My daily Testosterone Propionate diary

[Willyt]

I can't even inject longer testosterone esters in the evening without getting sleep disturbances. The ideal injection time for my ester blend would be an hour or two before waking, but that's not happening. Fortunately injecting soon after waking seems to be ok. If serum testosterone rises as fast as I think then it doesn't take long to catch up with where natural levels would be. Assuming a 6 am injection it might look a little like the red lines below, though of course the peaks and troughs would be rounded.

Interesting. My early morning wake ups are bad enough without adding a nightly T spike to the mix!

One very positive thing I have noticed on the daily propionate is far less water retention, which was a major problem for me on cypionate E3.5 with weekly total dose ranging from 100-120mgs. I am lean guy and was gaining upwards to 15 lbs on a 190lb frame, which was causing an assortment of health problems that ultimately caused me to end my two TRT attempts with cypionate. By contrast, I did not experience any water issues when experimenting with fast-acting forms like Natesto or scrotal cream.

Do you think adding enanthate into a low-dose daily prop blend will lead to a substantial increase in water retention?

I have read through Nelson's article links on water retention and have often wondered whether prop's reputation for less bloating is more a function of dose and frequency than the shorter ester. In other words, will daily injection frequency combined with low dose (e.g., 10mg or less) mitigate water retention for all forms of injectable ester T, whether it be prop, cypionate, enanthate, etc.?

 

[Cataceous]

I'm not sure about this. There are similar questions about what drives hematocrit. Do daily serum T peaks or troughs have correlations with these parameters that are independent of average serum levels? I assume there's already a pretty good correlation with average serum levels and therefore the doses. But it would be interesting to compare daily enanthate/cypionate to daily propionate when the doses are matched for testosterone content. If the longer ester fares worse then it could suggest that lower troughs help to keep the bad things in check. A related experiment I'd like to see is one comparing daily enanthate/cypionate to a propionate blend that causes the peak serum T levels to match. While enanthate/cypionate would provide stable levels, the propionate blend would have realistic trough levels, also causing lower average testosterone. I've speculated that because nature takes this approach it may be that the benefits of testosterone are more closely tied to its daily peak levels, while problems are caused by higher average or trough levels.