It is, but not really. As I said, you need hcg. It's not just DHT that's important. Hcg also keeps your leydig cells alive, if you wish to end trt one day, that's a big plus.
Regarding your transition to prop, you do realize that you are causing a transient bump in your TT levels as you still have Tc in your system? So now you are again going up in androgen levels.
And regarding the steroid plotter, those aren't your numbers, that is just the median. You actually have no idea what your mg to ng/dl ratio is so do not presume anything.
Regarding prop, you aren't following your natural pulses or anything, idk from where you got that idea. You'd need transdermal for that. Anything injected, if nothing else, has a "long" absorption phase. So let's say 12 to 24h's to Tmax and then 12 to 24h to T1/2. How is that at all similar to natural testosterone release? You should have just stuck to Tc, waited a couple of months, get your T levels to where you wanted them to be and see how you respond.
Yes, he clearly needs to do things his own way, go through the experience himself.
Yeah I'm on board with the hcg. I will definitely introduce at some point. I do think there would be benefit from it and I would like to try, once I find a stable protocol on the test only. I would like to get the benefits of increased upstream hormones as well as increased intratesticular testosterone, and everything else that functioning leydig cells contribute. Sperm i literally could not care less about, since that system has been purposefully decommissioned long ago.
I am aware that there is some amount of cypionate still in the system, which will slowly dissipate over the next few weeks. I'm just not worried about it.
I'm not at all presuming that the steroid plotter will represent my actual numbers, of course not. It's a model, clearly, and every individual will respond differently. Labs will show how I respond, and I will adjust accordingly.
It is unfortunate that, beyond the obvious inherent limitations of the model, steroidplotter may actually have incorrect pharmacokinetics programmed in for propionate.
Given the serial labs posted above, it would seem that propionate actually peaks and dissipates much more quickly than the numbers you quoted or what is programmed into the model, clearly before 16 hours and possibly even before 8, at least for that individual, though with only two data points we can't say for sure if the peak happened in the 0-8 hour window or the 8-16 hour window.
And obviously it is not possible to exactly reproduce the daily natural rhythm of testosterone secretion no matter what you do, using any mode of delivery or combination. And certainly not with a 48 hour cycle of drug delivery considering the natural cycle repeats every 24 hours. That was not my goal. My goal was to introduce more variability into the system, which is arguably more like the fluctuating nature of the endogenous rhythm than a system of very stable levels.
It is certainly possible that given enough time I would have eventually found a way to make cypionate work for me, but I wanted to try something different and so I'm trying it. If it doesn't work, I'll try something else. But i'm optimistic.
As to what I should have done have done or not done, that is nothing more than speculation. You have your speculations and I have mine, as to what will come neither of us can say for sure.
The main thing that I could see needing to change would be more frequent than EOD dosing. If the peak is actually closer to.16 hours then EOD should be OK. But if it's more like 5 hours then clearly prop should be dosed daily and I'll be in for some insane fluctuations over the next few weeks. We shall see and, like I said, if things go awry I'll reassess.
But I'll do my best to stick it out to the five week mark, when the cyp will finally be out of the system, and see where that puts me. If dose or frequency need adjustment I'll do that with high priority, along with estrogen management as needed. Once that's been more or less stable at acceptable levels for some time, I'll introduce HCG.
One interesting thing will be to see if there will be some recovery of the hpta even before the hcg. There is speculation that a protocol using short esters, with deep troughs, allows for some activity of the axis. I don’t know how true that is but I'm curious to see