Ok, so inspired by @now_i_care I thought I’d share my view of nandrolone and its various iterations, the case for usage, and the potential best ways to stack it effectively.
Disclaimer: This is based on science and limited personal experience. I’m absolutely not the guy to ask about results. I’m painfully average (well, given how fat America is I guess I’m well above average, but that’s nothing to be proud of) and my approach is limited to the science and the data. If I looked as good as my knowledge is I’d be a very different guy. But I do this for recreation and for my own goals. Take everything I say with the understanding that I am not as dedicated to my diet as many of you and that I’m not a model for anyone’s behavior. This is strictly science, and most scientists aren’t expected to look as good as many on you. Thank you.
The hype
So NPP has been pretty hot the last few years. Call it supply catching up to demand, or demand creating more demand, or whatever explanation you’d like. What’s undeniable is that it has become a go-to AAS for guys who fear the dreaded (and often overblown) side effects of deca. Now deca is the undisputed king of lean mass builders. With proper diet and training deca can take an ordinary man and make him into an extraordinary specimen of peak masculinity. But it is a slow transformation. And it comes with some costs.
The dark side
Deca dick. We know it happens. Hell, there are a number of active threads on this forum about guys who have become crippled asexual messes because of this stuff. Who in their right mind would take that risk? So for years and years broscience has come up with a number of ways to avoid that dreaded aide effect. I honestly don’t know where most of them started, or why they started, but they persist. We’ve all heard them, right?
“Run your test at double the amount of deca”
Sooooo a run with 600mg deca means you need 1,200mg test…ok, enjoy your new boobs, Stormy.
“You need caber or else you’re gonna be soft for months”
Taking a dopamine agonist as a prophylactic treatment may work, but it’s not free of consequences. Have an ergot allergy? Taking caber could be very dangerous. How do you know if you’re allergic to it? Well, most people don’t take in any ergot or ergot derivatives from food (unless you live in 5th C Belgium), so you’d never know if you had an allergy. Do you use any drugs or supplements for hypertension? Caber can cause a hypotensive response that could be extremely dangerous. Think guys running cycles of Tren and Anadrol are maybe trying to mitigate high BP by taking something? I’m willing to bet they are. Mix those in with caber and you could have an issue.
“Run proviron with it and you’ll be fine”
That last one…that one may be right. In fact, throughout my time scanning various boards, reading about the actual science of various AAS, and knowing a little bit about the human body, it stands to reason that eventually one of these broscience ideas was bound to land on a correct answer.
NPP vs Deca
They’re not the same animal. They are the same chemical, but that doesn’t mean they act the same way.
The most obvious difference is the ester, right? But there’s more to it than just that. On a mg for mg basis NPP is staggeringly more effective at reaching high blood plasma concentrations of nandrolone. It’s not even close. Take a look:
NPP and deca, both dosed at 25mg/ml, reach wildly different peak concentrations. The deca tips out at ~250ng/dL while the NPP hits nearly 800ng/dL. 800. As you can see, the deca stays around longer, but the NPP spends a full 16 days before it hits terminal decline and 17 days at a concentration higher than an equivalent amount of deca. That’s important if your goal is to utilize nandrolone to build muscle.
NPP dosage
So what does this tell us? It tells us that you needn’t use a hefty dose of NPP to get superior results. This is not all due to ester weight, either. Sure, 100mg of NPP has more nandrolone in it than 100mg of deca. Obviously that’s a factor. But the peak concentrations should not be off by a factor of 3+ just because of the ester weight difference. Something about how NPP breaks down and the speed at which it is released into the blood causes it to spike up and stay high for much longer than I think most users know.
It’s not a straight line extrapolation, but I would argue that generally speaking one could run 100mg NPP twice a week and get similar results to 600mg of deca, and get those results in less time. Less time on can mean easier recovery/pct and (probably) better long term health. If the goal is adding g lean mass, why would you choose 16 weeks of deca @ 600mg/w when you could very well get close to that goal with NPP @ 200-300mg/w for something like 10 weeks? Remember, the longer you’re on something the more probable side effects can become. Everything is poison, it’s just a matter of dosage.
NPP stack options
I’m going to throw out one idea, and one idea only: Epistane
Yes, proviron is a nice DHT that has mild AI properties. Guess what else does that? Epistane has proven AI properties because it was actually discovered when Japanese scientists were looking to develop an AI. It is a DHT derivative, and it has a solid reputation for building solid lean muscle. Hell, back when they were able to get away with calling it a prohormone (it’s not; it’s absolutely an active steroid) they sold it to anyone who walked into a supplement shop and wanted it. A lot of guys ran it solo, even. And guess what? It works. Most of the people who used it did so without much knowledge of what they were doing, so I doubt there’s much muscle out there that remains from the halcyon days of legal Epistane. But it’s still an effective tool that gets ignored by purists because of its past as a “prohormone”. But as with your girlfriend, sometimes you just forget the past and focus on what’s in front of you.
I will be running a blast sometime this Fall. I’m not happy with my current diet and training schedule, so no blast until I feel like I’ve gotten a better handle on that. Family and work come before the gym, and right now those two things are dominating my life. But when I do get where I want to be, my blast will be as follows:
TRT dose as usual
NPP @ 200mg/w for 8 weeks
Epistane 30mg ed for 6 weeks
I’ll create a log and do the whole thing when it’s appropriate. The point of writing all of that, then saying I’m going to run this blast, is to give information to this forum and then test my hypothesis in a real life setting. Anyway, hope this was useful to someone.
on paper it should be 3% difference so I predict somewhere between a 3-6 percent difference