Testosterone for athletes: harm and benefits of sports nutrition

Hormones and muscle growth[edit | edit code]

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Yuzhakov Anton HOW TO INCREASE TESTOSTERONE

Your muscles are built by hormones. Training is secondary. Tanning is a good analogy for muscle development. Let's make an analogy: the amount of time you spend sunbathing is your workout, and the intensity of sunlight is your hormonal level.

Let's face it: you can lie in the sun all day, but if the sunlight intensity is low, say you live in Scotland and it's winter, then you won't tan. It is unlikely that your skin will change color at all. But if you live in Dubai, just take off your shirt for a couple of minutes and your skin will begin to change color and adapt to the sunlight.

The same is true for muscle growth. You can train as intensely as possible, but if you have poor hormonal levels, the results will tend to zero. You can see this for yourself in real life. The average guy can go to the gym and train intensely and even build some muscle. But if his girlfriend goes to the same gym, her chances of getting more or less pumped up are zero. They can eat the same, train on the same programs, rest equally and have the same morale. So what's the difference? Hormonal background. In general, men have 10 times higher testosterone levels than girls.

A woman doing progressive gymnastics will become stronger and “toned,” but she will never be muscular. She won't be able to. Have you ever watched the Olympic Games? Often, the strongest gymnasts on the planet, if they do not take doping, actually look no larger than ordinary women in good shape. And of course, they don’t look like bodybuilders. This is true even if they are many times stronger than the average doughy guy.

Once we understand the true role of hormones, especially testosterone, in muscle growth, it becomes clear that our training methods are actually the tenth thing. If you want to get big and strong and stay that way throughout your life, your goal should be to maintain high testosterone levels. Research and simple everyday experience have shown that this is quite achievable without the use of esoteric practices—some men have been able to increase their falling testosterone levels by more than 1000%. How? Just following a few basic rules.

After cancellation

Of course, the fully gained results cannot be maintained after the withdrawal of testosterone propionate, however, there is no need to talk about such a loss of mass and strength as occurs after the withdrawal of the same methane. Especially if you trained really hard and were smart about your nutrition on the course.

As for post-cycle therapy, in the case of using testosterone propionate “solo” I don’t think that anything other than hepatoprotectors may be needed. And even then purely for preventive purposes.

Six rules for increasing testosterone levels[edit | edit code]

Here are the basic rules to follow if you want to increase your testosterone levels. Some experts recommend a variety of ways to boost testosterone—often these methods include taking vitamin and mineral supplements. The big supplement companies call the tune here. But in reality, if your blood levels of, for example, zinc are not critically low, this will not affect the growth of hormones. In other words, studies have shown that taking extra vitamins doesn't increase testosterone levels one iota, as long as you eat a balanced diet.

Testosterone levels can rise and fall slightly for a variety of reasons, most of which are minor and temporary. However, these rules are the most significant and the most stable. Do them if you need fuel for your muscles.

Rule 1: Train intense[edit | edit code]

Much paper has been blotted out in attempts to describe exactly why and how intense exercise stimulates testosterone levels, but few experts now deny that this is the case. To anyone who understands the principle of adaptation, this does not seem paradoxical. Your body functions according to the biological principle of homeostasis. One way to describe how homeostasis works is to say that in order to conserve energy, your body produces the minimum amount of hormones required. He follows the path of least resistance. Testosterone is a powerful substance evolved to make flabby muscles grow. If your body thinks you can survive playing computer games, sitting on the couch, and eating donuts all day, why would it waste energy producing excess testosterone? You don't need him, do you?

However, if you really have to fight for existence and hard push-ups, pull-ups and other exercises feel like a struggle for your body to survive, then the body gets used to producing a large amount of testosterone so that you can create tools and finish the job, which will make your life easier. Your body is smart, but it only reacts to the signals that you give it.

Rule 2: long deep sleep[edit | edit code]

Growth occurs mainly in the dark - both in an iceberg and in a plant or person. The same is true for bodybuilding. Very few bodybuilders realize that testosterone is only produced at night. More specifically, testosterone is produced during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The main point to remember: in the first few hours of sleep, FBS is quite small, but the longer you sleep, the more it is. And this continues until you have exhausted all your available sleep reserve. In short, for every minute of extra sleep, your body produces testosterone.

Most Americans are chronically sleep deprived. The general recommendation of 6-8 hours of sleep is TOO little in my opinion. How much is “too much”? Unless you have a cancerous brain tumor, there is no such thing as “too much” for a bodybuilder. If you can sleep 14 hours a day, hell, do it. Some might say it's antisocial. Well, it depends what you compare it to.

Rule 3: don't be a fat bass[edit | edit code]

When obese men had their blood tested, they found negligible levels of testosterone. And it doesn’t matter whether they train or not. This may sound gender jingoistic, but women must have more body fat than men in order to be fertile. For this reason, fat reserves in the body are inextricably linked with estrogen, the insidious female hormone - the implacable enemy of testosterone.

Fat is often thought of as passive tissue, but fat cells are actually chemical factories. Specifically, fat tissue produces aromatase, an enzyme that takes testosterone (responsible for muscle and strength) and converts it into estrogen (responsible for the growth of saggy nipples). This is why fat guys have low testosterone. Every extra kilogram of fat is an enemy base, destroying the necessary substances and replacing them with female hormones.

The negative point is a vicious circle. The more weight you gain, the lower your testosterone levels and the harder it is to build muscle and burn fat. The upside is the same as the downside: the more you exercise while gritting your teeth and avoiding overeating, the more fat your body burns. With every kilogram you lose, you gain back a little testosterone, which speeds up and simplifies the further process of gaining muscle mass and burning fat. Do you see? Your body knows what to do. You just need to tell him this, guys.

Rule 4: Eat cholesterol[edit | edit code]

By and large, bodybuilders on low-calorie diets forget that testosterone is made from cholesterol—cholesterol forms the building blocks of testosterone. This is why vegans (unless, of course, they are on chemo) have muscles like the walking skeletons of Ray Harryhausen. If you follow Rule 1 and give your body a fairly intense workout, and Rule 3 and don't allow yourself to become fat, then some cholesterol-rich foods such as eggs, sausage, cheese and fatty cuts of meat will not harm you. But it will increase cholesterol levels.

Rule 5: Be a teetotaler[edit | edit code]

When smoking, carbon monoxide enters the bloodstream, and this substance has a bad effect on the ability to convert cholesterol into testosterone. Alcohol lowers testosterone levels in several ways. Beer, for example, contains hops, which are a powerful phytoestrogen (that is, plant estrogen). Hops convert into estrogen in the body very quickly. Thus, women harvesting hops hundreds of years ago experienced prolonged periods. It has always been known that alcohol kills libido, hence the term “drunken stalemate.” Interestingly, Protestants opposed the beer purity laws passed in Germany during the Renaissance because they understood that alcohol destroyed libido.

Another thing that athletes simply aren't told is that the liver's job is to secrete enzymes that limit the amount of estrogen in the body. When you take drugs (even over-the-counter ones), you kill the liver, making it more difficult for it to suppress estrogen production. One of the most obvious signs of liver dysfunction in male drug addicts and alcoholics is wrinkled genitals and gynecomastia (literally, enlarged breasts). With such high levels of estrogen in the body, testosterone levels become critically low.

These five rules are the most important to follow if you want to improve your hormonal levels, in that order. But there is a sixth rule.

Rule 6: Don't take steroids[edit | edit code]

Simply put: the most harmful thing to the hormonal background of a modern athlete is steroids.

“How can this be?” - many people ask. Guys who take steroids put on tons of muscle, don't they? Well, in general, yes. But they pay a disproportionate price for this - endogenous testosterone levels.

All modern steroids are largely synthetic analogues of testosterone. The very moment you take a chemical drug, the principle of homeostasis begins to work and the body thinks that since there is so much new testosterone around, there is no point in producing its own. So gradually the endocrine system fails - it literally commits suicide. This is how it turns out that even athletes who take steroids in moderate doses have shriveled genitals—their testosterone-producing organs (the genitals) are failing. That's why those who use steroids have the syndrome of "shameful boobs" - gynecomastia, that is, the growth of mammary glands. This is incredibly common among bodybuilders today.

Perhaps the worst thing about all of this is that the damage caused by steroids lasts for a long time. Yes, if you have been taking steroids for a short time, you will be able to restore your testosterone levels to a certain extent after many months, but the higher the dose taken and the longer the recovery process, the longer the endocrine system suffers. What you may not know is that long-term steroid users never produce testosterone again. Their body simply cannot do this - it is no longer capable of it. Once the damage they cause to their endocrine system reaches a certain level, it will no longer be able to recover. These people are completely dependent on drugs, and the sick person does not care that he is dependent on dialysis. So what about strength? Remember, the whole point of bodybuilding is to create the right hormonal levels. But by taking steroids, you are doing exactly the opposite... You are destroying your endocrine system from the inside.

There is a myth today that getting in incredible shape requires steroids and heavy weights. This is a photo of bodybuilder Bobby Pan Fool. Pandur was born in 1876, and synthetic testosterone (made from cholesterol!) was invented all the way in 1936, so this is one of those rare cases where you can be sure that what you are looking at is 100% natural muscle. Pandur pumped up his muscles exclusively with his own weight and muscle control techniques (isometrics). He was convinced that lifting excessively heavy weights was harmful to his health, and when training, he never lifted dumbbells heavier than 10 pounds. But he was strong as a bull, and in terms of his form he could give odds to modern bodybuilders using steroids. It's quite real

Despite what you might think, the medical industry is furious that steroids are now illegal because it means they can no longer live off the crap. Although they are now trying to circumvent the law. They simply call steroids testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and sell the idea that modern men need to take steroid drugs because we are somehow weirdly flawed and have low testosterone. Modern men have low testosterone levels not because they are sick - it's all because of their lifestyle.

TRT is a scam designed to take money out of your pocket and kill your endocrine system. Why is it beneficial for “doctors” to continually weaken your natural testosterone levels? So that they can spend the rest of their lives selling you this rubbish! You should not believe in illusions when dealing with exogenous hormones. They harm your endocrine system right away - from the first injection, from the first pill you put in your mouth. If you want to be strong and muscular in old age, you can achieve this by following the rules that I have introduced you to, but if you take steroids, forget about it. The current steroid boom will lead to an even greater pharmaceutical disaster in the future. In the next few years, all these guys who puff themselves up to look pumped up in the clubs will be 40 or 50 years old and have the same tetosterone levels as octogenarian women.

Don't join their ranks. Dedicate your life to intense training and a healthy lifestyle and you will be strong, muscular and healthy into old age, just like my mentor Joe Hartigan, who could do one-arm push-ups in his 70s, like Joe Greenstein, the “Mighty Atom”, who flexed steel bars in his 80s, like Manohar Aich, who competed in bodybuilding in his 90s. They succeeded because they followed the six simple rules outlined in this chapter.

You can join the ranks of these glorious men. If you strictly follow these six rules, you will significantly increase your testosterone levels in a matter of days. If you follow these guidelines consistently over months and years, you will eventually be able to effectively develop your endocrine system, just as bodybuilders dedicatedly develop their muscular system. Old-school athletes had more testosterone in their old age than the average modern twenty-year-old office hamster. They did it, and you can too.

Distinctive features

Personally, I think testosterone propionate is a drug that is often unfairly neglected by AAS users.
But it is simply designed to build strength and mass! 1. Testosterone propionate perfectly stabilizes androgen receptors, accelerating protein synthesis in the user’s body. Which indicates its very strong androgenic effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtqfR3Sdrk0

2. At the same time, propionate compares favorably with other testosterone preparations in that when taking it, significant water retention in the body can be avoided.

3. Another distinctive feature of propionate is its pharmacokinetics. It begins to act almost immediately after entering the body, increasing appetite and having a positive effect on the central nervous system. As a result, we have an increase in strength indicators and a reduction in recovery time after training loads.

4. With all the advantages of propionate, its disadvantage can be considered a short period of influence on the user’s body - only 1-2 days. Which means fairly frequent injections. And yet I believe that if used wisely, this minus can be turned into a plus.

Modern myth about testosterone deficiency[edit | edit code]

The argument that is given in defense of steroids and TRT: “Modern men live in a world polluted with harmful substances and toxins, they are forced to eat food that has been processed and therefore has lost its nutritional properties. For this reason, the average man today lacks the necessary substances to activate the natural production of testosterone, as men did in previous generations.”

If an athlete decides to take steroids, that's his problem. But this line of reasoning is just an excuse that many lazy athletes cling to.

Be that as it may, over time, men's testosterone levels do drop.

Our ancestors were engaged in heavy physical labor - every day they received a load comparable to the load in the gym. Today, many guys leave the work to machines and sit at office desks. This is why their bodies do not produce enough testosterone.

Due to long working hours, we sleep less and less. Before the invention of electric lamps, people slept 10 or more hours a night... now a worker sleeps on average 5-7 hours. Modern men lack the REM sleep phase, during which hormones are restored.

Excess weight, which literally converts testosterone into estrogen, was rare 100 years ago, and fat people were paraded in circus tents. Now this problem has reached epidemic proportions. You could say this has almost become the norm.

While previous generations ate fresh, healthy, high-cholesterol foods—eggs, ham, cheese, whole milk, lard—modern “loose-cooked” people eat processed, high-carbohydrate foods. This is how the vicious circle closes.

Soft drugs and alcohol have always existed, but in the modern world the problem of their use is much more pressing than before. All this reduces testosterone levels.

Author: Paul Wade

Side effects

Like any other AAS drug, testosterone propionate has side effects inherent in substances of this class:

Liver problems;
Acne;
Increased pressure;
Gynecomastia;
Gastrointestinal disorders;
Excessive aggressiveness;
Excessive water retention;
Significant suppression of the production of own testosterone.

However, due to the fact that the weekly dose of propionate usually does not exceed 400 mg, these phenomena are not so pronounced. Moreover, when using propionate “solo” they are unlikely to visit you.

Expert opinion

Alexey – consultant of the site ru-steroid.biz

Today, many athletes prefer to use traditional testosterone as steroid therapy. You can read about the features of this hormonal drug in this article. Among testosterone preparations, the most popular are Omnadren 250, Sustanon 250, as well as Testosterone propionate and Testosterone cypionate.

Among the features of this hormonal drug, it is worth noting the acceleration of protein synthesis, a strong androgenic effect and a rapid effect immediately after entering the body, which is also mentioned in this article. Among the disadvantages of testosterone, I would note the short-term effect on the athlete’s body, which usually does not exceed a few days.

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How does testosterone affect muscle gain in bodybuilding?

There are certain physiological hormonal boundaries, beyond which it is impossible to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Doping allows you to break out of this range and achieve a testosterone surge.

Testosterone in bodybuilding is necessary to accelerate metabolism and protein synthesis. Protein is the main building material of muscle tissue. The hormone also increases the production of insulin (to facilitate the functioning of the digestive system and the processing of heavy foods), lipoproteins and endorphins.

By taking testosterone, an athlete has the opportunity to achieve an increase in muscle mass 2-3 times faster, compared to those bodybuilders who do not use artificial doping.

The role of testosterone in the life of a bodybuilder:

increase in muscle size;
reduction of fat layer;
increase in strength indicators;
strengthening bone tissue;
improvement of emotional background;
improvement of well-being;
rapid recovery after training and injuries;
slowing down the excretion of microelements from the body: calcium, potassium, sulfur;
water retention in the body.

Due to the last point, swelling of the body appears, so the man visually appears even larger. After you stop taking testosterone, the swelling will subside and the volume will decrease somewhat.

Steroid profile.

The anabolic and androgenic activity of the drug is high, equal to 100% of testosterone. Aromatization is also high, so additional use of anti-estrogenic drugs is required to minimize the negative manifestations of estrogenic activity. There is no toxicity to the liver, since the drug is administered by injection, thereby bypassing the internal organs, and immediately enters the bloodstream.

Testosterone propionate reviews are mostly positive. According to data from surveyed athletes who had previously taken the drug, a general positive opinion was expressed by 90% of respondents.

Which anabolic steroid should you choose for your cycle? Will it be testosterone propionate or enanthate, sustanon, or perhaps it will be taken in combination with another type of anabolic steroid. All these questions must be discussed in advance with a qualified specialist; it is only within his competence to choose the course that is right for you.

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What should you be wary of?

The first disadvantage that an athlete using testosterone propionate feels is the number of injections. The steroid should be injected every other day, at least 3-4 times a week, which is not entirely convenient, while most anabolic steroids require one injection during the same period. On the other hand, you can survive this, because the main thing is the result.

Among the side effects, the drug cannot be called flawless and practically harmless to the body, but here there is another side of the coin, if you do not exceed the recommended dose, most of them will not occur. Side effects of propionate are similar to enanthate and cypionate, but occur much less frequently.

The following side effects are distinguished:

redness and irritation at the injection sites, which is due to the frequency of injections;
the appearance of acne on the skin (quite a common occurrence);
baldness on the head and excessive hair growth on the body;
enlargement of the mammary glands according to the female type;
decrease in voice timbre;
prostate enlargement;
masculinization in women.

Testosterone propionate also affects the body’s production of its own hormone. Complete restoration of full testosterone synthesis, after completing the course of the steroid, occurs in approximately two to three months. To speed up this process, it is recommended to take gonadotropin, starting from the second week of the course. To prevent aromatization processes in the body, it is recommended to stock up on auxiliary medications, such as Clomid or Nolvadex.