Q: “What should I do if I get sick during a cycle and can’t train properly or my body obviously just doesn’t have the energy to gain? If I decide to cut the cycle short, should I continue to at least use something, maybe a lower dose, to avoid losing my gains? I don’t have any pressing date that I have to be ready for in the next few months.”
A: I wouldn’t change plans when an illness likely will have you down for only a few days, but I’d end the cycle if it’s likely to be about a week or more.
As mentioned so many times, ending a cycle early allows the next cycle to start earlier, completely compensating for the change in schedule. It’s not really a loss at all. You could start the next cycle as soon as you’ve completed the same number of weeks “off” that you had been “on,” or if you wish to be more conservative, twice that time. This will be much sooner than would be the case if you’d continued the cycle despite the illness. You won’t be setting yourself back overall.
If your testosterone was good before the cycle and the cycle length has been fairly short, such as 8 weeks or less, in most cases recovery will be good simply from using a SERM as PCT. (The most common choices are Clomid or Nolvadex.)
However, if and only if you suspect recovery of natural testosterone might be slow, then I’d suggest also using in PCT either HCG or low-dose testosterone, such as 100 mg/week.
This is because we don’t want the immune system adversely affected by testosterone dropping too low.
Intermediate steroid doses – not enough for real gains, yet too much for recovery of the HPTA – are a waste of your time. Either be on-cycle, or in recovery. Whatever muscle loss may occur while ill will be easily recovered on regaining health. Again, ending steroid use earlier will allow restarting earlier, and this will be much more productive than trying to avoid losses while ill.
In short, optimize your usage. And using anabolic steroids while down and unable to train is not optimizing usage.
About the author
Bill Roberts is an internationally-recognized expert on anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). He received a bachelor degree in Microbiology and Cell Science and completed the educational and research requirements for a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at a major American university.
Bill entered the nutritional supplement industry prior to completing his doctoral thesis but his education was invaluable so far as being able to design/improve nutritional supplement compounds, since it was in the field of designing drug molecules and secondarily some work in transdermal delivery.
His education was not specifically "geared" toward anabolic steroids other than expertise with pharmacological principles having broad applications. This has allowed Bill to provide unique insight into the field of anabolic pharmacology with knowledge of points which he would not have known otherwise.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.