I mean, separating the doses is more ideal as you're trying for a soft-landing, but I doubt it'll hurt you too much. But otherwise excellent news on holding most of the weight so far! Keep doing what you're doing
When you do get the bloods, make sure to share them all here if you can.
Also, any more thoughts on whether you're going to do another cycle sometime, or is this the only one for now?
Tapering from the perspective purely of LH/FSH recovery makes no sense, for sure, since it'll still impair recovery.
But that's not why I recommend it. This taper is part of the cycle. There's a point about acclimating the body to its soon-to-be changed status (a new homeostasis of lower test levels) that can only be achieved by tapering off slowly, as opposed to plunging off a cliff while levels of things like myostatin are still very high.
I've found it to be a very effective tool over the years for minimising losses post-cycle (well, that and not using too much AAS in the first place). While someone's coming off, I also tend to get them to taper up other things (intake of creatine, HMB, leucine, calories etc) in a further effort to counter catabolism.
They're excellent points...it's just that since test is suppressed at even a low dose and won't start to kick in again until clean, jumping of the cliff tapering doesn't seem to work IME with regard to acclimatising your body to lower test..I've not seen any evidence that suggests that gradullyblowering your exogenous hormones helps the body to acclimatise....it seems that endogenous test is either switched on or off not really kicking back in slowly with lowered doses...
One other point I wanted your opinion on is HCG. I used to do it but don't now as I feel all it is doing is sending am artificial signal to increase LH temporarily....its not really "restoring" anything ..take away the HCG and the signal to your brain and nuts is gone and your starting from scratch again...it isn't doing anything to resort the pituitary/gonadal axis in the long term..purely a short term artificial signal which your body recognises as such...
I guess it helps if you don't think about AAS as the only relevant factor here. You can build muscle without any testosterone in your body at all. This is because there are lots of mechanisms involved in anabolism and catabolism. At the end of a typical cycle, for example, your myostatin levels will be at their peak. They're probably why people stop gaining after x weeks on a cycle in the first place. They took time to build and for the body to reach that new homeostatic equilibrium where they prevented further gains. Unfortunately they don't just drop back down to baseline the moment you stop your cycle. So what you're exposing yourself to is the most catabolic hormone in the body right when you need some kind of buffer the most. Hence tapering more slowly rather than cliff-edge.
I can't really think of any other mechanism that would help apart from tapering AAS down and other growth factors up. I also don't think it's too hard to grasp the logic of it - it's the exact same thing behind any other drug withdrawal programme. Cold turkey just isn't as effective.
As for reaching the standard of scientific proof, well you've got me there. Aside from the logic of it, I can only give anecdotes based on people (mostly clients) who've followed it and recovered better. If I was rich, I'd pay for all kinds of double-blind studies but, alas, I went into the wrong field for money haha :D
I don't expect people to do it if they don't want to though. OP followed it based on the logic I presented. But he had nothing to lose in trying either way, just another couple of weeks on cycle tapering down.