For years, I've had a great deal of success at improving myself. Over the last few years, I've roughly followed a personal growth model developed by Scott Barry Kaufman, which he discusses in his excellent book "Transcend."
Kaufman uses a sailboat to explain how people grow: the hull stands for basic stability, health, safety, belonging, and self-respect... because if it leaks, you spend all your energy not sinking. The sail stands for growth: curiosity, love, creativity, meaning, because when it holds its shape, the same wind (life’s opportunities and stress) turns into forward motion. The sea is the messy world in which we live.
The point is to capture the complexity of human growth; it’s a living system you maintain while moving. You patch leaks as they appear, trim the sail for conditions, and keep both survival and growth working at the same time. The model’s purpose is practical: diagnose where you’re losing speed, make the next small fix, and keep aiming at horizons that matter.
Decades ago, when I started this journey, the first step I had to take was fixing my boat. In my mid-twenties, I was fat, weak, rarely exercised, ate like crap, and neglected sleep. I had to fix all of that before I could start working on the things I needed to grow as a person. In short, I had to make my boat sea-worthy before I could start exploring the ocean.
Since that time, in my mid-to-late twenties, my boat was relatively easy to maintain. In most cases, the exploration and growth I was doing involved activities, like running, weightlifting, and jiu jitsu, that kept the boat sea-worthy.
Age, however, takes its toll. We have to spend more and more time maintaining the boat. More things break, too, which requires more time to fix. When I was 22, I could eat a large pepperoni and bacon pizza, and I'd feel mildly uncomfortable for about 30 minutes. Now, at 49, eating an entire pepperoni and bacon pizza will make me feel like garbage for a week. At thirty, I used to be able to do a hard lifting session in the morning, then do a twenty-mile run that afternoon. By the next day, I'd be 90% recovered. By the third day, I'd be completely recovered. Now, I might be able to manage one of these workouts once per week.
The boat now requires so much maintenance and repair, I spend all of my time keeping it from sinking. I can't actually sail anywhere. Any growth that happens only occurs if I stop maintaining and fixing the boat... which causes the boat to go to shit.
The Plight of Aging
In my younger years, I was naively-ignorant of the realities of the aging process. I'd see middle-aged people who basically gave up on health and fitness (and growth), and I'd just chalk it up to laziness. I knew aging caused diminishing returns, but I didn't fully understand just how profound of an effect aging had. My twenty-eight-year-old brain couldn't empathize with this profound struggle that comes with aging.
Until I got there.
It was easy to tell people to just work harder because, in my younger years, I had endless energy and I didn't have all that much maintenance and repairs to do. After all, the boat was still new. Around my mid-thirties, I first noticed that it started taking longer to recover, and progress required more sustained work. I had to lift harder, run farther and faster, and eat better. There was less room for error. I didn't mind, though, it presented an interesting challenge.
Each year, it took a little bit more effort to keep the boat afloat. I also started experiencing a drop in motivation... it became increasingly difficult to work up the drive and energy to keep the boat afloat. This wasn't a deal-breaker, but I had to borrow the time and energy for this maintenance from the time and energy I normally spent doing cool shit.
At about the age of 41 or 42, thanks to blood work, I discovered I had exceptionally low testosterone (about 300 ng/dl), which was at the very bottom of normal (average for this age is about 580 ng/dl). Based on the confluence of symptoms, I realized part of the reason my ship was getting so difficult to maintain and repair had to do with low testosterone, which I later learned was due to a testicular issue.
Basically, for my entire life, I've always made roughly half of the testosterone I should have been producing. So I did what I've always done - I started experimenting to solve the problem.
After a lot of playing with all the relevant variables, I figured out I could raise my testosterone about 50% (about 450 ng/dl) with a cocktail of supplements (mainly zinc, magnesium, vitamin D3), a specific diet (essentially the Paleo diet), and specific activities (high quality sleep, lifting heavy weights utilizing compound lifts, combat sports, and sex).
This worked exceptionally well for a few years. Testosterone levels around 400, while still low, allowed me to do everything I wanted to do. Unfortunately, the returns started to diminish by about 50 ng/dl per year starting three years ago. No matter what interventions I tried, or in what doses, my health, fitness, and motivation tanked.
A few weeks ago, blood work revealed my testosterone levels were at about 240 ng/dl, which was officially considered low. The follow-up test was well below 200 ng/dl. For reference, 550 ng/dl is about the norm for a 49 year old male; that first test (240 ng/dl) would be the testosterone level we'd expect in a 105-year-old dude. This explained why it became extremely hard to build muscle, seemingly impossible to lose fat, sleep was getting much more difficult, had low sex drive, and had virtually no motivation to work out.
Worse, a lot of other health markers started to tank to dangerous levels. My blood pressure and resting heart rate were up, good cholesterol was too low, bad cholesterol was too high, my kidney function was worsening, and I was on the cusp of pre-diabetes. I've managed all of these things with exercise, sleep, and diet, but all of these management strategies were tanking. I was trapped in a vicious circle, and my ship was sinking.
The Decision to Start TRT
TRT had been on my radar since I discovered the low T levels, but I had always been resistant. First, I had "natural" remedies that worked well enough. Second, I never liked how men would use TRT for performance-enhancing for running, jiu jitsu, and wightlifitng (or other recreational endeavors) because it feels like taking shortcuts instead of doing the work. Obviously this was ignorant of me; sometimes no volume of "work" solves the problem.
I was also concerned about possible side effects, including the possibility that starting exogenous testosterone may prevent your body from producing testosterone when you stop, meaning this becomes a lifelong decision. So I resisted and did my "natural remedy" routine. It worked... until it didn't.
I had a long discussion on this issue with my doctor. She was totally on board, in part because my overall health was starting to go to shit, and I sensed she thought I should have done this sooner. But still, I was at a spot where natural testosterone, even with all of my interventions, was low enough to be functionally useless. The fact that this was also causing other health measures to crater made this a no-brainer. So... I'll be starting TRT!
Even though any hormone replacement requires significant tracking and balancing. I'm excited to finally be in a position where I don't have to expend a ton of time and energy just trying to keep my T levels at a reasonable level. It's become such a focus of my health and fitness efforts over the last few years, I haven't had much opportunity to focus on any other growth.
This phase, as I start and tweak TRT, is like dry-docking the sailboat. I wasn't sailing anywhere before. Hell, the boat was barely afloat. For someone who needs growth, I need this psychological framing to keep me sane. Based on research, it usually takes six months to a year to really tweak hormone levels. While this is happening, I'm going to focus on really fixing my boat... not only the testosterone issue, but also dialing in my exercise, diet, and sleep routines to fix the other problems (blood sugar, cholesterol, kidney issues, etc.). As an added bonus, it will be nice to once again be able to build muscle and cut fat at a rate that's better than a century-old dude.
What Are Your Experiences?
That’s where I am now... dry-docked, fixing what leaks so the boat can actually sail again. If you’ve walked this path, men on TRT, women on HRT, tell me what it was like in real life. What pushed you to start, what protocol you tried (how you took it and how often), what changed by week four, month three, and month six. How were things like libido, mood, sleep, recovery, body composition changed? What worked and what didn’t. If side effects showed up, how did you handle them (dose, timing, route, add-ons), and which labs actually helped you steer. If you stopped, why? Share as much or as little as you want; I’m reading for patterns, not trophies.
Also, I'm interested in others who might be experiencing something that might require “dry docking” your boat. Basically, do you have some issue or problem that is fundamentally preventing you from growing? What is the issue, and what is your plan to fix it?
~Jason
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