I know it’s very dose dependent, but typical steroid doses are 10-100x what your body produces naturally(!).
I don’t know how it compares to “clinical doses”, but think twice man…
The doctor started me on a "midrange" dose of enanthate: 75mg every 10 days. My levels shot up, at the very high end of the male range. I brought that down to 75mg every 2 weeks and it barely budged.
This is the exact same drug/formulation that a lot of these guys are taking for TRT. The highest "official" dose is 100mg every 7 days. (I'm sure some of them are taking even more than that, but that's as much as a doctor should be prescribing you.)
Obviously everyone metabolizes this stuff differently, and if you're tall/heavy you'll likely need a higher dose than someone of average stature like me. But if my T levels shot up from ~20 ng/dL* to ~900 on a very moderate dose of enanthate, how high are those levels getting for someone who's starting from ~500?
* The normal female range is anywhere from 15 to 70. The normal male range is anywhere from 200 to 1000.
Even those patients are often disappointed when the TRT doesn’t solve their problems.
The high doses used by TRT clinics shoot past that threshold and go for levels that were previously only used by people using testosterone for performance enhancement.
The really hard thing about this topic is that a lot of the negative effects don’t show up right away. It’s sometimes months or years later before people realize their testes are so shut down that they’re dependent on TRT for life, for example. People also go into loops of trying to manage high estrogen (a side effect of high TRT doses) where they crash their estrogen, going into deep depression, or get it wrong and end up growing excessive breast tissue that needs to be physically removed.
High testosterone levels (beyond normal physiological range) are also associated with lower cognition. It makes people feel more confident, though, so this also isn’t noticed. Anxiety disorders are also a common side effect of excessive dosing.
The list goes on and on. Unfortunately mainstream podcasts on this topic are woefully bad at covering it because they know listeners only want to hear about the positives. Even the supposedly good podcasts like Huberman Lab are a joke on this topic. The TRT forum people love picking apart how bad Huberman’s TRT takes are, even though he positions himself as being moderate on the subject.