once you get to a point down the road where eating 5,000 a day and injecting 500/wk test is no longer effective, you will have to start investigating adding in other compounds. But you are a long way off from this.

You have another, less conservative option, too. It’s the one most commonly pushed around the web. “Just go big. Anything less than 500mgs is a waste of your time.” I read above that you’ve already came across this in a YouTube video. This approach would have you just start with 500mgs/wk right from the start. Yes, it works. And to an extent, it can even make up for less-than optimal training and diet. But it’s just not necessary. If you are eating a lot and training the big compound lifts heavy and progressively, you should be very happy with your results on 300-350/wk. I made amazing progress on that, to the tune of 30 pounds of muscle in about 9 months.

For the training piece of the equation, we really shouldn’t get into it, in this forum, because there are other forums on here dedicated to training. I’ll just say this, and not as an insult Most people simply train hard, wrong (if that makes sense). Whenever I walk into a public gym and look around, I see so many people pushing themselves really, really hard in exercises that don’t matter. They’re doing a great job of making themselves *feel like they trained hard, but not actually doing anything that will build size or strength. One example of what I’m talking about is when I see guys do like 5 sets of squats, never taking any of the sets anywhere near failure, then doing five more sets of leg presses( again no where near failure), then five more sets of leg extensions(still no failure). They leave the gym telling their buddies how they destroyed their quads, when all they really did was exhaust their quads, fry their CNS, seriously deplete their glycogen stores, and shoot cortisol through the roof. What they should have done was walk in, warm up, do a few warm up sets, and then do one all-out set of 20-rep breathing squats with their 10-RM. My point in all this? Please make sure you are following a tried and true training program written by a very good coach. Don’t train hard, wrong like I see many, many people do. I don’t write this to insult you. I just see so very few people train optimally that when I see a bro-split, like the PPLPP, that you typed above, I cringe and have to speak up.

If you wanna talk training, there are PLENTY of people on here willing to do that. You’ll have to figure out what your goals are and then look for training programs based on those goals and read others experiences with them. For bodybuilding, John Meadows’ stuff is about as good as it gets. For strongman, Brian Alsruhe. For powerlifting, Jim Wendler.

Also, these forums have very impressive guys from all areas of training hanging around. Great bodybuilders, great strongmen, great powerlifters. Good luck.

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No. If you’re going right back to trt dosing then nothing is required. Use HCG irrespective of whether or not you want kids. There are downstream benefits to having your body still producing some small amount of testosterone.

As for everything else…Hulk laid it out about as well as possible. Pick a program for your goals and make sure to follow it. I love PPL because I’ve been able to do more with less. For me—and you’ll figure out what works for you as you go—I like adding reps vs adding more weight on certain exercises. A bad rotator cuff limits how much I can overhead press, but it doesn’t limit upping the reps. So I’ve had good success just adding more volume on a few things. Progressive overload is the goal and sometimes your body won’t cooperate with that goal when it comes to adding more weight. So be willing to make changes as you go to adjust to what you can do. Avoiding injury is priority 1 (getting bigger and stronger is priority 1a).

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Thanks for all the input guys! I will choose one path, be careful, and commit to the training and diet pertaining to it. Although I am having a tough time finding a proven program with exercises I can do. My home gym has a squat rack, barbell and weights for it. No machines.

19

A little creativity can take you a LONG way with the home gym stuff. You can hit the big three plus TONS of accessories with just a barbell, squat rack, and weights.

I’ve never tried this before, but supposedly zercher squats from the floor are actually supposed to be really good for building strength and work capacity

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20

a list of exercises is not a program… its just a list of exercises which you can do till you are blue in the face and get nothing out of it…

Most ACTUAL programs dont prescribe any machines… most actual athletes dont use any machines also.
Just buy Beyond by Wendler and go… all you need is a rack and a barbell…

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21

Sounds like the perfect home gym to me. A Bench would be nice, but even that’s not mandatory.

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