HGH IGF Insulin - A Basic Cycle Guide

[RedBaron]

I originally wrote this for one of the boards I am a mod at. For chance there is anyone considering a combination cycle using these and isn't really clear on where to start, this is some basic information to help get you on your way. Enjoy! - RedBaron

[Putting it all together - HGH + IGF-1 + Slin – by RedBaron
A basic guide for the lazy man :)

There are volumes of information and studies available about using HGH, IGF-1, and Insulin, but for the most part coming up with a good cycle including all of these is a tedious process and requires more reading than most people wish to do or have the time to do. The following is meant to a quick and simple reference to what a cycle including all three might look like and a brief description of the action of each component. This is in no wise intended to be a comprehensive guide nor is it presented as the ONLY way to run a cycle such as this. This is merely as an example of one method that will definitely yield results.

THE CYCLE

Weeks 1- (20-30) – HGH – On 5/ off 2
Weeks 1-5, 11-15, (21-25)
• 2 – 2.5 IU’s - first thing in the morning on workout days – early afternoon on non-workout days
Weeks 6-10, 16-20, (26-30)
• 2 – 2.5 IU’s first thing in the morning
• 2 – 2.5 IU’s post workout with your insulin (or alternatively before workout if desired)
All HGH injected subQ into abdomen, obliques, fronts of the thighs, upper triceps

Weeks 1-5, 11-15, (21-25) – Long R3 IGF-1 – Every day
60mcg’s intramuscular
• post work out on workout days
• first thing in the morning on non workout days

Weeks 6-10, 16-20, (26-30) – Humalog – Workout days only
• 8IU’s immediately post workout, intramuscular

IMPORTANT / CRITICAL - Post Insulin Nutrition
Immediately after Humalog injection – do the following
• Injection + 5 minutes – drink shake with 10g glutamine / 10g creatine / 55g dextrose (7 grams per IU of Insulin)
• Injection + 15 minutes – drink shake with 80g of whey isolate protein in water
• Injection + 60 – 75 minutes – eat a protein / carb meal with 40-50g of protein, 40-50g of carbs, NO FATS (you may wish to add another whey isolate protein drink with this meal)
Avoid fats for 2-3 hours for Humalog IM, 3-4 hours for Humalog subQ, 4-5 hours for Humulin-R.
keep some glucose tablets or other simple carbs on hand (Orange Juice, Full sugar Coke, etc.) for the active window of your insulin. Hypo symptoms can and will hit hard and fast and you will have little time to react. This is the main danger of insulin use. Be ready.

OPTIONAL Addition to above cycle

Weeks 1- (20-30) T3 - Every Day
• 12.5 mcgs - 25 mcgs taken each day

[alternative method if additional fat loss is necessary - Only use if sufficient AAS cycle is present to protect and support lean tissue]
Weeks 1-5, 11-15, (21-25) T3 Every Day
For each of the 5 week runs of T3:
Days 1-3 25 mcgs
Days 4-6 50 mcgs
Days 7-9 75 mcgs
Days 10 - 20 100 mcgs
Days 21 - 24 75 mcgs
Days 25 - 27 50 mcgs
Days 28 - 30 25 mcgs
Days 31 - 35 12.5 mcgs

DESCRIPTION OF THE ELEMENTS OF THIS CYCLE

HGH
HGH should ideally be used for 20-30 week cycles (or longer). The dosage should be between 2-3IU per day if you are using GH primarily for fat loss, 4-5 IU’s a day for both fat loss and muscle growth, and approximately 1.0 – 2.0 IU’s a day for females. It is best to split your injections 1/2 first thing in the morning, 1/2 early afternoon if your dose is above 3.0 IU’s per day. Your pituitary will naturally produce about 6-9 pulses of GH per day. Each injection you take will create a negative feedback loop that will suppress these pulses for about 4 hours. By taking your injections first thing in the morning and early afternoon you will still allow your body to release its biggest pulse, which normally occurs shortly after going to sleep at night.

When starting out with your HGH cycle, for most people it is wise to begin you dose at 1.5 – 2.0IU per day for the first couple of weeks, and then begin increasing your dose by 0.5 unit every week or two until you reach your desired level. While it isn't an absolute neccessity to do this, if you are sensitive to the type of sides HGH present you will often times avoid these sides of joint pain/swelling, and bloating/water retention by slowly acclaimating to your ultimate 4-5 IU/day goal.

You should use an U100 insulin syringe for injecting HGH, and inject it subQ into your abdomen, obliques, top of thighs, triceps. Rotate injection sites. HGH can have a small localized fat loss benefit, so keep this in mind when choosing your injection sites.

IGF-1
When HGH makes it pass through the liver, a release of IGF-1 is a result. IGF-1 appears to be the key player in muscle growth. It stimulates both the differentiation and proliferation of myoblasts. It also stimulates amino acid uptake and protein synthesis in muscle and other tissues. While HGH will cause an increase in your IGF-1 level over the course of a few months, HGH has a cumulative effect, so the addition of IGF-1 will greatly speed up the time to results.

There are two types of IGF-1 that will typically be used by bodybuilders. One is bio-identical huIGF-1, a 70 amino acid string. The other is Long R3 IGF-1, which is an 83 amino acid analog of human IGF-I comprising the complete human IGF-I sequence with the substitution of an Arg for the Glu at position 3 (hence R3), and a 13 amino acid extension peptide at the N-terminus (hence the long). This 13 amino acid "side chain" helps prevent the IGF-1 from being so easily bound, and thus increases its active window exponentially. Which of these you use depends on your goal.

HuIGF-1 is very short lived in the body (half life of probably around 10 minutes). This type of IGF-1 is very useful if you are seeking local site growth. Since it is so short lived, little of the IGF-1 makes it to other tissues and IGF-1 receptors in the body. The way to inject this is immediately post work out into the muscle that you wish to have local site growth. Use a U100 insulin syringe, and inject 60-80mcg’s bilaterally into the desired muscle immediately post workout. For this type of IGF-1, I would use it workout days only or if desired you could inject on non-workout days first thing in the morning into a muscle group worked the previous day.

For Long R3 IGF-1, it isn’t as critical that you inject into a local site as long R3 has a active window of many hours, and is designed specifically to resist being bound by IGF binding proteins.

Since it is common to reconstitute this type of IGF-1 with Benzyl Alcohol, Acetic Acid, or Hydrochloric Acid, I would still recommend that you inject intra-muscular. While for some purposes of nerve regrowth, etc. subQ is a somewhat superior injection method, it can and probably will leave a nice red irritated spot if you inject subQ, and it is not superior for muscle growth purposes anyway.

I still inject into a muscle just worked to take advantage of increased IGF-1 receptors present as a result of tearing down muscles with workout, but because of the long activity window of this type of IGF-1 any muscle will work well and give you good results,. I would suggest that you inject between 40-80mcg’s per day everyday immediately post workout on workout days, and first thing in the morning on non-workout days.

Use a U-100 insulin syringe with 1/2" needle to inject IGF-1 intramuscular (bilaterally for HuIGF-1, bilaterally optional for Long R3)

Insulin
Working out causes us to end up in a catabolic state. It is important to back in a positive nitrogen balance as soon as possible. When not using insulin, we drink some dextrose with our protein to cause an insulin spike immediately post workout to help shuttle the protein and sugars to the muscles.

Insulin is very good at shuttling nutrients to the muscles, and works in a very complimentary manner with GH in the types of things that they shuttle. Also, HGH can cause an amount of insulin resistance, so adding some insulin to your cycle will go a long ways toward reducing the elevated blood glucose levels caused by HGH's interfering with the liver's ability to uptake glucose, and thus help offset any potential resistance that might occur during your HGH cycle. Also by taking our HGH with or near the time of our insulin injection (immediately post workout) we are ensuring a great influx of growth factors. HGH + Slin passed through the liver = BIG secretion of growth factors. These growth factors will equate to muscle growth, rapid healing, etc.

For the purposes that we are using insulin, a dosage of 4-10IU’s is adequate and should be used immediately post workout. I personally prefer using Humalog intramuscular as it will cause a rapid spike and clear out of your system quickly. You can use it sub-q or use Humulin-R instead, but each of these will result in a longer active window, thus a longer time to avoid eating any fats and watching your carb intake. Any fats or over abundance of carbs will end up being stored as fat during insulin's active window. The approximate windows are:
Humalog - IM - 2-3 hours
Sub-q - 3-4 hours
Humulin -R - IM - 3-4 hours
Sub-q 4-5 hours

Use a U-100 insulin syringe with 1/2" needle to inject IM immediately post workout. Alternatively, you can inject subQ if desired or if you wish a longer active window for some reason. Begin with a dose of 2IU's or so, and increase the dose each workout day until you reach your 8IU's.

If for some reason you wish to avoid insulin, I would still suggest that immediately post workout you spike you own endogenous insulin by drinking 80 grams of dextrose / 40 grams of whey isolate protein. While this certainly won't do the work of 8-10 IU's of Humalog, it will most certainly assist getting your muscle back in a nitrogen positive environment in a short amount of time.


T3
HGH can have a slight inhibitory effect on your thyroid. For most people this is minimal and does not require any additional thyroid be taken, but if you wish to augment protein synthesis as well as give yourself a slight metabolic boost in thyroid without shutting down your own production, you can add 12.5mcg of T3 daily to your HGH, IGF-1, Insulin cycle. This will aid both in bulking and cutting.

If you add T3 to your cycle, you should also consider taking some thyroid support supplements such as t-100x, bladderwrack, coleus forskolin. You should check and make sure your intake of trace minerals (selenium, zinc, copper) is sufficient to aid in the conversion of T4 to T3.

If you are going to take more than 12.5 mcg of T3, a wise method is to cycle the dose both up and down to avoid a rebound effect when going off the T3 portion of your cycle. The other consideration is that T3 is very indiscriminant in it stoking of the metabolic fire. It will happily burn both fat and lean tissue, so I would only recommend its use at much above 25mcgs per day (and definitely if used at 50mcgs or above at which point IGFBP's will rise significantly) if you are on a reasonably healthy anabolic cycle to protect your lean tissue. For strictly our use with an HGH cycle and use in assisting with protein sythesis, 12.5mcg will be sufficient and will not be problematic.

Also another consideration if cycling in higher doses, cycle your T3 in conjunction with your LR3 IGF-1 use. The thought behind this is that LR3 binds poorly to IGFBP's, so you will be able to use an elevated dose of T3 (which will likely increase IGFBP's) and still keep elevated IGF-1 levels. I would suggest that use of T3 above 25mcg's or so would not be advisable for too many 5 weeks segments of your complete cycle. As one of the major "anabolic" benefits of HGH use is elevated IGF-1 levels, we don't want to create an environment of radically increased IGF binding proteins. Abuse of T3 will go a long way in creating that environment hostile to IGF-1.

Well, I think that about covers the peptide suite …all that is needed to complete this cycle is the addition of your prefered testosterone combo (cyp, e, prop, etc.) and you have a great combination for bulking or cutting.

Happy growing! :)
RedBaron
(last updated 6/20/05)

	T3

	IGF-1

	Hgh 177-191

	Supps

	protein

[bornbad71]

Very good read RB....thanks for bring it over.

[Swellin]

Excellent post bro!

I know there are certain points for which others will have some different views. Much like anything else, we all have different ideas on how to do things. This is just one way.

[RedBaron]

Originally posted by Swellin@Jan 16 2005, 02:05 PM
Excellent post bro!

I know there are certain points for which others will have some different views. Much like anything else, we all have different ideas on how to do things. This is just one way.

Good point and agreed. I am certainly not dogmatic about there only being one way to do a cycle like this. There are many variations that could be put into place and work just as well. The above is just one way that does work, and can be built on and varied to fit your personal needs.

[IBBAdmin]

Originally posted by RedBaron+Jan 16 2005, 07:54 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (RedBaron @ Jan 16 2005, 07:54 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Swellin@Jan 16 2005, 02:05 PM
Excellent post bro!

I know there are certain points for which others will have some different views. Much like anything else, we all have different ideas on how to do things. This is just one way.

Good point and agreed. I am certainly not dogmatic about there only being one way to do a cycle like this. There are many variations that could be put into place and work just as well. The above is just one way that does work, and can be built on and varied to fit your personal needs. [/b][/quote]
This is why all should be posted. You could learn from different experiences and put together something that works for you. This world we live in its trial and error experiments so the more info we have access to ,the better off we all are !

Thanks for a great post Redbaron ;)

Admin