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Blood Work for Dummies Part 2
“Think about the choices you make in your life, who are they for and why are you making them.”
Limitless Bodybuilding
By PJ Braun
presented by
In the last column I went over blood work and some of the glaring things that you have to pay attention to, but didn’t get into too much detail so to not overwhelm you. What I’m going to do is put together a little cheat sheet for you. The reason I am doing this is to help you better understand what the difference is between healthy ranges and unhealthy ranges, and what the HRT community refers to as optimal numbers. I am going to be giving you what are considered optimal numbers for what a HRT doctor would be striving to have you achieve.
As I’ve said plenty of times, I am not a doctor, I do not prescribe medication and I do not try to treat symptoms, sicknesses or illness – this is all just practical application that I’ve picked up over the past 20 years working with some of the best doctors in so many different fields.
Let’s start with cholesterol, because so many people don’t understand what cholesterol is, what it does or even how many different kinds of cholesterol we make and can be tested for.
One of the best cardiologists I’ve ever met strongly suggested I start looking at the cholesterol ratio rather than just the total. An optimal total cholesterol peaks at 200 (mg/DL) but you will see two numbers underneath that number. You will see the LDL and you will see the HDL. This is where the whole “you need more good cholesterol because you have too much bad cholesterol” arguments came in, but most importantly you want the range to be around 3-1 LDL to HDL and that is far more important. So for example, if you have a total cholesterol number of 200 you may think, “Oh I’m perfect, I am optimal,” but the doctor should then show you the difference between your HDL and LDL numbers. Herein lies the problem, especially with bodybuilders using different hormones, aromatase inhibitors and God knows what else that can dramatically affect these numbers – in fact, I have seen total cholesterol around 160 but with a ratio of 12 to 1 and this is very, very dangerous so I will briefly explain why.
Because of the effects from some of these hormones on the body, in particular the heart, we see the good cholesterol, which is the HDL, often dropped very low; I’ve seen it in the single digits on many athletes. Why is this good cholesterol so damn important? Because this is the cholesterol that carries the bad cholesterol away from your heart and back to the liver! On the flip side, the bad cholesterol, the LDL, contributes to the buildup of fatty acids in the arteries. This narrows the arteries and increases the risk for heart attack, stroke and peripheral artery disease. And we have heard this one a lot the past few years in bodybuilding, so I won’t get myself in a rant about bodybuilders throwing caution to the wind to be as big as possible but afraid to take some heart medication that could very well save their lives.
Another area I always see brought up as a major concern is the liver, and although the liver does repair itself to a degree, this is still an area of lots of concern when bodybuilders get carried away with higher doses of androgens and more specifically oral androgens. This is a very interesting ratio, because the average person should have their AST and ALT anywhere from 50 to 60 depending on the lab or protocol they are on, however there are so many contributing factors to your liver performance – training hard, taking in copious amounts of certain vitamins and ingesting large amounts of protein can all push you out of range. It is very common to be slightly elevated in those areas; even if you are natural but training very, very hard and eating lots of food, you aren’t letting your liver rest. Some food for thought: when I was an alcoholic, my liver enzymes were always high, sometimes in the triple digits, before I found intravenous glutathione. I could write novels on glutathione and its benefits, but instead I’m going to share my own personal experience with it and why I administer 1,000 milligrams intravenously on a weekly basis.
When I went through my divorce and let myself get out of hand with vodka, I ended up in the hospital with a .429 alcohol rating, and they told my mother he won’t make it through the night. Whether it was a mother’s love or a divine intervention, I was released from the hospital six days later and never took a sip of booze ever again. My first set of labs came back after the first night and my AST and a LT were over 1,200 and over 1,400. They rushed me in to more tests to see if I had alcohol-induced hepatitis, cirrhosis and a bunch of other terrifying things.
The liver is so resilient that at my sixth day in the hospital, my labs came back with both numbers down to the 400s already. As soon as I got home I did an IV of 1,400 milligrams of glutathione, which is such a powerful antioxidant that not only was it killing all of the free radicals in my body, it was also rapidly detoxifying my liver. I felt like a new man already, waited two weeks and then another, then did my labs and the doctors were astounded. I was back in the optimal range over the last four years because of this phenomenon and I decided to run all sorts of mini blast cycles, usually 30-day protocols, with some of the most aggressively liver-toxic (lol, depending on who you talk to you) but I still do once-a-week intravenous glutathione and even on 40 milligrams of Halotestin, my numbers stay in range!
The reason I wanted to share that story is so that you can think about the choices you make in your life, who are they for and why are you making them. I’ll tell you personally that nothing good comes from a bottle of booze, in fact if you do it long enough it will kill you one way or another, but when used in moderation it’s fine just like the things that we put in our body.
Most of you are going to read this and say damn, I got to get some glutathione! Before you do, remember these pointers: nobody has designed an oral, stable glutathione at this time so don’t waste your money. The next most common is doing intramuscular shots, but they have to be done frequently and still don’t have the same purifying effect. Down here in Florida, you can get glutathione on every corner and every med spa or IV place, and it can be done as a cocktail with things like Myers’ Cocktail or just a high dose of vitamin C (quick tidbit from the writer: they must add the glutathione at the end of the bag for it to be the most effective; if they pre-mix it, they don’t know what they’re doing!)
So how much or how often do you really need to do it? How about this: mild gym life, weekend warrior, once a month. Serious lifter taking gear and messing with other recreational drugs, at least biweekly. And for the top NPC and IFBB athletes, it can only help you to do it weekly; you’ll feel so much better, your skin will look better, your digestion will be better and this is all stuff you can handle on your own.
There is so much more to talk about with blood and lab work, so expect more in the next column. Thank you all for reading; each time I write one of these columns it brings back the greatest memories of learning all about bodybuilding in Muscular Development! The best of the best!
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