Meet the Nutmaxxers Obsessed with Shooting Bigger Loads

Some of the most important discoveries in medicine came from brave people experimenting on themselves. Jonas Salk tested his polio vaccine on himself and his family. Isaac Newton poked a blunt needle into his own eye socket to understand how we see light. And using their own bodies as test subjects, the Redditors on r/CumBiggerLoads have determined that a combination of zinc, pygeum, L-citrulline, and lecithin is the “holy grail of cum.”

There, 47,000 visitors are reading more than 600 weekly contributions concerning the best supplements for—apologies for what you are about to read—“shooting ropes,” “monster loads,” and “Spiderman-like webs,” methods for “cumtraining for volume,” and how to turn your “money shot” into “The Big One.” What turned all these men into citizen jizz scientists? A growing interest in male self-optimization, a pornified sense of what’s normal, and a dearth of scientific consensus around the topic.

Mike, 27, began trying to increase the size of his ejaculations in 2021 after seeing an ad for Semenax pills on a porn site. “Of course I’m like, This is just bullshit,” he says. “But then I started reading on Reddit about it. I was just going on, like: What are these supplements doing?”

Quarantined with his college girlfriend in her parents’ beach house, there wasn’t much to do but have sex. Mike (who, like others in this story, asked to use just his first name to protect his privacy), struggled to keep up with her libido and desire to be ejaculated upon. “I feel drained. I feel exhausted. I feel like I can’t satisfy this girl,” Mike remembers thinking. “After once or twice a day, not much is coming out.” So he turned to supplements. “Probably for like six months, I was experimenting with just different stacks”—combinations of supplements—“I would read about on Reddit,” Mike says.

Marcus, a nurse practitioner from North Carolina, has experimented with many stacks he learned about on r/CumBiggerLoads. He has grown comfortable enough in the subreddit to ejaculate into a graduated shot glass and share photos of it with his peers there. “I like the community,” says Marcus, who posts under the username NosyTrees. “The biggest debate currently is on the dosing of the supplements needed to get results.”

All manner of niche sexual interests have found a home on Reddit. But the prevalence of podcast episodes and YouTube videos devoted to ejaculating more suggests that this particular concern is becoming mainstream. Andrew Huberman has recommended Vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, omega-3, CoQ-10, tongkat ali, and boron to support sperm production. He also discussed L-citrulline in his episode with urologist and YouTuber Dr. Rema Malik, highlighting it as an alternative to Viagra and Cialis. In her video devoted to increasing semen volume, Dr. Malik recommends hydration, not smoking, extending foreplay, and waiting longer. On Steve-O’s podcast, Tommy Lee recommended pineapple juice and celery.

“There is certainly a lot of interest in ejaculate volume,” says Dr. Michael Eisenberg, professor of Urology at Stanford School of Medicine. But demand for cum supplements has outpaced research on them. “The data around supplements to improve it is mixed. There is data that certain supplements like Vitamin D, selenium, and zinc can improve semen quality. For men deficient in [zinc], there is some suggestion it could help semen volume.”

For all this talk of bigger loads, it’s not exactly clear what a typical one is. According to a 1975 study in Fertility and Sterility, ejaculate volume ranges from .1 to 11 milliliters, with an average of 3.2 ml (roughly half a teaspoon). Below 1.5 ml is considered potentially subfertile. “Low semen volume can impair sperm transport, which does have implications for fertility,” says Dr. James Kashanian, assistant urologist at New York Presbyterian. But there is little medical benefit beyond a certain threshold. “In many cases, the desire to increase volume is more about confidence and aesthetics than health,” he says.

Commercially available pills like Semenax, Load Boost, and Popstar Volume + Taste tout similar ingredients to the “stacks” discussed on r/CumBiggerLoads. Like all dietary supplements, these are available without a prescription. On Semenax.com, customers take a “Cumshot Test” assessing their emissions on a scale from “Powerless” to “Insane.”

Pills have been sold online under the Semenax name since at least 2005, but newer entrants are responding to growing demand. “I think people are becoming more and more interested in taking ownership of their own health, but also looking to optimize and generally tweak their body in various ways and often supplements are part of that,” says Ben, cofounder of VB Health, which launched Load Boost in 2020. (Ben asked to use his first name only for this story to avoid being contacted outside of work.)

Supplements are not reviewed by the FDA, and Dr. Kashanian warns that their quality can vary. “While they are marketed heavily and come with enthusiastic testimonials, none of these supplements have been tested in robust clinical trials and none of these have shown any benefit in clinical trials,” he says.

Instead, Dr. Kashanian recommends lifestyle changes. “Scientifically and medically, there are a few validated methods for improving ejaculation volume and strength,” he says. Semen is mostly water, so staying hydrated is the most important factor. Abstaining from ejaculation for two or three days can also increase volume, but Dr. Kashanian warns that long periods of abstinence can reduce sperm motility or quality. Kegels help too. While nutrition is important, Dr. Kashanian says, “over-supplementation does not seem to have a role.”

The mixed clinical data on specific supplements has not discouraged men from taking them. Dr. Kirk McAnsh, a chiropractor from Alpena, Michigan, recommends more than 24 ingredients to patients via his Patreon, Intimacy Nutrition Doc. “ I try to balance things based on ancient wisdom, Biblical wisdom from the Song of Solomon, Taoist tradition, and tantric tradition,” Dr. McAnsh says. “And then I look for common threads that weave between all those and scientific papers.”

Within the amateur bigger loads community, the lack of medical consensus on supplements is not a deterrent, but a reason to go deeper on their own. “If people waited around for science to prove everything, then we’d all be dead by the time they did,” Dr. McAnsh says. “So I think people are just stepping forward. Now that the internet’s there, they can do some research and think about it and not wait for 20 years until they get around to doing a study that may or may not be biased or paid off by a pharmaceutical company.”

Steven, 54 from North Carolina, sought out Dr. McAnsh after complications from type 2 diabetes affected his sex life with a new, 10-years-younger girlfriend. “ There was one particular time when we had first got together, where I came and she looked at me and was like, ‘That’s it?’” says Steven, who asked to use his first name only for privacy. “ When I would ejaculate, it was hardly anything there, man. And it was clear.”

Steven compares the inability to cum to that of a frustrated artist.  ”Whatever picture comes to mind, you can paint and get it on the canvas with precision, right?” he says. “Then, you injure your damn arm and you still have these visions of these pieces that you could paint. But now you got an injury and you can’t paint like you used to.”

Dr. McAnsh recommended a number of supplements, plus replacing chicken with beef, coffee with matcha, and walking 10,000 steps a day. Steven also eats four stalks of celery daily, a trick he picked up from porn star Peter North. About one month later, he says his ejaculate is larger, thicker, and whiter, on top of improved erection equality and performance. “Load size is just as important to me as being able to get it all the way up and go a good 20-minute round,” he says.

The influence of pornography on this space is unavoidable. Every man I spoke to cited porn as part of why they wanted to increase their volume. “If the majority of erotic content in our lifespan is porn, then we are naturally looking at our own life and making comparisons,” says Caitlin V. Neal, sex coach and host of HBO’s Good Sex.

In fact, porn stars are some of the supplement industry’s biggest customers. “ We work with a lot of talent in the industry,” says Ben of VB Health. “That is another marker of approval we have is that we are trusted by people who use our products because they need to perform.”

Most nutmaxxers get off on the sight of their own large loads and their partners’ reaction to them. Facials are a big part of their life. “More volume means more of a visual spectacle,” says Marcus, the prolific r/CumBiggerLoads poster.

Marcus began increasing the size of his loads after a college hookup had a shocked reaction to his ejaculate. “She started to gossip around campus and I got a reputation and wanted to get more of those reactions," he says. “So I took supplements to make sure I could always ‘perform’ when needed.”

Hink, a men’s sexual-health content creator who sells semen supplements, has seen factions form in his YouTube community around their favorite place to ejaculate. “  We have a debate between Team Tummy Pancakes and Team Bun Glazer,” says Hink, who asked to use his online pseudonym. “That’s a reference to basically having such a large ejaculatory volume that it looks like a pancake on the stomach or it looks like there’s actually a glaze on the buns because the volume is so large.”

Michael, a 39-year-old from Los Angeles, began taking supplements after the anti-hair-loss pill finasteride left his semen watery. “ I always enjoyed blasting my girl in the face, for lack of a better term. So I started to look for a solution to fix that,” he says.

Michael’s girlfriend, Lana, has enjoyed participating in his experiments. “ It’s just very interesting,” she says. “He revealed to me that he was taking his concoction. We experimented with different dosages of everything and saw what that did, so that was kind of cool.” Michael and Lana asked to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

Lana is not alone among women in preferring more semen. Both Steven and Mike began supplementing after their girlfriends reacted negatively to the small size of their loads. “There are plenty of women who like cum and like to have it on their bodies,” says Good Sex’s Neal.

“My guess is that the majority of women probably don’t mind having a little bit more ejaculate from their partner,” Neal says. “And I would guess that there’s a not insubstantial subsection of women who actually really would love to have more ejaculate from their partner.”

But many men find that their partners do not appreciate their newfound talent. Marcus’s post “Hookup said my loads are disgusting lmao” is one of the all-time top posts on the subreddit. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve encountered very few sexual partners that are truly into it,” Marcus says. “Some of them seem to tolerate it more than anything.”

Hink finds that increased load size is a niche area of self-improvement in his community. “Most men are far more concerned with getting a bigger penis, better erections, and lasting longer,” Hink says. “A lot of girls don’t like semen and don’t want a mouth full of semen. So, this is, I think, a little more selfish.”

But achieving more semen volume is more attainable than those other goals. “ It’s so much easier and there’s so much less risk, and quite honestly, it’s a lot cheaper,” Hink says. Ultimately, the desire for a larger load is the desire to satisfy oneself. “It’s the pièce de résistance,” Steven says. “It’s the reward for the job well done.”