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. Rena 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.