I kinda like TOT. It’s more accurate, considering that none of us knows what our healthy Testosterone levels were before we needed exogenous testosterone. So the replacement part of trt, isn’t really accurate.
However, we KNOW quite confidently what the the max ceiling was on our endogenous levels in the absence of clinical disease. It isnt a mystery in the slightest. Hence, taking your peak levels (or mean levels) 1.5-2x above the healthy ceiling is absurd in the context of treating legitimate testosterone deficiency.
It is simply bullshit. Check out PAIS. TOT is taking some guys past PAIS levels to treat a presumed testosterone deficiency. I am still waiting for Nichols and Howell to publish that paper on type III hypogonadism due to androgen receptor resistance in the modern man. Can’t wait to read it. Must be hard being on the bleeding edge of science.
1 Like
Thanks for this. In the interest of absolute accuracy i went back and tried to look for Danny’s injection frequency back when he threw out the dosage and levels i quoted above. Heres is his first post on TNation:
So he was injecting 200 mg/week of TE (twice weekly injections of 100 mg) and he was getting 1200 ng/dl trough. So i will go back and redo the plot that estimates his PK profile. He isnt the outlier he always claims he is in terms of free T elimination. His mean TT is approx 1.2*1182 = 1418 ~ 1400 ng/dl.
Look that up on my graphs above…he has approx. 50 percentile response.
All those useless graphs and math @cliteastwood. Unfortunately all that useless info points alot of ignorant suffering people being conned by someone who isnt very good at math, science, physiology, etc.
But he means well you say. Ok. And as we know the road to hell paved with the finest of intentions.
1 Like
Just spitballing here, what if Danny never tried “castrate levels”, what if there is a sweet spot for pretty much everyone, at 50-70mg per week, when you go past it, you have to go way up to get the ratio right for libido etc, as aromatization does not continue to happen in a linear fashion, at the very least you get more dht when you up the dose, to combat the added estradiol? Could there be something here, i have experienced feeling good with around 100 mgs when its time for the next injection, which then takes that good feeling away, on the other hand i have felt good after injecting a full sustanon, for a couple of days, but it’s different, sleeping is pretty hard and you are kind of hyper.
4 Likes
@tareload dude I am having some serious body heat or hot flashes if that’s what they are, and get sweaty at night at times. Not sure if it’s the case of diagnosing everything and anything to TRT regimen.
1 Like
Is it pretty normal for people to have trouble sleeping on gear?
I have always slept like a baby even with larger doses of multiple compounds.
And I have never taken any sleeping aids outside of melatonin.
I have heard from many about the 250mg sustanon injection propionate buzz, making it hard to sleep, it does jack levels quite high for the first couple of days.
1 Like
Thank you for this hypothesis. I am still thinking about it and we give Danny a lot of thought care here.
Couple of questions for the experienced here. I started on cream a little over 2 weeks ago. Feeling better after a few days which was really nice. My testicles really started to ache though after a week or so and I started to feel like I did before starting trt.
- How long does it take for the body to stop it’s own production?
- Do you generally have to up the dose to make up for the stopped production if you started low and slow?
I haven’t had blood yet but feel that down feeling I had. It’s weird but I do feel my blood pressure has increased and my resting heart beat but I cannot afford to go off as I was feeling really depressed without trt. It’s as if I traded some motivation for anxiety at times though. I know it’s early but I do feel that dialing in is going to be a long haul. Thanks.
Gibbon
Somewhat dose dependent, but 1-3 weeks for FSH and 4-5 for LH to reach complete suppression.
Yes.
Measure it and keep a log.
Do blood work in a few weeks and adjust from there with your provider. Appears you may have to balance positives vs negatives WRT dosing if your log shows significant impact to BP/RHR.
Agreed with @highpull on the rough shutdown timeline. I will spare everyone the graph with confidence intervals.
1 Like
Thank you both for the responses. Seems like I need to up the dose. I started with only 3 clicks at 10 mg each. Hard to know the absorption but Atrevis gel is supposed to be better.
When on the cream is there a time that is best to do labs? After application how many hours? I am not applying to the scrotum yet but if I can’t get my levels up I may have to do that since it appears better. Sleep has been an issue and that seems to be a problem when levels are not high enough or too much roller coaster.
thanks again.
Relevant data here:
If you want peak perhaps 2-4 hours after application. Mid to trough 6-8+ hours after application.
Thank you.
I have had night sweats for the last 3 nights. I know low T can cause this but is there other causes out there? Too high or too low estrogen. I assumed I need to go up in dose but wonder if I need to go down? This is quite frustrating and the only way to know is probably to choose one or the other…
IMHO you need to ride it out. If you truly feel you have a low dosage by all means go up, then give it time. Its been a long time since I was on cream so I can’t say if that is a low dosage or not.
Edit: I just went and looked at my log for my dosage on cream and I started with 5 clicks of my dispenser with a 10% cream. I ended up at about 8 clicks on a 20% cream (believed I was getting 20mg per click) before I moved to injections. So if you truly are getting only 10mg per click I would say you are on a low dosage. I would verify you are getting the dosage you believe before adjusting though. My clicks were a lot smaller than a lot of other dispensers that others I have seen used on here as I believe they were getting 50mg per click.
But don’t go chasing every symptom right now. Your hormones are in flux as you just started and endogenous is shutting or has recently shut down. What you feel now may be nothing when things settle.
1 Like
Thank you all for the level headed advice. I appreciate the knowledge and experience here.
I did defer to the doctor and pharmacist who specializes in this and I did move to another click (2 in the morning, two in the afternoon). It is a small dose but I was so leery of a large dose to start based on my past I now realize I will need to ride this out. The doctor said the same thing, let’s look at symptom resolution and go slow.
How are you doing on shots? What is your protocol? Thank you.
Gibbon
1 Like
I am doing good on shots. My normal protocol is 18mg daily shallow IM. Right now I am playing with same weekly dosage divided into 2 injections rather than daily just to see if I notice a difference. Only been doing it about a week and a half so can’t report much. My libido has seemed to be up slightly. Never been an issue just something I noticed. Being its been such a short amount of time I am not going to say that it really is attributing to it. It could be just the change is slightly affecting and will go away or it is just something that would of occurred anyways and coincidentally lined up with it. We will see.
1 Like
Morning wood is becoming a common occurrence now. 
I kind of was impatient and past week did 120mg split in 60mg twice a week. But feeling great. Not sure if 120mg was the sweet spot or lowering dose finally “kicked in” my system since these protocols have a lagging effect, maybe 120mg will prove to be too much.
2 Likes
I haven’t done any blood work but after two weeks of cream I am sleeping terrible with hot flashes. Pharmacist say’s it is either low or high estrogen. I did raise my cream dose 25% and slept even worse last night. I always thought that people chased high estrodiol but it got me thinking about low estrogen and symptoms. I didn’t have this until recently so I wondered if the only way is to get labs or actually lower my dose instead of raise it right now?
I don’t understand it all exactly but is the ratio of test to estrogen very important and if I am raising T but my estrogen is low could this cause symptoms? When I had a E2 test it only said it was below 20 but didn’t give me a number