Been many years since I’ve posted to good old T-nation, but thought I’d post my experience here now that I’m old AF hahaha. Hope this helps anyone looking at doing it, and maybe sparks some discussion.
A few years ago was knocking back a few with my brother and he talked about having been on TRT for a while and said he loved it so I decided to give it a whirl. I had managed to put on a few extra pounds and had just hit 40 at the time, was recently single and definitely thought I was done having kids so what the hell.
Found a doc who was pretty…ahem…liberal with dosing and who was onboard with proscribing anything else you wanted as well. Suddenly had legal test, var, Winstrol, hgh, whatever I wanted available for purchase via my HSA. And it was totally on the up and up legally. Kind of surprised me.
The first year was fantastic. Doc started me out on 200mg a week. That year in the gym was outrageous. Dropped a ton of weight while eating whatever I wanted and piling on muscle. Felt like I was 25. Was single and definitely having a great time.
I hit a wall after a year or so, don’t really know why. Lost a lot of the renewed energy. Started gaining some flab back (I work a desk job so it’s easy to do). My theory is this is when I started to have high enough hematocrit that it started to affect me. I had some blood work done around then and my doc instructed me that I had to donate blood to try and bring it down. I wasn’t too concerned so donated once and kept on going. Got my bench up into the 400s for the first time in years, which was cool, but increasingly started feeling like shit.
So a couple years into it by then I started paying alot more attention to what was going on inside my body. Donated blood again and this time my blood pressure was sky high along with my HCT. Like systolic was in the 160s and HCT was 57. Bad enough they almost didn’t let me donate, freaked me out. Talked to the doc and they weren’t super helpful so decided to start donating regularly and see if that helped. Spent the next year keeping the dosage the same but donating as often as allowed, every three months, bumped up my cardio, and started supplementing with beet root powder for the bp and taking naringin to help with the high hematocrit. Bp came down, but was still high, and HCT stayed really high no matter what I did. Was consistently over 56.
Around that time a close friend my age had a stroke. Nothing related to trt, just bad genetics. He has since recovered the the most part, but his naturally high HCT was a big factor in it most likely. I decided I needed to make some changes at that point and cut my test dose in half to 100mg. I let that ride for most of a year to see if it helped. Didn’t notice much of a change in the gym, bedroom, or mood, was pretty much the same as on 200. BP came down a bit more, but HCT stayed way high. Finally decided to call it.
I had been reading about enclomiphene and decided to get off TRT and switch. I’m now several months off test. Did HCG and enclomiphene for pct and now on daily enclo.
During 200mg/wk test levels were around 1200. On 100 they were still around 800. Was using arimidex for E control the whole time. Was doing sub-q injections 2x a week.
I haven’t retested my T levels just in enclo, going to at 6 months. Definitely still feeling the drag of being off the test. Energy levels lower, having a harder time keeping in the gym, and having to really watch my diet. The only really noticeable thing is lack of sex drive. Everything works fine, but that edge of being kinda horny all the time while on T is definitely gone. Good news is I donated blood a couple days ago and HCT is back in the (barely) normal range and BP is as well.
Anyway, from my experience: stay on it with measuring your vitals. High HCT and BP can literally kill you. Definitely don’t be scared of trying it though. I imagine I’ll be back on it at some point.
I’ll try to update this when I get the chance with T numbers 6 months post PCT with just enclo.