Half-life of anabolic steroids: updated table

What is the purpose and importance of half-life?

The half-life of a substance that can be administered into the body works like a “stopwatch” that indicates the time needed for its quantity to drop by half, directly influencing its absorption and active life in the body.

For example, testosterone enanthate has a half-life of 5 to 8 days. When administering 200 mg of the hormone, after one half-life, there will still be about 100 mg circulating in the body. After two half-lives, this number drops to 50 mg, and so on, until the drug is completely eliminated.

Understanding this is important for several reasons, especially to define the ideal frequency of administration and maintain stable hormone levels, optimizing the desired effects and minimizing side effects.

Furthermore, knowing the half-life is useful for starting the PCT protocol at the right time, since the proper recovery of natural testosterone production will only occur in the absence of exogenous anabolic hormones still circulating in the body.

As you can see, half-life is not an exact science, where each hormone has a time range and not necessarily a fixed period.

This is mainly because the individual composition of the substance and the biological individuality of the user also play a role in the absorption time of the hormones.

For example, in the case of hormones with esters (enanthate, propionate, decanoate, etc.), the body is only able to break down the ester and absorb them because there are specific enzymes called esterases that do this job.

It is not possible to consider that the processes involving the functioning of these enzymes are identical in all people and in all hormones.

Therefore, although the half-life is mainly defined by the chemical structure of the compound, it can still change, even if slightly, as some people may metabolize certain hormones more quickly or more slowly.