Muscle Insider
New member
Blood Work for Dummies! Part 1
Limitless Bodybuilding
By PJ Braun
“If you are using pharmaceuticals to enhance your physique, it’s not too bold of me to say that paying attention here could save your life.”
Let’s get this out of the way from the start. I am not a doctor, and I am not giving medical advice. I am just a guy who has lots of doctors in his close circle of friends and I ask a lot of questions. I have been getting regular blood work for 20 years. My “regular” started out twice a year and eventually went to quarterly, and at one point when I was very ill more than monthly, and now I am on a bi-monthly schedule. You should be getting checked twice a year and if you are using pharmaceuticals to enhance your physique, it’s not too bold of me to say that paying attention here could save your life.
You hear a lot of negative stories about bodybuilders dying of heart attacks from steroids. That’s a blanket statement but there are certain things to look for no matter what, whether or not you are on steroids, and there are things that get enhanced and potentially worse even faster by taking certain hormones or having an excess of even testosterone in your blood. There is a synergy to the body that can be enhanced beautifully and destroyed quickly.
Get Your Own Blood Work
Basic questions. Where do I go? What do I ask for? How much money will it cost? How do I interpret the results? Can I have a copy? Since I can easily do an hour-long lecture on this subject, it’s best for me to break it down in bullet points as simple as possible, like the “Learning For Dummies” series of books.
For starters, you don’t even need a primary care physician or medical insurance to get your own blood work. There is a website for Private MD Labs located at privatemdlabs.com that has been around for years that offers every single test you can imagine and you pay for the ones you want. So you could literally just order a test for one thing – perhaps it was left off a different lab – and get your results easy. You can go on that website and order the basics I am going to go over here for between $275 and $350, which is about the average going rate at most HRT clinics. The advantage of a good HRT clinic is you will have a doctor who specializes in optimizing hormones, who will read your work and guide you, whereas with Private MD Labs, you will pay for the tests in advance and then go to a walk-in clinic like Labcorp or Quest and someone will draw your blood based on what you ordered and then mail you the results. Now this is when I really got into studying the numbers, so here we go!
Standard blood work from any regular doctor is going to start out with what’s called a Cardiac Health Panel and your CBC With Differential, and this is the stuff that right off the bat is easy to read even though you will see lots of numbers. It’s easy to read because the way it’s laid out, the hematology is split from the normal cardiac panel and you can go in that long line of words that might seem scary to you and look for hematocrit right away, which is conveniently next to your hemoglobin. Every man using testosterone needs to look at this level more than once a year! To simplify this for you, hematocrit and hemoglobin are a measure of two very important markers for heart health. Hemoglobin is a protein in blood cells that when is too low will make the patient anemic, for instance. Hematocrit, on the other hand, is related to the measure of red blood cells to total blood count, and this one left unchecked can also lead to various medical problems.
Now here is what’s interesting and why the two are so important together. If the hematocrit is too high (the normal range is 40.7-50.3), the simple way to get it back into range is by donating whole blood. Some people have genetic conditions where this abundance leads to them having to donate on a prescription basis to keep the numbers in check, where the rest of society legally can’t donate blood more than every eight weeks. This simple procedure can not only save another person’s life waiting for blood in the emergency room, but it can save your own. The problem with hemoglobin being too low and being anemic is you won’t be able to donate blood most of the time, even if your hematocrit is high, and this is where a medical doctor is very important. I went through iron deficiencies this entire past year and had to get infusions every few months just to feel “OK” and it was a scary time.
The cardiac health section will have your cholesterol numbers and your triglycerides, but don’t just go to the total number here. It’s imperative to look at your cholesterol/HDL ratio! Just because the total number isn’t high, doesn’t mean you have no concern. I have seen labs from bodybuilders where the HDL (or good cholesterol) is in the single digits, which often happens from various contest-prep substances or aromatase inhibitors and the ratio is like 8! This can lead to cardiac problems too! An ideal range is <=3.5 and a risk range is >=5. Guys, please look at these numbers right away – they are almost always tested for standard anyway!
Guys Are Dying Young
The scary amount of deaths we’ve seen lately have almost all been heart related, and by starting to watch these numbers young men can learn to address them the proper way, make the lifestyle and supplement changes to keep their bodies efficient, healthy and happy – and this must be taken seriously because guys are dying young.
Many of the health concerns I will talk about in the next couple of months can also be hereditary and have nothing to do with taking anything, but they still need to be addressed! Next month’s column will be on the liver and kidney function panel, thyroid panel, prostate panel, and the exciting one bodybuilders like to optimize the best they can, the hormone panel. Maybe I will do a whole column on that for the meatheads … who wants to talk about all this scary stuff when they can figure out how to get huge and ripped first!! Ha ha, because we want to be huge and ripped for the long haul, that’s why I’m here!
I will leave you with this. Years ago when I was coaching, I would not work with anyone without a clean bill of health from a doctor, and I had a friend from the gym who was training so hard and struggling worse and worse. I gave her some training and dieting tips and over a period of a couple of months she kept gaining weight. I knew she wasn’t cheating, and something was wrong based on the other symptoms she was having. I told her, “Please go get your thyroid checked … something is wrong!” over and over for a month, but she was scared to go! Then I did not see her for about six weeks. Finally she called me out of the blue and said, “PJ …” I said omg, where have you been? She said, “I went to get checked and it turned out I had a tumor growing fast and had to get it removed right away, but they got it fast before it spread anywhere else and removed my thyroid … they said I should thank you for saving my life” and then we cried together. I will never forget exactly how I felt when the goose bumps came over me that day. Take my advice; it could potentially even save your life!
Instagram @pjbraunfitness
blackstonelabs.com
DISCUSS ON OUR FORUMS
SUBSCRIBE TO MD TODAY
GET OFFICIAL MD STUFF
VISIT OUR STORE
ALSO, MAKE SURE TO FOLLOW US ON:
[*]YOUTUBE
Click here to view the article.
