MONSTER 2.0 — The Ask

Two pillars are already standing. The Blueprint is the training: six days, built from an AI scan of every machine on my gym floor, aimed at stripping ten kilos while keeping the muscle underneath. The Kitchen is the fuel: 2,455 kcal, 225 g of protein, a deliberately moderate 17% deficit, every gram solved rather than guessed.

This is the third one. Or rather — this is the request for the third one.

Nothing here is locked. This is the document I am handing to my clinic, and every number in it is a proposal they can correct, reduce or reject. When it comes back signed off, that version gets published as The Needle and becomes the protocol I actually run. This one is the ask.

Fifteen weeks ago I started an eight-compound protocol under medical supervision and then measured everything that moved. Three blood panels later I have 19 of 22 markers back, an ECG, and enough signal to stop guessing. This document is what I want to run next, why, and what it costs — written to be handed to my clinic on Monday.

What fifteen weeks actually did

Before the new plan earns any credibility, the old one has to show its work. Baseline was drawn 21 April, seven days before the first injection. These are the numbers that moved, and the metabolic markers are the reason I am willing to push harder.

The metabolic axis is an unambiguous win and it is the strongest argument in this whole document. A body that moved HbA1c out of prediabetes and halved HOMA-IR in fifteen weeks is a body with room to be pushed. The full panel-by-panel breakdown is here.

But three numbers set the boundaries of everything that follows, and I want them on the table before I ask for anything: estradiol at 99.6% of its ceiling, haemoglobin at 17.0, and HDL below range at 39. Those are not reasons to stop. They are the three dials that decide how the next phase has to be built.

What is still out, and why it does not block this

Never measured in any panel, and all three are cheap: potassium, magnesium and total protein. The first two are the electrolytes that move QTc and I am about to run a protocol that shifts fluid. The third is what would confirm or kill the hemoconcentration theory below. Please add them.

The design principle: frequency before dose

When I wrote Blast & Cruise in June I reached a conclusion I then failed to act on for two months:

I am on twice a week. Monday and Thursday, 50 mg each. That is better than one weekly bolus and it is still a wave — a peak a day or two after each pin, a sag before the next. And the peak is where the trouble lives: aromatisation to estradiol, haematocrit pressure, water retention, blood-pressure swing.

So the single most important change in this entire document is not the dose. It is that testosterone goes daily. 250 mg a week delivered as one 250 mg shot is a spike. The same 250 mg delivered as 36 mg every morning is a flat supraphysiological line. Identical milligrams, identical weekly exposure, and the thing I removed is the peak.

This matters more on a blast, not less. The bigger the dose, the bigger the peak. It also drops the injection to 14 units on an insulin needle, which is nothing.

And a limit on the claim, because I overstated this in June: more frequent dosing smooths concentration. It does not reduce total weekly exposure, and erythrocytosis, aromatisation and lipid effects are driven substantially by total exposure rather than by peak alone. Daily dosing is a real improvement, not a licence. Whether it materially improves my markers is something the week-4 panel measures, not something I get to assume.

1 · Testosterone — the blast

250 mg from a base of 100 is a 2.5× jump into clearly supraphysiological territory. The forums are full of men blasting at 500 and a gram; that is their arithmetic, not mine. 250 is a real blast for my system and it is the smallest blast that does the job — which is the point. Estrogen, haematocrit, blood pressure and lipids all rise with dose, and they rise far more gently at 250 than at 600.

The honest arithmetic of what this produces. My trough on 100 mg is 712.60 ng/dL, which is already a strong response — and that is the fact worth stating, rather than a projection. I am deliberately not publishing a predicted number for 250 mg, because scaling a single trough linearly across a 2.5x dose change is not a valid calculation: absorption, SHBG, clearance, injection frequency and assay timing all break it. What can be said is that a strong responder taking 2.5x the dose lands clearly supraphysiological. The dose is not the target. The measured exposure is. If week-4 labs come back materially above that band, the right move is to come down, not to defend the number.

Twelve weeks is the blast. Then the cruise, and for this block I am committing to 16 weeks minimum rather than the bare 1:1. The cruise is the actual strategy: gains you can only hold at a blast dose were never gains, they were a rental.

2 · Estradiol — and the aromatase-inhibitor question

This is the most counterintuitive recommendation in the document and the one I most want the clinic to check.

My estradiol is 43.84 pg/mL against a ceiling of 44. On 100 mg. A 2.5× dose increase will push it up. The obvious move is to start an aromatase inhibitor alongside the blast. The evidence says do not.

A high number is not a symptom. I have no gynecomastia, no nipple tenderness, no troublesome oedema, no sexual dysfunction. Treating an asymptomatic 43.84 with a drug whose failure mode is crashing estradiol would be trading a theoretical problem for a real one: below 15 pg/mL you buy reduced bone mineral density, joint pain, worse lipids and a dead libido. With HDL already at 39, wrecking my lipids further to chase an estrogen number would be a genuinely stupid trade.

So the ladder is: dose design first, drug last. The numbers below are a proposal for the clinic to set or overrule, not established cut-offs. There is no guideline defining a universal estradiol action threshold in men, and I would rather show my working than invent authority for it.

What I am asking the clinic for: anastrozole on hand, not started. A working range of roughly 25–40 pg/mL on a sensitive male assay, with a hard floor at 20. And the discipline to let the first four weeks of daily dosing show what it does to aromatisation before reaching for anything.

3 · Haematocrit — and a correction to my own advice

Haemoglobin 17.0, haematocrit 47.5%, ceiling 54. Six and a half points of headroom, and testosterone is the thing that eats it. On a blast this is the single biggest safety issue and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

In Blast & Cruise I wrote: "past 54% you act — hydrate, donate blood, run therapeutic phlebotomy." I want to correct that, because the literature does not support the casual version of it.

One nuance that may soften the whole picture: albumin came back at 5.22 g/dL, above range. The most common cause of high albumin is plasma-volume contraction, and haemoglobin, haematocrit and albumin all rising together on a fasted morning draw is what hemoconcentration looks like. If part of that 15.7 → 17.0 is plasma volume rather than red cell mass, the erythrocytosis is less advanced than it appears. Total protein would settle it and has never been measured. That is why I want a standardised, well-hydrated repeat CBC with albumin and total protein before the blast starts.

4 · HCG — restart, do not escalate

I have been out of HCG since 11 August. It restarts. But I want to argue against my own instinct here, because I originally assumed HCG should scale up with the blast.

It should not. HCG stimulates the testes, and the testes aromatise. Raising HCG on top of a 2.5× testosterone increase pushes estradiol from two directions at once, when estradiol is already my binding constraint. Suppression is harder on a blast, so the job HCG does matters more — keeping testicular volume, intratesticular testosterone and fertility online — but the dose that does that job does not need to rise with the testosterone.

Proposal: 2,500 IU per week, unchanged, but split into 2 × 1,250 IU (Tuesday and Saturday) instead of one weekly bolus — the same flattening logic as the testosterone. Reassess at the week-4 panel. If estradiol is climbing disproportionately, HCG is the first thing I would cut, before touching the testosterone and long before adding an inhibitor.

5 · Retatrutide — double it

This one I am confident about. Currently 1 mg weekly. Proposal: 2 mg weekly. Full background in Retatrutide: The Off Switch.

The phase 2 trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine gives the dose-response directly: at 24 weeks, −7.2% bodyweight at 1 mg, −12.9% at 4 mg, −17.3% at 8 mg, −17.5% at 12 mg, reaching −24.2% at 12 mg by week 48. The standard escalation ladder is 2 → 4 → 8 → 12 mg in four-week steps, and starting at 2 mg rather than 4 mg significantly reduced GI symptoms in the trials.

I am at 1 mg, which is the weakest arm they studied. Moving to 2 mg is a conservative step onto the bottom of the standard ladder, not a leap. If it is tolerated for four weeks I would hold there rather than automatically climbing to 4 — the deficit is already doing work and I would rather not stack aggression on aggression.

6 · BPC-157 goes up, TB-500 comes back

Both are effectively at zero. BPC-157 comes back at double the dose because I have a specific target — the shoulder. TB-500 comes back at the dose it was already on, runs a six-week loading phase, then halves. Full background in The Wolverine Stack and BPC-157.

My BPC-157 dose has been at the bottom of the useful range. 250 mcg five days a week is a maintenance dose. The commonly reported effective range is 250–500 mcg once or twice daily, and 500 mcg/day is the figure that comes up most often for actual injury work. For tendon and ligament repair specifically, 300–400 mcg daily split into two doses is a frequently used structure.

The site change may matter as much as the dose. Both the literature and common clinical practice favour injecting near the injured tissue rather than at a convenient site, on the reasoning that local delivery concentrates the peptide where the repair is needed. I have been rotating BPC through thigh and abdomen out of habit. If the shoulder is the target, the shoulder is where it should go.

TB-500 keeps the twice-weekly 2 mg as a loading phase — that is already the standard loading structure — but I would drop to 2 mg once weekly after roughly six weeks rather than running the loading dose for the whole block. Loading then maintenance is how the compound is normally structured, and it halves the ongoing cost.

Honest evidence note, because this document goes to doctors: both are peptides with strong preclinical data, extensive anecdotal use, and thin human trial evidence. Neither is an approved medicine, and there is no approved dose because there is no approved product. I run them because the mechanism is plausible and the risk profile in practice has been benign, not because there is a randomised trial telling me to. That is a weaker standard than the one I apply to the testosterone, and I would rather label it than blur it.

7 · Do any of these need cycling? One does, and I am already in the window

I went through every compound, current and planned, and asked whether continuous use degrades it. Three have a course, loading or washout structure rather than running forever. But only one is actually overdue, and I have been ignoring it for fifteen weeks.

And here is the part that made me laugh, because the solution already happened by accident.

I am nearly out of both CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin. A few shots left, effectively zero. I had been treating that as a supply problem to fix as fast as possible. It is not a problem. It is a perfectly-timed washout that I should use deliberately rather than rush to end.

This also cleans up the confounding. IGF-1 fell from 251.30 to 214.70 and I attributed it to the deficit rather than to peptide failure. A four-week washout followed by a reintroduction gives a much cleaner read on what the peptides are actually contributing — and it does it for free, because the stock ran out anyway.

8 · The growth-hormone axis — peptides or HGH, and I want both costed

In July, before the panel came back, I wrote From CJC-1295 & Ipamorelin to HGH and committed to a decision rule in public: if the panel showed a healthy IGF-1 response, stable glucose and no unresolved problem, switching just to chase a bigger number would be hard to justify.

On a strict reading of my own rule, that is a no. But I am not closing it, for one specific reason: IGF-1 fell while I was injecting compounds designed to raise it. The deficit beat the peptides. Which means that 214.70 is not evidence that the peptides are working — it is evidence that something stronger was pushing the other way, and the peptides may simply be underpowered against a deficit this size.

That is a genuine argument for HGH, and it deserves a real proposal rather than a brush-off.

Option A — GH peptides (the default)

CJC-1295 200 mcg + Ipamorelin 200 mcg, five nights a week, resuming week 5 after the washout. Secretagogues borrow: the pituitary stays the source, exposure stays more physiological, glucose stays gentler, and the cost is roughly $80–350 a month.

Option B — recombinant HGH

If the clinic wants to run it, this is the version I would want, and the whole game is starting low:

9 · MK-677 — open, with the conflicts stated

MK-677 (ibutamoren) was raised as an option by the clinic and I want to keep it on the table rather than rule it out by reflex. It is an oral growth-hormone secretagogue, typically 25 mg at night, and its sleep data is the best of anything in this document: stage IV deep sleep up as much as 50%, REM up around 20%.

I argued against it in Hibernation Protocol. Those objections have not disappeared, and two of them are sharper now — but they are conflicts to be managed, not automatic disqualifications.

10 · NAD+ — continue, with an honest caveat

100 mg, five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday. Continues. Background in NAD+.

The honest read: NAD+ has the weakest human outcome evidence of anything in this protocol. It is the compound I would drop first if the clinic wants to reduce injection burden or cost, and I would not argue hard. I keep it because subjective energy and recovery have been good and the risk profile is benign — which is a preference, not a finding, and I would rather label it as one.

The alternatives, and the arguments against my own plan

A plan that only contains the case for itself is marketing. Here are the strongest arguments against each of my choices, and the alternative versions worth putting on the table.

The case for 150 mg instead of 245

The strongest objection to this whole document, and it deserves a proper hearing.

The argument: my trough is already 712.60 ng/dL on 100 mg. That makes me a strong responder, and a 2.5× increase from a strong-responder baseline is a larger real-world exposure jump than the milligram number suggests. Estradiol is at the top of range, haemoglobin is 17.0, HDL is 39 and ApoB is unknown. On that reading, 150 mg captures most of the anabolic benefit at a fraction of the risk, and the honest version of a first blast is the smallest one that produces a signal.

Why I am still asking for 245: the goal is not maintenance, it is a time-boxed aggressive recomposition with every relevant marker measured and the stop thresholds written down before I start. 150 mg is a smaller experiment than the one I want to run, and the difference between "probably fine" and "measured fine" is the monitoring plan, not the dose. But this is a prescriber's call, not mine, and I want both numbers on the table.

Fewer things changing at once

This protocol changes a lot simultaneously: testosterone dose and frequency, retatrutide doubled, HCG restarted, BPC raised and relocated, TB-500 restarted, GH peptides paused. If anything moves — blood pressure, haematocrit, mood, appetite, GI — the design cannot tell me which change caused it.

The alternative is sequencing: change testosterone first, hold everything else for four weeks, then add. It is cleaner science and it costs a month of the block. If the clinic wants to stage any of it, the two easiest to delay without losing the block are NAD+ and the retatrutide step-up.

Lower HCG, or none during the blast

A reasonable position is that 2,500 IU weekly is a large gonadal stimulus for an estrogen-sensitive protocol, and that something closer to 250–500 IU twice weekly would preserve testicular function with far less aromatisation. The counter-argument is that suppression is deeper on a blast, so the protective job is bigger. I would take a reduction here before I would take an aromatase inhibitor.

The week, in practice

Split into two parts: the core, which runs in every version of this protocol, and the growth-hormone axis, which is the part still open for discussion. Every draw is on a 1 mL U-100 insulin syringe, subcutaneous.

The core — identical in all versions

That is 24 injections a week before the growth-hormone layer. Seven are the testosterone, and that is the price of the flat line. BPC-157 goes near the shoulder rather than into the general rotation — that is the point of raising it. Everything else rotates on the normal site map.

The growth-hormone layer — four versions

Weeks 1–4 are the same in every version: nothing. That is the washout. From week 5, A, B and C are three mutually exclusive alternatives — the clinic picks one. Staying on Version 0 for the whole block is a legitimate fourth answer if the view is that this blast does not need a growth-hormone layer.

Timing rules that matter regardless of version:

Reconstitutions, so the clinic can check every draw volume in the tables above:

Testosterone cypionate  250 mg/mL, no reconstitution   35 mg = 14u / 37.5 mg = 15u
HCG            5,000 IU + 2.0 mL bact water = 2,500 IU/mL  1,250 IU = 50u
Retatrutide        6 mg + 2.0 mL = 3 mg/mL                  2 mg = 66.7u (draw 67)
BPC-157           10 mg + 3.0 mL = 3.33 mg/mL               500 mcg = 15u
TB-500            10 mg + 4.0 mL = 2.5 mg/mL                   2 mg = 80u
CJC-1295           5 mg + 2.0 mL = 2.5 mg/mL                200 mcg = 8u
Ipamorelin         5 mg + 2.0 mL = 2.5 mg/mL                200 mcg = 8u
NAD+           1,000 mg + 5.0 mL = 200 mg/mL                 100 mg = 50u

What to expect, and when

Monitoring — and the red lines

The order — two different lists

These are not the same thing and conflating them is how you run out mid-block. List 1 is what I need to buy right now to start on 24 August, netted against what is already in my fridge. List 2 is the steady monthly basket I repeat at the end of every month once the stock is gone. Everything is calculated at 4.33 weeks per month — a month is not four weeks, and that gap is exactly where people run dry.

What I already have

List 1 — buy now, to start 24 August

List 2 — the repeatable monthly basket

Once the current stock is consumed, this is the standing order. These are maximum no-carryover quantities — vials come in whole units and monthly consumption rarely lands on one, so some months will leave a partial vial over. Net it against the next order rather than buying blind, and the run rate is still a single number I can budget against.

The calendar

Why all three pillars, and not just this one

The temptation with a document like this is to read the injectable protocol as the engine and the other two as support. It is the other way around.

The reason I can defend doubling a GLP-1 agonist in a cutting phase is that The Kitchen already puts me at 2.14 g/kg of protein — above the range the muscle-preservation literature uses. The reason I can defend a supraphysiological testosterone dose aimed at recomposition rather than just mass is that The Blueprint already has me under a heavy bar six days a week, which is the single strongest intervention against lean-mass loss there is.

Strip either of those away and this protocol becomes a worse idea immediately. The compounds are not what produce the result. They raise the ceiling on what the training and the food can produce, and if the training and the food are not there, there is nothing to raise.

That is the whole thesis of MONSTER 2.0 in one line, and it is why this is pillar three rather than pillar one.

Now it goes to the people with the prescription pad. Everything above is a request with the reasoning exposed, the counter-arguments included, the thresholds pre-committed and the arithmetic checkable. Tear it apart.

Whatever comes back signed off gets published as MONSTER 2.0 — The Needle, with every change they make and every reason they give. If they cut the dose, that goes in. If they kill a compound, that goes in. If they tell me I am wrong about the aromatase inhibitor, that goes in too — and it will be more useful than anything in this document, because it will be the version that survived contact with someone who does this for a living.