That was the original purpose when they first synthesized testosterone. I’ve known a few guys in their 40s and lates 30s who got on it. They say it’s the best decision of their life.
umm yeah. Main downside is that your pituitary will sense it as a disturbance and downregulate your own testosterone production. So you’re basically stuck with taking it for the rest of your life; and if (for whatever reason) you can’t get it, you can look forward to several weeks or months of low endogenous testosterone.
Not for me, thanks. At least not long-term.
I was just about to parrot your post when I saw this thread. I also started TRT in my late 30s. Best decision ever.
PS - Do you use Arimedex?
Finley, this logic doesn’t make sense. Someone on TRT already has low T. That’s why they’re on it. We are not talking about someone in their 20 using steroids for bodybuilding.
Not necessarily. It’s true that testosterone production drops as you age (and for various different reasons - not age per se) but older men don’t actually have “low testosterone”. It’s just lower than, say, a 20-year-old. The symptoms typically ascribed to “low testosterone” often aren’t; for example they can be due to progressive CVD, or excessive sarcopenia caused by idleness.
If you take high-dose testosterone for many years, your endogenous testosterone will drop to virtually zero because your pituitary has downregulated LH. If you stop using it, it will take a very long time to bounce back, and may never recover at all. Bodybuilders back in the 1960s found this out the hard way.
Of course medical TRT carefully calibrates the dose to mitigate this problem. But it can’t be magicked away entirely.
But there aren’t any real detrimental effects to responsible TRT, so why wouldn’t you like to keep levels high?
I remember seeing my monster of a dad become as weak as a child as he approached 70. Ain’t happening to me.
Probably going to go on HGH soon, too. I heard there are anti-aging clinics here that can prescribe it, but I haven’t verified it.
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If you’re guaranteed a lifetime supply of TRT patches and medical monitoring, it’s your decision. But the biological response I described is inevitable. It happens whenever you introduce an external disturbance into any homeostatic system.
Maybe I’ll change my mind later, but I think I’d rather age gracefully. I don’t want to be still in the prime of life when it’s time to check out. I need to have a reason for dying.
Injectable testosterone is available pretty much everywhere. It has gotten more expensive in Taiwan though. Twenty years ago it was just a couple thousand for a year’s supply. It’s over 6000 now, but that’s still nothing.
The normal range is quite wide 270-1070 ng/dL. If someone is 300ng/dL they could feel like shit, depressed, low energy, low libido, and possibly other conditions.
At some point, it’s a quality of life treatment. Do you really want to be at the lower range at 50? All of the men I’ve met on it feel so much better. Like they’re 20 again. Not just the physical anabolic benefits but the emotional and mental benefits goes a long way. It was originally synthesized for depression.
If I’m already at a low range of normal, it’s not going to get any better. The symptoms will get worse. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want your quality of life better. Testosterone isn’t exactly a hard medicine to find. And after your doctor gets the correct dosage for you, it’s maybe a quarterly check up and most doctors can do Skype visits with you sending the blood tests over every few months.
I absolutely will consider it once I hit over 35-40 and see if need it. I want to enjoy an active happy life. It’s important to me. Putting on some testosterone cream or simple injections is nothing compared to the benefits imo.
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How would you know if you need it or if it would improve your life? Are there symptoms?
I still can’t understand what improves by taking it. Is it like a constant jolt of caffeine or some kind of nootropic brain enhancer?
If you are happy well balanced with no depression problems is it going to make you more happy? And what is more happy?
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Testosterone is the hormone that makes a man a man. It is part of what gives you muscle mass, bone density, sexual drive, competitive aggression as a man. All part of surviving and passing down your genetic material. As you get older, your testosterone level drops. Probably because until recently, most men don’t live past 35.
Low testosterone impacts sleep, causes low libido as testosterone is one of the main hormones that make you horny. Think of the constant boners when puberty happened and your body produces a lot of testosterone to cause physical and mental changes to make you a man. It can cause ED since testosterone increases the nitric oxide needed for your vascular system for an erection. It can cause mood changes and depression since testosterone help moderate your dopamine and serotonin levels. Low energy and drive is another effect of low T. Not to mention the loss of muscle mass as testosterone is an anabolic hormone. Also fat gain as the androgenic properties of T helps you use fat more efficiently.
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I’m not saying people shouldn’t use it. I’m just suggesting that people need to have a better understanding of what’s involved; they should make the choice fully informed. I’m not a luddite, or philosophically opposed to pharmaceutical interventions. I’ve used both anabolics and androgenics. But any powerful drug comes with tradeoffs that must be considered carefully.
Part of the problem is that even endocrinologists only have a high-school grasp of how homeostasis works; they’re not taught it in medical school, and they’re not taught it because the medical profession treats other professions with such disdain that they’re not even aware of the vast body of theory that exists to describe such systems. So yer average endo will say, ohh, it’s wonderful stuff, there aren’t any side-effects, we’ll do this and that test to make sure the dose is right, and everything will be fine.
Well, yes, everything will be fine … unless or until you decide to stop taking it. That’s when you’re going to find yourself in deep shit, at least temporarily. Of course, you can make sure that you NEVER stop taking it.
The crucial point is that ‘low testosterone’ in older men is a deliberate homostatic downregulation. 90% of the time it is not caused by some systemic failure (eg., your testes failing to respond to LH). Your control loops are all still functioning perfectly, and they will respond to exogenous testosterone as theory dictates.
And that raises the question (as tango42 implied) … can older men can really benefit from the benefits of more testosterone? If that makes sense. If their bodies have started to reduce it, maybe there’s a reason. My guess is that there’s a sociobiological explanation: you don’t want older men competing with younger men for mates, because there would be widespread violence and the species would disappear into a smoking hole in the ground. Or you’d have too many genetic errors being propagated down the line.
I probably have “low testosterone”, since I’m pushing 50, but I don’t have any issues as a result. Without going into personal details, I’m more than happy with my virility; in fact the last thing I’d want is teenager-level horniness when it would be 110% inappropriate for me to be chasing anything that looks female 
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How about in the next decade when you begin losing so much more strength and virility? What’s the point you say you don’t want it to continue?
The sex drive is very controllable. Probably because as adults we can have sex whenever we want. It’s not like being a horny teenager at all.
It makes women horny too. Some women like taking very small amounts of quick acting testosterone for that extra oomph on occasion. They need to be very careful of masculinization though.
My understanding is they’ve come a long way. There are way more TRT doctors now that it’s becoming more mainstream in the medical community.
And also a lot of people these days use steroids and have to eventually come off. Most of them will have low T, I’ve heard it’s becoming an major issue in the medical community. BD is as common for men as women now and steroid use for none sports performance reasons is rising. Lots of young men in their 30s are coming off steroids and don’t have doctors that know about this.
If you’re feeling fine. That great. Many aren’t and they are looking to feel better. People respond to hormones differently, you might be find at 400ng/dL but someone might feel like shit there. The same way most of us can take as much steroids and never become mr Olympia. We don’t react to it the same way.
I believe low T is also linked to heart problems as well.
Well … as I said, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, but I’m included to go along with the natural aging process. I think nature usually gets things right, and any perceived benefits from TRT may be offset by other disadvantages. As mentioned, I don’t want to be 19-year-old-horny if I’m 70 years old and have zero opportunities. I’m not discounting TFT out-of-hand though.
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Imo, nature hasn’t taken to account men living past 35. That’s a relatively new thing in human history. We probably just aren’t evolved to last this long.
I think this is a bit of a misconception. It’s true that men often died of violence before middle age in times gone by, but not all of them did. In most civilized societies, most men lived into their 60s and 70s. Even the destitute usually made it into their 50s. The historically low “average lifespan” is simply an artifact caused by astronomically high numbers of deaths in childhood.
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These associations are interesting. I’m inclined to wonder if heart problems and low T are simply two aspects of an underlying disease (eg., metabolic syndrome).
That’s 500 years ago. A blimp in time for human evolution.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18359748
The same was broadly true of the Roman empire; factoring out child mortality, a typical lifespan was about 60 years old. Possibly late 50s.
It depended a great deal on where you were living. Some societies were exceedingly violent or disease-ridden. Some places on earth are just inhospitable to life. Given a basic level of shelter, law-and-order, food/clean water, and hygiene, there’s no reason why you’d die early. The improvement in the modern lifespan is almost entirely due to improvements in those basic factors.