Bradycardia and recovery

Hi, y’all, hoping I can get some thoughts on recovery and a couple of health situations.

I’m a 46 y/o 190lb 6’1” male.

In 2019 I had confirmed low testosterone with two blood tests below 300 ng/dl (the lowest was 192). After a year I was tired of the weekly injections and periodic blood donations, so I stopped treatment and after 6 months of no steroids, I tested between 400-500 (can’t remember the exact number).

In addition, I’ve just started the Living Liver Donor evaluation to donate to my mom who needs a transplant. The evaluation reported high liver enzymes in AST and ALT on two separate blood tests. Imaging showed my liver fat as 4.7% so in the normal range. I have a biopsy scheduled to learn more.

My EKG also uncovered a heart rate of 37 with an intraventricular conduction delay. I’ve had a low RHR of around 42-44 for as long as I can remember. I always thought this was a good thing, but I guess it’s not (I’m not an athlete although I’ve always been active). I also have follow up stress tests and cardiology follow ups.

over the past few years I’ve been battling pretty strong fatigue. I assumed it was just age, and then thought it was the low-T but the steroids didn’t help much. Now I’m wondering if it’s my liver or heart that’s the culprit.

I was also hospitalized for a week with exercise induced rhabdomyolisys in 2018.

I guess getting down to it is how much is my recovery from a training day affected by a low heart rate and possible reduced oxygen pumping in my blood or any of these other situations?

I’m still following the 3 workouts a week schedule and I’ve been doing NLP for 10 weeks, but my bench and press are going so slow. I feel like my squat and DL are ok, but not great.

starting weights
squat: 85x5x3 (start low because I get serious DOMS when unconditioned)
bench: 105x5x3
press: 65x5x3
deadlift: 135x5

current weights
squat: 220x5x3
bench: 155x5x3
press: 112.5x5x1 and 102.5x5x2
deadlift: 275x5
power clean: 100x3x5

thanks for any help/advice you can offer!

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about this complex situation. There’s unfortunately more to unpack in the first half of your post than we can feasibly do in this forum, outside the context of a consultation. But to address your question:

I guess getting down to it is how much is my recovery from a training day affected by a low heart rate and possible reduced oxygen pumping in my blood or any of these other situations?

  1. Your recovery is in no way impaired from a low resting heart rate.

  2. You do not have reduced oxygen in your blood due to your heart rate. These are separate things; a low resting heart rate (whether adaptive or pathologic) does not influence blood oxygen content.

It seems to me that you have indeed made decent progress on your lifts. It is typical for the upper body lifts to lag on that program, as it is not a very good program for those in particular. We’d recommend changing programs, while also following up with your physicians for evaluation of the other health concerns.

Fatigue is a common symptom with a wide variety of potential causes, although by far the most common is related to sleep issues (whether poor sleep habits or undiagnosed sleep apnea – which, incidentally, can also cause low testosterone). Might be worth looking into, as well as ensuring that your thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) level has been checked too.

Thanks for the quick reply and the empathy! Kind of just rolling with things until further tests reveal anything worth being worried about, but yeah, you got to the heart (pun intended) of my concern. It’s helpful just to hear that my lifts are progressing at least at a decent rate that’s not like obviously lacking or anything.

I’ll definitely follow up on the sleep apnea suggestion!

I had previously thought it might be thyroid related but blood tests have shown normal results there over both annual physicals and in this donor evaluation thankfully.

thanks again for boosting my confidence!