Why Growth Hormone Therapy Is HRT (Not Just A Gym Tool)

Should You Stop Growth Hormone When You Stop Training?

Why are you taking the growth hormone? Are you using it specifically to support your results that you're getting from the gym? What I'll say is this, is if I got hurt, I wasn't training in the gym, I wouldn't stop my testosterone replacement.

Most people answer that question one way in their head and act a completely different way in practice, because they think of growth hormone as a gym supplement that happens to be injectable, and when the gym stops, the injection stops too.

That logic breaks down because growth hormone is not sitting off to the side of your endocrine system waiting for you to go lift. It is wired into the middle of it.

Growth hormone therapy falls under the HRT umbrella, right, in the same way that managing your thyroid health is also considered HRT. The thyroid, your GH axis, your HPG axis, your testosterone, all three of these are working together in an ecosystem where they rely upon each other in certain ways.

I should be clear that the research hasn't directly tested whether classifying GH therapy as HRT changes outcomes the way thyroid management does, so that framing is how I think about it rather than something a trial has settled.

The ecosystem part is not controversial, though, and it is worth walking the chain.

Your pituitary releases growth hormone in pulses, mostly at night. That GH travels to the liver and signals production of something called IGF-1, which is the molecule doing most of the downstream work on tissue repair and body composition. Thyroid hormone is required for that liver conversion to run properly, so a sluggish thyroid gives you a weaker IGF-1 response from the same dose of GH.

Testosterone sits in the same loop from the other direction, because androgens raise IGF-1 and GH amplifies androgen signaling in muscle tissue.

Pull one thread and the other two loosen. That's the whole point.

Fat tissue belongs in this conversation too, and not as a passive storage tank. Fat cells release a hormone called leptin, which reports your energy stores back to the brain and feeds into the same hypothalamic circuitry that governs GH release and reproductive hormone output, which is why body fat and hormone signaling are not separate problems (Wauters et al., 2000).

So the question of what happens when you stop is a question about that whole ecosystem, not about your bench press.

You should be continuing to maintain optimized hormone levels, regardless of that injury, and that's going to help you to recover the best, fastest, and most efficient way without losing some of the results and getting fat.

I cannot point you to a study that tracked injured patients who stayed on versus came off and measured recovery speed, muscle retention and fat gain side by side, so take that as how I have watched it play out rather than a finding.

What I will say about the stopping decision is more practical. An injury already drives up cortisol, drops your activity, and usually wrecks your sleep, and sleep is when the majority of your GH pulses happen. The period where you are most tempted to pull back support is the period where your own production is already suppressed.

Simplest version of what to do: if you started GH therapy because your levels warranted it, your levels still warrant it when you are in a sling.

If you started it purely as a training accessory, something you stacked on top of a hard block to squeeze out more, then stopping during a layoff is a reasonable call, and you were never really doing HRT in the first place.

But if you're using it for everything else, I don't see why you would stop.

Most of what I know about this came out of conversations in the free community, so if you want the rest of it and somewhere to ask, the men's group is here: https://www.skool.com/jh-iron-forge-brotherhood/about

Research: Wauters M, Considine RV, Van Gaal LF. Human leptin: from an adipocyte hormone to an endocrine mediator. Eur J Endocrinol. 2000.

References

Wauters M, Considine RV, Van Gaal LF. Human leptin: from an adipocyte hormone to an endocrine mediator. Eur J Endocrinol. 2000. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11022169/