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This is a loaded question and is dependent on many different things.

TRT = Testosterone replacement therapy.

TRT is a general term used to describe taking a low, regular dose (usually weekly) of testosterone to replace your body’s own declining levels.  I want to start off by going through some of the variables/questions one should ask themselves to help determine what is best..

How old are you? Once you hit your late 20’s, your natural test levels will start to decline. If you’re 30+ years old its going to be hard to get your natural levels back to ‘normal’ in just a few months. 

Are you getting your blood work done regularly? If you’re not able to test your blood to see exactly where your testosterone levels are while on cycle and off cycle, then it will be very hard determine if you’re recovering quickly or if your testosterone levels are low. 

Do you have any health issues? If you have high cholesterol, heart issues, etc. then you will want to monitor this carefully if you use steroids. I have seen guys do much better staying on a low dose TRT (200mg/week) throughout the year, rather than cycling steroids at higher doses for 3-months, then going off for a period of time. On the same token, I have seen others with health issues do better cycling on and off. 

What are your athletic/fitness/exercise goals? If you’re competing in bodybuilding, powerlifting, or some other sport  at an extremely high level, then the low dose TRT may not be for you, as those endeavors require different demands at such a high level. If you’re using steroids to help get into shape, slow down aging, or for general increased performance in your chosen discipline, then you’re probably a better candidate. 

The endocrine system is very sensitive; if it gets thrown out of whack it can take some real time to get it back to ‘normal.’ In the bodybuilding scene, we have been taught that we should cycle on steroids then cycle off them back and forth. The reasoning behind this is to give the body’s natural test levels a chance to recover. I have heard guys say that you need to go off at least as long as you were on. Doing this protocol would put you going on cycle for 3-months then off for 3-months, in this yo-yo fashion. In theory this is sound advice, you use exogenous testosterone for a few months, doing this will suppress your natural testosterone so you take the next 3-months to get your natural test levels back up before suppressing them again. I suppose the idea behind this is that if you don’t let your natural test levels get back to normal by cycling on and off, then you will permanently suppress your natural test levels. 

If you’re a 30+ year old healthy male who is using steroids to help with performance and recovery in the gym or with any athletic performance, I would seriously consider using a TRT dose and staying on year round. This may sound scary at first, the idea of never coming off steroids can make you feel like an addict or feel like you’re putting your health in jeopardy. Let me make a few arguments about why it may be a good idea to do this. First off, if you’re going to be on all year, you don’t need to be using normal cycle doses. I think most guys doing a 3-month cycle would say 800-1,000mg/week would be considered normal. If you’re staying on year round, then a dose of 200mg/week is the max that would be needed/advised. Doing this lower dose can really mitigate the negative health effects of steroids. I know for myself, if I use 800mg/week my blood pressure raises, my cholesterol will get out of whack (especially if I am using orals), and I tend to have a much higher hematocrit/red blood cell level that can lead to the heart working even harder to pump the thicker blood through the body. Even 200mg/week is multiple times higher than what our bodies are producing naturally, so your definitely going to see benefits at this dose; especially if you’re using year round. 

This brings me to my next point: what is the sense in spending all of the time to get your test levels back to ‘normal’ via PCT and being off cycle, just to throw them into suppression again a few months later? This yo-yo effect is what causes the majority of negative side effects that guys experience when cycling their gear. If you go from having 1500+ ng/dL testosterone levels to having 0, you’re going to lose the majority of the muscle you have built while on cycle, as your body does not have the hormones running through it that can sustain that muscle mass. Chances are you will only keep a small % of it in the end. I believe many guys would do much better using the TRT dose year round as its easier to keep your blood work on track on the lower dose; additionally, you will experience far less negative health effects. Yes your gains will be slower but they will be permanent and much easier to sustain. The slower you build the muscle the easier it is to sustain. When your muscles grow quickly over a short period of time the whole body has to ‘grow’ or adapt to support the muscle- meaning tendons, ligaments, your circulatory system, etc etc.. Many guys experience this first hand after they have put on 20lbs in a short time and they try to go out hiking (or even walking, climbing stairs, etc) and they can’t seem to catch their breath. It is because their heart and lungs are trying to pump blood and oxygen to 20% more muscle tissue and simply can’t keep up. 

I remember the first time I came off cycle when I was just getting into bodybuilding. I felt like complete garbage, I was young, inexperienced and saw any hard fought muscle gains slipping away and no matter how hard I trained or how much I tried to eat, I lost the majority of what I had gained. Generally, depression can set in from having low or no testosterone, and this just complicates matters more. I found myself counting down the days until my ‘3-months off’ was over and I could start back up again. It felt like 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. I often wonder how I would have done lowering my doses and simply staying on for longer periods of time with the TRT type of dose. 

I will conclude with a few last points to keep in mind. Get familiar with your blood work. At a minimum, you should have it tested twice a year. Doing steroids and not getting your blood work done is like trying to navigate using a map without knowing what way is north? You won’t know what direction to go because you don’t know exactly where you’re at. Once you know what your testosterone levels, cholesterol, red blood cell, etc is at, you have the necessary tools to know how long it takes your body to recover from a cycle, deal with any health issues, and make an informed decision if a year round TRT dose is good for you. I don’t believe one way of using steroids is better than the other, so it is best to experiment a little and see how you react. Try doing the TRT dose for 6-9 months and see how you feel, how your blood work looks, and what kind of progress you have made. Compare this to your normal regimen and see what makes more sense to you. 

Getting your blood work done is very easy these days. There’s a lot of online testing companies that will have you get blood drawn at a Lab Corp or Quest Diagnostic type of facility and then email you the results for a $100-200. You don’t have to explain anything to your doctor, it is private, and you can see exactly what’s going on in your body. 

Thanks for reading. As always, we appreciate any feedback we can get, be it good or bad. Feel free to comment and add any info you think is beneficial to this conversation.

Thanks!

G and All of Team Gear Depot

I see a lot of novice bodybuilders doing some pretty extreme things to gain an edge. I want to take some time in this article to address some of these and try to sort out what is worth your time and money.

The majority of us over complicate bodybuilding (myself included). It’s amazing how many advances in science and health have pushed the envelope in bodybuilding in just the last 20-30 years. It’s a very exciting time, as we have more science behind this sport than ever before. I would venture to say that bodybuilders and cyclists are at the forefront of technology, nutrition, drugs and physiology. I can speak to the crazy things some guys will do to gain even a fraction of a percentage in bodybuilding. Everything from the plethora of peptides on the market today, to drugs like EPO & DNP, to waking in the middle of the night to have a huge calorie packed shake. I have tried them all and I want to reflect on the value/return of these efforts, in the grand scheme of things, to try and separate what is really worth your time, money and effort.

Workouts and Training – obviously this will be the first thing on the list; we know this works and we know it’s needed to create a stimulus for the body to adapt to. Some guys like the low volume HIIT stuff, others like higher German style volume training, but the majority of us probably fall in the middle here. There are a thousand different training programs so we won’t get granular here, but I want to express the importance of regularly changing your training style and trying some different types of training. if you notice your training getting stagnant, then don’t be afraid to try some HIIT training for a few months. On the other side, if you’re doing some really hard core training and busting your ass, don’t be afraid to give yourself a break and let the body heal up 100%. I feel like I spent so many years training hard, but never allowed my body the time it needed to fully heal so while I was breaking the muscle down on a regular basis, I never got all of the growth out of each workout because I dove right back in and trained those muscle groups again because it was ‘chest day’ or ‘leg day’ again and I needed to stay on a schedule. Rotate your exercises, workouts and rest days.

Recovery – this is something I wish I had put more effort into earlier in my career. You can call it active recovery, or whatever you want, but doing any combo of extreme stretching (read the DC guide on this), yoga, sauna and cryotherapy will help your body recover and stay injury free. Watching a 270 pound inflexible bodybuilder doing yoga is quite comical! The first several times I did it, I hated it! I didn’t like how weak and inflexible I was in so many of these poses, but the more I did, the better I got and I saw a huge difference in my posing and especially in my range of motion for many of my lifts. Hot yoga is also great to crank up the intensity one more notch, or doing some basic stretches in the sauna can help achieve the same effect. Cryotherapy is a new fad but is becoming a solid part of many top athletes recovery regime. On your days off or after your workouts be sure to incorporate some form of this as it will help with recovery, flexibility, and generally make you feel and perform better.

Nutrition – in order to build muscle your body needs high quality nutrition. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that you have to eat every 2-3 hrs to build muscle on a regular basis. That is 6+ meals per day! That’s a lot for the average guy and there are some things that need to be taken into account.

• How big are your meals? Some guys like to feed on small meals throughout the day; however, others, because of lifestyle and schedule will do better on 3-4 larger meals per day.
• What is the quality of food you are eating? This will dictate how fast your food can process and how soon you can put more down the hatch. There is a big difference between eating a burger at a fast food joint or having the fajitas at Chili’s, as opposed to cooking a burger or fajitas at home with organic quality ingredients. If you don’t believe me, try it and see which one makes you ‘feel’ better.
• What type of food are you eating? Everyone has certain foods that their body “agrees with,” and seems to digest better and provide more satiety than others. You will find those foods through trial and error, but when you do, that is what you will want to incorporate into your diet.

Post Workout Nutrition – this is something that can be done for cheap and pays major dividends in building muscle. You have an increased anabolic window for about 90 minutes after you train. This anabolic window is caused by the body deleting its glycogen and other nutritional reserves during your workout, thus creating the ability for the body to super compensate and reload those lost nutrients + some extra. A good analogy is squeezing a damp sponge in your hand and wringing out all of the water in it (this is your workout). If you eat nothing after your workout, then your sponge remains dry, but if you immediately take that sponge in your hand and dip it into a bowl of water it will soak up ever ounce of water it can hold. Your body does the same in this 90 minute window. The body is depleted and is begging for nutrition to help start the repair process. During this time,your body will shuttle amino acids and sugars much faster than normal. I recommend between 30-60 grams of whey protein and some simple sugars (30-60 grams of sugars) as soon after you get done working out. It takes minimal planning to do this and it is not expensive if you bring a shake with you to the gym to have a quick refuel right after you train. It is wise to plan your next meal about 45-90 minutes after you have this shake.

Steroids and HGH – there is no contesting that Steroids and HGH do work. I am not going to go into too much detail here, except to say that when looking at what steroids to take, it is always a safe bet to stick with the basics. A testosterone ester should make up the base of your cycle, then depending on your experience, you can add another inject like Equipoise, Deca, or Tren to supplement the testosterone. The only other thing I would recommend is an oral steroid like Dbol, Winstrol, or Anavar. Keep the doses low to moderate and understand that you’re not going to consistently get the gains you got on your first cycle or 2– they will taper off the more you use steroids. Before you up the dose on steroids, try incorporating a different workout program, some active recovery, more rest, or tweak your nutrition.

Supplements – anyone who has been in this game long enough probably knows that the majority of supplement claims are BS, or highly exaggerated. That being said, I want to briefly touch on the supplements I think we can all agree on that should be a staple in any program. Whey protein in some form should be supplemented for your post workout shake, and/or for meal replacement throughout the day. Find a real whey protein isolate! If you look on your tub of protein and see that it has whey protein concentrate listed on the bottle the chances are it is mostly concentrate and very little isolate. In my opinion the isolate is far superior. You can research the reasons why and see for yourseld. The next supplement I would spend my hard earned money on is creatine. I think creatine has more clinical studies done on it than almost any other supplement. Simply put, creatine works. It helps to push more water into the muscle, allowing it to perform better. If you can afford some powerful anti oxidants and a good multi vitamin then I would definitely advise that as well. There are thousands of different supplements on the market, and while many of them have shown to increase this level or that, leading to increased performance I don’t believe the return is worth the investment on most of them if you are a novice or recreational athlete on a budget.

I remember being a young aspiring bodybuilder about 20 years ago, chatting with the current Mr. Olympia. I was a die hard, if he told me eating 2 pounds of dirt each day would help me build bigger muscles, then I would have done it! I wanted every edge I could get. In speaking with Mr. O, he really surprised me with his simplistic approach to the drugs and a few other things. I was expecting him to give me the secrete pro bodybuilder stack of steroids I would use to get huge. What he told me kinda left me confused..? He didn’t know about half of the new peptides coming out, had never used igf, and said he relied on some Test, Eq, Tren and Anavar to prep for shows and the doses were not nearly what I expected (very low). Part of me did not believe him, as I know many guys say they take far less then they really do, but over the years and seeing how his body, mind, and enjoyment of life has held up over the years I have realized he was telling the truth.

If I had to give myself a few points of advice 20 years ago here is what I would say:

• Building muscle takes time: there are some things you can’t cheat and time is one of those. Stay on your routine but get some hobbies so you’re not totally engulfed in this game trying to chase every little rumor promising gains.
• Take more time to recover. Your body is not a calendar. If you don’t sleep well for a night or 2 in a row, you don’t need to be blasting a crazy leg workout the next day as your recovery ability is already compromised. Train hard, but rest smart. I would rather take an extra day or two off and ensure I have left ample time for recovery and rebuild, then train a day or two early and stay stagnant.
• Pick 3 steroids to use (2 if you’re in the off season). Take some breaks from the gear if you are younger, if you are in your later 30’s then make sure to get some time on just a TRT dose.
• Find the foods your body agrees with and incorporate those in your nutrition program.

If you take the points in this article and incorporate them in to your routine, I think you’ll see a strong foundation for muscle gain. Yes, there are thousands of things you could do to give yourself an edge, and all of those small advantages can add up to real gains, but the financial cost, time spent, and injury that can come from trying untested methods are not worth it for 95% us. Years of doing this will maximize your potential and still leave you with some money in the bank and some sanity in your head!

Thanks for reading. Any questions, please feel free to comment or email us, we love hearing feedback from you guys!

Thanks,

G