Thanks. One of the first things I noticed after my first drink was I wasn't hungry after I drank it. After a few days, I also felt I had greater mental clarity, or so I thought. Vegetables have always been lacking in my diet (the green ones), which is why I decided to go this route.
I started self-admin TRT 3 weeks ago. 200-250mg Test-E/week. Have an appointment with a local specialist for April 2016. Long wait times in Canada. Most other Docs wanted to prescribe an anti-depressant or put me on gel. From what I gather via online, if a man has done more then 3 moderate cycles or cruised longer then 3 years, with no PCT, Low Testosterone usually results during mid-life (40's). This seems to be the consensus of former steroid users and a few doctors who post online. My test-levels have been low for 9 years now, so I really don't care. Lots of studies implicate low T with all-cause mortality. Something about quality of life eh.
I think 250mg is high for TRT. I'm not sure the specialist would prescribe that high of a dosage. "Beginning" body builders first cycles start at 250mg. This is more of a base 250-500mg for a cycle vs more of a therapeutic dose. Did a Dr. advise that dose?
I started on 250 mg/week, for the first two weeks. Then dropped down to 200 mg/week. Typical TRT dose is 100-200 mg/week.
Here's an interesting interview of six-time Mr. Olympia winner Dorian Yates conducted in 2010. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/dorian_yates_training_insight.htm Although I'm not a fan of pro bodybuilding and the steroids that go with it, he did have some interesting things to say as it relates to working out. Unlike some Internet gurus, he believes that the more advanced you are, the less you must train to avoid overtraining. If I understood correctly, he most recently worked each muscle group every 4 or 5 days, for 2 or 3 exercises, each comprising a couple of warm-up sets and one set to failure. What makes this interview compelling is that Yates obviously juiced but, even so, took care not to over train. So if a guy who takes drugs that aid recovery is still careful about exercise volume, one can imagine the importance of proper recovery among those who don't juice. Carpinelli and other researchers who suggested that more advanced trainees should probably exercise less rather than more are regularly dismissed by the gung-ho Internet crowd.
Love Dorian. Def did more than 3 exercises per body part though. On smaller muscles like biceps yea. At least from what I recall from watching his training tapes. Favored intensity over volume for sure. Temple gym is a mans gym lolol
We spoke about this workout technique earlier in this thread. Although it initially sounds like 2 or 3 total sets for a body part is no big deal, you have to understand that each set is super-slow, emphasizes absolute muscle exhaustion (even on the negative part of the movement) and requires a spotter(s) on all sets because you can't take yourself to that level of intensity and subsequent failure without another person or team of people around you. It's a tortuous way to work out, which is in my opinion, why he tore both his bicep and tricep later in his career, amongst other injuries.
I think you may be right. I was "multi-tasking" and inadvertently took a couple of his comments out of sequence. Specifically, the frequency and then the exercises per muscle group. "When I first started, I split my body into two halves, two or three exercises for each body part with training three times a week. On a weekly schedule it looks like you are doing one workout twice and the other one once. But if you look at the nine-day schedule you are doing, everything twice in nine days, that averages four or five days between each body part. The last routine I was doing was a four-day split over a week but it was four different workouts so it was taking a week to get back around to legs, back, chest or whatever. So I had to allow longer for each body part to recover because I was much stronger and more advanced." During his earlier days, it looked like he was doing two sets to failure after warm-up. "Prior to '92 I was doing two sets to failure, so I would do maybe a couple of warm-up sets and then one set to failure, then probably drop down the weight probably five to ten percent for the next set to failure. Obviously, if I've been to failure with 100 pounds and I have six to eight reps, then if I did 100 pounds on the next set I wouldn't get those six to eight reps because of the fatigue, so I would have had to drop down. After '92 I cut back to doing just one set to failure. So those were the major differences, but I always trained along those lines anyway." So he may have done more exercises per muscle group, as you suggest, after he lowered the frequency and went from two sets to failure down to one. It wasn't clear to me.
Was he an advocate of super-slow? I don't think that's a necessary component of low volume, high intensity.