Mildly Infuriating

I'm in the U.S., and the medical system is abysmal. Primary care physicians are basically robots that dole out pills based on the "standard of care", which is a standard produced with health insurer input. I had metabolic syndrome, and uncontrolled high blood pressure despite being on 3 meds. No doctor ever mentioned metabolic syndrome to me, and I figured out that chronic stress was driving my high blood pressure, and presented evidence of this to a cardiologist and told him I needed a beta blocker. That wasn't next on the list, so he prescribed something else that was worthless, so I had to wait another month to show him the drug did nothing. In the mean time, I found I was able to use exercise to bring down my blood pressure. I did hire a personal trainer, but they were worthless (YMMV on this, as I know others that have had very good trainers).

What got me on the right path was studying longevity science, and deploying the strategy outlined by Peter Attia in his book "Outlive", which is a free audiobook on spotify premium. Basically, the levers you have to pull are sleep, exercise, nutrition, supplements and drugs. With respect to exercise, he emphasizes resistance training (min 3 hrs per week), zone 2 cardio (6 hrs per week) and HIIT (1 hr per wee).

I had never done resistance training before in my life, and I started with bodyweight fitness in my apartment, which I did for about a year before it became clear that I needed to figure out weight training. I found Joe Delaney's youtube channel, and thought it would be a good starting point, and I hired a personal trainer, who disregarded my opinion and had me do other things, and gave me a program that was difficult, time consuming, and had significant potential for injury. After a couple of weeks of struggling with that, I tossed it, and did Delaney's beginner program. After two months of that, I modified it to add exercises to target my specific areas of weakness. It was a good starting point.

With respect to the drugs, I knew it would be difficult to add muscle at my age, so I dug into PEDs. There is a lot of "noise" in this area, but one of the social media influencers I stumbled across referenced Llewellyn's Anabolics, which provides a thorough summary of pretty much every anabolic compound in common use today, including reference to the actual studies, the common side effects, the effectiveness, etc. Ligandrol is currently in phase 3 clinical trials, but is widely available through grey market sellers on the internet. Thus, there is not only the risk of using a non-FDA approved drug, but also the risk of whether the producer is actually selling you the actual drug. The drug itself had enough human trial data for me to be comfortable with it (note: some SARMs available were abandoned because of major issues, such as causing cancer in rats), and the seller has been around for a while and had a big enough user base that I could be comfortable that I was getting a reasonably good quality drug.

I've made some mistakes along the way. For example, I crashed out my testosterone the first time I tried Ligandrol, because I used Nolvadex, a SERM, to maintain testosterone production when on cycle, and it wasn't up to the task for me.

Overall though, my efforts have been very successful. We have a world of information at our fingertips, so long as we are able to filter out the bullshit. There is a lot of "tribal knowledge" passed from peer to peer, much of which is complete crap, but you can find smart people that review and reference the actual science that can point you in the right direction.