BroDeal said:
In early season, when my mileage pushes up to 300 a week, I often feel pretty fried. Dead legs are not too bad but mental lethargy affects life outside of cycling. I am thinking of trying DHEA because it might be an interesting experiment.
This is what I posted a while back on this forum;
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"I take it for health/anti-aging purposes and it makes me feel good mentally but it won't do a thing to help your recovery or performance in cycling or any other sport for certain, anyone who thinks otherwise is misled. I only supplement with it as I have very low levels naturally and just 25mg oral daily brought levels up several times baseline helping depression significantly.
Although DHEA does have the possibility to convert to testosterone in reality it does not do so very much if at all in males, at least when taken orally. I have only seen one study to suggest that it can convert to testosterone in males and that was with transdermal administration and in very large doses. Unfortunately with these doses estradiol was very high (going by memory) which is not ideal for men."
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I will also add that I believe that DHEA is a very important hormone on its own and not just because it converts to testosterone and estradiol. I can't say for sure if you need it or not and its very hard to tell the difference between the placebo effect and the real deal when it comes to things like these.
Another hormone that helped me significantly was Vitamin D. When I started supplementing with it a few years ago (after a blood test showed I was low even with a decent sun tan) I had a fantastic reduction in depression/agitation in a few weeks. The amazing thing is that the effect still holds to this day and I feel great, there is no doubt that it helped me and it is important to know that
NOT everyone can produce enough vitamin D from the sun! I am one of them and before supplementing with it felt that there was something missing for so long. I now take 5000iu daily.
If you are low on vitamin D you will probably not be producing as much testosterone as you should. Then again if you are riding 300miles a week you won't be either.
I hope people will respect my opinion on this hormone as a health issue that has nothing do do with doping in competitive sport.