1. TRT Propaganda Dates Back To the 1940s

Over the last few years, the mainstream media has been heavily promoting the idea that modern men are losing their manliness due to a persistent fall of the average testosterone levels. It’s hardly a coincidence that a rise of TRT clinics accompanies those claims.

Luckily, they have a solution for you, brahs! Inject and resurrect!

Some may be shocked, but similar male shaming campaigns were a thing even in the 40s.

Here’s a quote from Dr. John Milton Hoberman’s book Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping:

“The first public advocate of testosterone therapy for aging men was the popular science journalist Paul de Kruif, whose manifesto The Male Hormone was published with some fanfare in 1945. Excerpted in Reader’s Digest and promoted by a full-page review in Newsweek (“Hormones for He-Men”), The Male Hormone was in some respects a prophetic book.

The potential market for a rejuvenating male hormone seemed to be enormous: “How many millions of American males, not the men they used to be, would flock to the physicians and the druggist, a bit shame-faced and surreptitious, maybe, but hopeful, murmuring: ‘Doc, how about some of this new male hormone?’”

In the text above, Dr. John Milton Hoberman refers to the book The Male Hormone by Paul de Kruif which focuses on rebuilding “broken men” suffering from hypogonadism [inadequate functioning of the testes].

The slogan on the cover of the book states:

“The male hormone discloses magic far beyond the merely sexual. It boosts muscle power. It banishes mental fatigue. It eases heart pain. It even restores the sanity of men in middle life who suffer from physical deficiencies.”

Sounds familiar? Those sentences could easily be utilized in a modern TRT ad.

Note: A primitive version of TRT could be traced back to 1889 when Dr. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard reported in front of the Société de Biologie in Paris that he’d successfully extracted a liquid from the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs.

Brown-Séquard felt 10 years younger after injecting himself with the elixir. The statement generated a serious wave of interest and led to a deficit of animals due to the high number of people who wanted to experiment with Testosterone 1.0.

2. Most Men Who Claim to Be on TRT Are Actually on MBT [Muscle Building “Therapy”]

TRT stands for testosterone replacement therapy, but most lifters are using it as a way to introduce mild steroid cycles to their lives and build unnatural muscle mass.

The average man produces roughly 50mg of testosterone a week which amounts to about 7mg per day. Yet some dudes inject 300mg every seven days and still claim that they are on TRT.

If you are importing six times more testosterone in your body than what’s considered normal, you are cycling, not replacing.

Why do people do it? Primarily for muscle gains. A low dose (e.g., 70mg a week) would give back a lot of the vitality that men lose when their test levels drop, but similar dosages cannot trigger spectacular growth as hormone-induced hypertrophy requires a supraphysiological testosterone boost.

Shadow Pinners. Doses ranging between 150-500mg are behind the large group of men that I call shadow pinners. Those are individuals who carry 10lbs/4.5kg  to 30lbs/14kg of extra muscle mass on top of their natural potential. To some, those numbers may appear unimpressive, but more often than not, they are enough to stimulate external admiration.

5kg of real contractile muscle tissue is a lot more than people think, especially when it’s added to body parts in the foreground. E.g., biceps, triceps, chest, shoulders…etc.

Yet the shadow pinners easily pass as naturals because most lifting enthusiasts have been conditioned to think that only big dudes who appear composed in Photoshop take steroids.

3. TRT Tackles Symptoms. It’s Not a Cure.

Many people present TRT as the ultimate way to revive manhood and overcome male depression, but test injections do not eliminate the underlying mechanisms that have led to global emasculation.

Injecting test synthesized in a lab to feel like a man is no different than taking anti-depressants to reignite your love for the rotten world.

Similar medicaments do not fix the large number of societal, cultural and environmental factors destroying testosterone and male prosperity in general. Drugs can make you feel better or even great, but they wouldn’t be as popular if the world wasn’t so detrimental to testosterone in the first place.

Giving men injections and then throwing them back in the same hostile environment that calls masculinity toxic is not a good long-term plan.

4. TRT Works

Unlike the dubious supplements promoted by hypertrophy wizards, TRT backs its promises. Even if you want to hate the protocol, you cannot ignore the overwhelming reports of males who are injecting and feeling “better than ever”.

Here’s what the typical TRT endorser says:

“It cured my depression. My muscles feel tighter…filled with blood. Strength is through the roof. I’m getting constant attention from women. They can smell my pheromones. Yesterday, I looked at a slut. Fucked her hard one hour later. No joke, brahs. I got more results from this in 3 months than lifting like a loser a.k.a. a natural for a decade. I’m sold.”

Of course, some of the testimonials regarding TRT are diluted by placebo, but even with that in mind, it’s hard to overlook the undeniable, tangible benefits such as extra energy, positive attitude, courage, assertiveness and of course an increase of muscle mass and strength.

5. TRT Is the Secret of Big Old Guys in The Gym

I’ve met a group of aging muscle professors who look significantly more muscular than the younger crowd at almost every gym I’ve ever been to. At first, I thought that those men had training wisdom that the noobs were yet to acquire, but as the years went by, I got exposed to multiple conversations suggesting otherwise.

After a while, a member of the group usually confesses to injecting, albeit while downplaying the role of steroids:

“I take them, but I don’t feel like they’re doing much,” says the 44-year-old lawyer who has 16.5-inch arms and a set of six-pack abs.

Some of those guys are on more than just testosterone. Those with sufficient resources take growth hormone for example. Yet the same men have no problem criticizing your lifting template and filling your head with doctrines backed by chemical enhancement rather than groundbreaking “engineering”.

6. TRT Hits Your Fertility

Steroids have a proven negative impact on men’s ability to father children. The same applies to TRT even when the doses are low. Some guys are incredibly fertile, but after six months of TRT, their sperm count drops to zero.

To regain your ability to impregnate women after constant TRT cycles, you would have to become an expert in fertility-boosting substances yourself or pay a professional to fix you and pray for the best.

Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to state that TRT makes you infertile forever. It doesn’t. Fertility is shut down after prolonged used, but it could be regained back.

7. TRT Gains Are Not Eternal

Muscle acquired from TRT cannot be kept without regular injections. The extra mass does not evaporate quickly, but it will definitely disappear if steroids are discontinued.

If it was possible to retain steroidal muscular development, many men would do a few cycles and then quit forever. But life doesn’t work this way. Once you remove the primary growth factor, the body stops receiving commands to synthesize extra protein, and the musculature shrinks.

Some bodybuilders say: “I kept a lot of my size even off drugs.” More often than not, those individuals haven’t been off cycle long enough to fully detransform to their natural shape.

8. TRT Is Fairly Safe

TRT comes with side effects, especially when people double or triple their doses and turn the regime into full-blown steroid cycling, but with enough info and medical supervision, TRT can be done for life.

Bayer AG, Berlin supported an 11-year study including 823 hypogonadal men many of whom were on the fat side.

428 of the participants were put on testosterone therapy whereas the rest did not take anything. The group on TRT did significantly better. Its mortality rate was 5.4% in comparison to 19.5% among non-enhanced men. Moreover, the men on testosterone supplementation got leaner and benefited from improved insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure and more muscle mass. [source]

9. You Never Know If TRT Will Cause Hair Loss or Not

People say that steroids speed up hair loss only if you’re already prone to it. Meanwhile, some individuals experience fairly quick hair loss without previous symptoms upon starting injections.

In most cases, hair loss is detrimental to your overall appearance. Sure, some women like bald men and often use dudes like Jason Statham and Vin Diesel as an example, but that’s cherry-picking at its finest.

Hair thinning is one more reason why TRT is a better fit for older family men. If you already have children, and your head is balding anyway, the side effects of TRT have nothing on you. In the meantime, young dudes who are still climbing the love ladder could potentially lose crucial attractiveness points.

Women today are omega picky, especially in the beginning. And if the extra muscle mass and “masculinity” that you gain from TRT cannot compensate for the accelerated or newly stimulated hair loss, you would receive a penalty for it regardless of how much women allegedly like bald men.

This is the price that we pay for living in an incredibly visual world.

10. The Longer You Are On TRT, The Harder It Is to Recover

What do you think happens when you stay on TRT for years? The body forgets how to produce testosterone and needs an extended course to refresh its memory.

In theory, you can quit TRT whenever you want, but the damage to your testosterone factory will require a restoration process with an unknown deadline. How long will it take to reacquire your balls? 3 months? 6 months? 8 months? Forever? Whatever the answer is, the process is unpleasant. The longer you’re on, the harder it is to bounce back.

Recovery is still possible, though. When people stop injecting and go off, they usually pass through a long period of feeling lethargic and castrated. The extra muscle disappears faster than your girl does when you lose your job; the strength goes away; the Spartan power faints quickly too.

An important question, in this scenario, would be – what are you recovering to anyway? At best, you will reach your previous testosterone metrics, although some argue that you will never go back to the levels before the TRT journey.

Many people who quit TRT and “recover” feel worse than when they started TRT. This is hardly a surprise since TRT is not a cure – it’s a donation. Once the substance goes away, you go back to the same or even lower levels. You can think of it as a form of welfare – it doesn’t fix the lack of money on a basic level; it’s simply a patching mechanism.

11. Men on TRT Are Not Natural

Many individuals delude themselves into thinking that as long as they’re on TRT, they’re natural:

“I’m just increasing my levels to what they should be.”

Here’s the deal, brah – if you need medicaments to have optimal “natural” levels, how natural can you possibly be? It’s like saying I’m taking sleeping pills but fall asleep naturally.

Somewhat ironically, this statement is usually made by people whose TRT dosing is a steroid cycle rather than “replacement”.

Why do they do it? It’s a rationalization. Some people want to lie about their natural status to everyone – including themselves.