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PCT calculator
Post-cycle timing is one question with an arithmetic answer: when is the slowest thing you ran actually gone. Enter your compounds and your last injection date. It will not hand you a protocol, because no protocol here is well evidenced.
Read this first. Anabolic-androgenic steroids are controlled substances in most countries and are prescription-only where they are legal at all.
The last dose of each compound, not the day you decided to stop. If you tapered, use the final injection of the slowest ester.
When each compound clears
| Compound | Half-life | Half gone | 97% gone | Date clear |
|---|
97% gone is five half-lives, the usual working definition of cleared. It is a property of the ester, so it does not change with the dose you ran.
Clearance timeline
The slowest ester owns the calendar
Starting PCT while a long ester is still releasing wastes it. A SERM works by removing negative feedback at the hypothalamus and pituitary. If exogenous androgen is still arriving from an oil depot, the feedback is still there and you are running the drug against a signal it cannot overcome. With nandrolone decanoate at a 10 day half-life, that depot is still meaningfully active seven weeks after the last shot.
This is arithmetic, not a protocol. The calculator tells you when a compound is gone. It does not tell you what to take, at what dose or for how long, because the evidence for any specific post-cycle protocol in healthy men is thin, largely uncontrolled and mostly borrowed from fertility medicine. Anyone quoting you an exact milligram ladder is quoting a forum, not a trial.
Recovery is not the same event as clearance. Clearance takes weeks and is predictable from the half-life. The return of your own production takes months, is not predictable and depends on how long you were suppressed and how far. 19-nors are consistently the slowest to come back. Some people do not fully recover, a risk that rises with cycle length and repetition.
The only way to know is to measure. Bloodwork at baseline before anything, at the point of clearance, then again eight to twelve weeks later is what distinguishes recovery from hope. LH, FSH and total testosterone together tell you whether the axis restarted. Without those three you are guessing from how you feel, which is the least reliable instrument available.
Common questions
When should I start PCT after testosterone enanthate?
Enanthate has a half-life near 4.5 days, so it is about 97% gone by three weeks after the last injection. Starting a SERM materially earlier than that means running it while an oil depot is still delivering androgen, which is the situation the drug cannot work in.
How long after deca can I start PCT?
Nandrolone decanoate has roughly a 10 day half-life, so clearance runs to about seven weeks. That is the longest wait of any commonly used compound. If deca is in the stack it sets the date on its own no matter what else you ran.
Does the dose I ran change when it clears?
Barely. Clearance time is set by the half-life, which is a property of the ester rather than the amount. A higher dose starts from a higher point but decays at the same rate, so it adds days rather than weeks.
What about trenbolone acetate or other short esters?
Short esters clear fast. Trenbolone acetate at about 1.5 days is essentially gone in a week. That almost never sets the PCT date, because a short ester is nearly always run alongside a longer one that clears much later.
Is PCT actually proven to work?
Not to the standard the word implies. The drugs used are real and have real mechanisms, but controlled evidence for specific post-cycle protocols in healthy men who used steroids recreationally is very limited. Most published work sits in fertility medicine with different patients and different goals.
How do I know whether I have recovered?
Bloodwork, specifically LH, FSH and total testosterone together. LH and FSH show whether the signal from the pituitary came back. Testosterone shows whether the testes answered it. Feeling normal is not evidence. Neither is a single testosterone reading without the other two.
How long does recovery take?
Highly variable. Some axes restart within a couple of months, some take a year and some do not fully return. The strongest predictors are how long you were suppressed, how many times you have done it and whether 19-nors were involved.
Related tools
Steroid cycle calculator
Weekly totals, active milligrams and time to plateau.
TRT restart and PCT guide
What the drugs do, set against what the evidence actually supports.
Bloodwork guide
The LH, FSH and testosterone panel that shows whether you recovered.
Half-life calculator
The washout curve behind these dates.
And some things do not wait for a blood draw. Chest pain, breathlessness, coughing blood, or pain and swelling in one calf can be a clot. Yellowing of the eyes or skin, dark urine, or pain under the right ribs points at the liver. A sudden severe headache, one-sided weakness or trouble speaking can be a stroke. New or worsening thoughts of harming yourself count too. Get emergency care the same day. Say what you have been taking.
The arithmetic is the easy half
A plan on a web page is not a record of what you actually did. OptiPin logs every injection against the schedule, tracks the compounds in this calculator and lines your bloodwork up against the weeks it belongs to.
It also models what this page deliberately will not. Serum levels rather than milligrams on board: testosterone in ng/dL calibrated per ester, estradiol in pg/mL including what an aromatase inhibitor does to it, both re-fitted to your own bloodwork instead of a population average. Still estimates. Bloodwork is still the instrument that measures.
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