SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

TRT - What to expect in terms of its effects on a man's body composition? If you hear people talk about "gear" (=performance enhancing drugs | PED), you get the impression that one injection of testosterone, nandrolone and co would turn a scrawny beginner into an Olympian. Reality, however, looks much different ... in fact, the number of people who ruin their health with (often oral) designer steroids without seeing any of the results they expect has been increasing continuously over the past years (Baker. 2006a,b; Graham. 2008; Rahnema. 2014) and that despite the fact that the "Anabolic Steroid Control Act" of 2004 was originally meant to prevent exactly that from happening (Herschthal. 2012). In spite of the fact that the introduction of today's SuppVersity article focused on PED, the purpose of the meta-analysis and thus its summary was "systematically review [...] available observational and register studies reporting data on body composition ...

Don't let her talk you into participating in studies that risk your manliness ;-) Would you be willing to participate in a study, where you could end up without testosterone? No? Well me neither... strangely Joel S. Finkelstein et al. were able to find 198 healthy men between 20 and 50 years who were stupid enough to participate in an experiment, where they were randomized to placebo, or testosterone gel (1.25, 2.5, 5, or 10g per day) while being on gosererelin acetate , which did suppress their natural testosterone production. With additional 202 subjects receiving an identical "treatment", but in this case alongside a whoppy dose of the aromatase inhibitor anastrazol as a bonus, the study design leaves us with plenty of groups and tons of subjects. To "determine the relative degree of testosterone deficiency, estradiol defi­ciency, or both at which undesirable changes in body composition, strength, and sexual function begin to occur." (Finkelstein 2013) ...