The maintenance dose for testosterone is benchmarked at 2.2mg per kilogram of body weight per week.
This calculates to 220mg/week for a 100kg individual, and 155mg/week for someone who is 70kg.
This isn’t just a simple numbers game; it’s the baseline required to stably support a level of muscle mass that is utterly impossible to maintain without exogenous administration.
While you might hear legends of bodybuilders over 120kg maintaining their conditioning on just 175mg/week, that’s talk of genetic freaks whose liver and kidney metabolic capacities and hormone receptor sensitivity shatter the standards for normal people.
Generalization is forbidden.
Standard HRT aims to maintain testosterone blood concentration between 600-1000 ng/dL for general health purposes.
A cruise, on the other hand, is set higher than this and is configured to hold onto muscle mass that is absolutely unattainable naturally.
The key point here is that a cruise doesn’t automatically mean it has to be a low dose.
Body weight, stress levels, training intensity, recovery environment—they all differ.
Even if 220mg/week is the maintenance line for a 100kg individual, the actual holding power varies wildly depending on whether GH or insulin are used concurrently.
What if you want to gain even a little more muscle mass?
The most ideal strategy is to simultaneously increase both testosterone and total caloric intake by 10% each.
If you’re using 220mg/week, you’d add 22mg to raise it to 242mg/week and increase your daily calories accordingly.
The critical point here – you can’t just increase the hormones and leave the calories the same.
Doing so will only maintain volume; there will be no progress.
Hormones can’t work without raw materials.
Ultimately, real change is only made when they move in tandem with the fuel of calories.
Growth hormone, even on its own, holds monstrous value.
It elevates everything: sleep quality, recovery speed, protein synthesis rates, and even the efficiency of testosterone utilization.
This is why it allows you to achieve the same state of maintenance with a much lower dose of testosterone.
Now, what if you add insulin to the mix?
That changes the entire game.
The ability to forcibly shuttle nutrients into the muscles is explosively enhanced, and your physique and density can actually improve.
Of course, there are bodybuilders who get by on testosterone alone.
But once you go past a certain point, you hit a wall in terms of recovery speed, post-training restoration, and overall physiological stability.
From that moment on, the system’s limitations become apparent.
For insulin, a low dose of around 4-6 IU post-meal is most effective for muscle glycogen replenishment and nutrient absorption efficiency.
However, even at this level, long-term use can cause pancreatic beta-cell fatigue, so it is imperative to take a rest period every 8 weeks.
Furthermore, keeping at least 15g of glucose on hand at all times to counter post-insulin hypoglycemia is a survival strategy.
For growth hormone, 3-4 IU per day is the most stable range for maintenance purposes, but even this dosage can induce carpal tunnel syndrome or insulin resistance, so regular blood glucose monitoring and the concurrent use of metformin should be seriously considered.
A gear guru on the U.S. West Coast actually manages high-level bodybuilders by adding a GH+insulin combo to this maintenance formula.
His core philosophy is simple.
“It’s not about increasing the hormones, it’s about dialing in the efficiency.”
He doesn’t just look at testosterone levels on blood work; he adjusts dosages by primarily analyzing three things: recovery, sleep quality, and insulin sensitivity.
In practice, it’s not uncommon for a 70kg athlete to maintain muscle mass and conditioning on 155mg/week.
But in the 100kg+ weight class, it’s almost unheard of to maintain without GH, using only testosterone.
Trying to hold on without growth leads to a vicious cycle of accumulated fatigue, declining sleep quality, loss of appetite, and delayed recovery—which ultimately forces you to increase the testosterone dosage.
This is the time when you need to recalibrate the entire system, not just up the hormones.
If you just increase the dose without this adjustment, your physique won’t change, and only the side effects will pile up.
The testosterone, GH, and insulin combination is not a fixed-dose concept.
Overall system design is the key.
For example, just because your blood work numbers go up after increasing your testosterone dose doesn’t mean your actual performance will improve.
Physique, recovery, sleep, and durability—these are determined by the sum of all external environmental factors, including diet, sleep, digestion, and stress.
Ultimately, moving based on blood work numbers alone is a novice strategy.
A cruise setup should typically be reset every 1-3 months, and within that cycle, you must check the system’s status with blood work at least once.
Relying on feel alone makes the worst-case scenario—muscle loss or side effects—unavoidable.
The testosterone maintenance formula is a solid baseline, while GH and insulin are tools of leverage that boost the system’s efficiency.
The key isn’t the hormones themselves, but the overall system design. The real skill lies in the ability to control when, how, and how much of each tool to deploy.
If you’re ignorant of this and just fixate on dosages?
The system will inevitably collapse one day.
