Does Ashwagandha Cause Weight Gain?

When it comes to herbal extracts for wellbeing, Ashwagandha is one of the most popular - especially for men. It’s often popular for muscle-gain and testosterone influence, leading to many people thinking that Ashwagandha and weight gain are somehow related.

Does Ashwagandha cause weight gain? Can it help build muscle? Is it good for your health?

Today, we’re going to answer all of these questions and give you everything you need to know about this popular - but controversial - supplement. We’ll also talk about how to get the most out of it and whether or not you can use ashwagandha for weight gain. 

Deciding the Quality of Weight Gain

When we talk about quality weight gain, there is more than just the amount we’re gaining. It’s a question of more than gaining weight, specifically breaking that down to:

• Muscle gain: more muscle mass is the key to good, healthy weight gain. You want to build muscle to improve your performance, look better, and ensure weight isn’t fat. This is the key to all kinds of other factors like joint health, long-term weight management, and even metabolic health.
• Fat gain: reducing fat gain is the other side of healthy weight gain - you want to minimize fat stores, unless you’re very underweight. This comes down to patience, good nutrition, and maintaining healthy protein intake and regular exercise (strength training especially).
• Strength and power improvements: why not get stronger as you get bigger? Weight gain is the perfect time to push the progress in the gym, or wherever you exercise. Bigger muscles aren’t just good looking but help you become more competent, capable, and lift more.
• Joint health and injury-resilience: getting bigger is a chance to protect joints, build stronger tendons, repair old damage, and even strengthen your bones. It’s time to prepare the whole body with extra mass and top-quality nutrition and recovery.

These factors are how you judge your weight gain process. It’s more than just what’s on the scale - the things you learn to do, become better at, and the risks of injury - all improve with good weight gain.

They’re also ways that Ashwagandha might make gaining weight better - aside from just pushing up your weight.

Why Recovery is Important - and how Ashwagandha Helps

One thing you need to know to understand Ashwagandha and how it’s useful is that recovery is key to gains. You get bigger and stronger while resting - especially relaxed, low-anxiety, hormonally-balanced rest. It’s why sleep is so important and why we’re going to talk about hormones, stress, and relaxation - because they’re key to bigger, stronger muscles.

The recovery processes are both mental and physical. You can limit your gains with too much mental stress and - on the other side of the spectrum - you can improve muscular response to exercise by relaxing better and looking after your mind.

This balance of mental and physical is key. They both influence your hormones, which determine how well you respond to exercise, what kind of weight you’re gaining, and how well you’re going to perform next time you’re in the gym.

Better recovery means better gains, better workouts, and feeling better along the way!

What Does Ashwagandha Do?

Ashwagandha is a type of herbal extract that comes to us from Indian traditional medicine - or Ayurveda. It’s a herbal extract typically associated with male health and wellbeing, particularly with the traditionally masculine side of things - hormonal health, associations with muscle mass, libido, appetite, and others.

Ashwagandha is getting more attention lately for these health benefits - and one area where it’s becoming more popular is weight gain. Many skinny guys want to bulk up and build muscle mass, gaining weight and size - and they’re looking to classic herbal extracts that might help - like Ashwagandha.

With a focus on strength and virility in Ayurvedic medicine and wellbeing, it’s a popular and obvious place to look. What’s interesting is that Ashawagandha does have some proven benefits like these - unlike many other popular herbal extracts, with more powerful research than others like Maca or Bocopa Monnieri.

But there’s one question that matters the most - and we need to address the elephant in the room...

Does Ashwagandha Make You Gain Weight?

Ashwagandha doesn’t make you gain weight by itself. While it’s an effective way to adjust your hormonal health - and has some proven benefits - they’re not related to weight gain quantity. Ashwagandha alone isn’t going to make you gain more weight.

The benefits of Ashwagandha are related to some other factors in weight - such as what you gain, how you perform, and even some indirect mechanisms that might help you gain weight.

The problem isn’t ashwagandha - which is a useful compound, especially for skinny men looking to get bigger and stronger - but marketing. It doesn’t make you gain weight by itself - but has great synergies and benefits in combination with other ingredients.

Specifically, it’s a great way to boost appetite, performance, and support healthy hormonal function. (This answers your question: does ashwagandha increase appetite? )

If you’re a hardgainer struggling to get the most from diet and exercise, these are enormous benefits. Typically, Ashwagandha’s synergies are best with other powerful hormone regulators (like D-Aspartic Acid, or CLA) and appetite-adjusters (like hungerspark herbal extract).

Let’s look at what Ashwagandha can do to help you gain weight - indirectly - as well as how it helps support your performance, diet, and muscle building...

Other Benefits of Ashwagandha: Ashwagandha’s Real Superpowers?

Ashwagandha’s benefits to weight gain are indirect and they filter down through the various types of weight gain factors we mentioned earlier. We want to look at these benefits because they make Ashwagandha a great herb for health and as part of a mixture of other compounds.

Regulating Hormonal Health and Wellbeing

First - and most importantly - Ashwagandha seems to be important for hormonal health. It has a small benefit to testosterone in most men, with additional benefits in those with already-reduced testosterone levels.

Ashwagandha’s effect seems to be protective. Aside from a small testosterone boost, it primarily protects your testosterone levels against hormonal distress. Things like stress, anxiety, poor sleep, and other environmental factors can wreak havoc on your hormones - but Ashwagandha helps protect you.

This is a key player in the way that exercise - an important stressor and part of healthy living - affects you. It helps reduce the stressful-ness of exercise while supporting hormonal health, even during extensive, intense bouts of exercise. This is key for maintaining mood, energy levels, and supporting recovery.

Performance Benefits of Ashwagandha?

Ashwagandha doesn’t only help protect these performance markers, but also seems to have its own (albeit modest) benefits to performance. 

There are some studies out there which show that Ashwagandha has positive benefits to power and strength. These are typically filtered through mental factors like mood and fatigue, as well as anxiety about exercise (which we’ll discuss next).

Anxiolytic Powers and Recovery Benefits

Crucially, Ashwagandha is an anxiolytic - a compound that reduces anxiety. This is a powerful benefit for anyone, but specifically combines well with the hormonal balance and protective effects it displays over testosterone levels. Again, this is particularly powerful in men - for whom testosterone is absolutely key.

Anxiolytics help reduce mental stress and anxiety. This helps reduce the risk of mood disorders, rebalances hormones, protects your sleep quality, and helps prevent a range of stress-related recovery problems. By protecting yourself from stress and anxiety, you protect yourself against the knock-on effects that plague so many of us in the 21st century.

Modern life is stressful and its ups and downs can have a huge negative effect on your health. Ashwagandha is great for protecting your peace, maintaining your mood, and preserving performance even when life gets hard and chaotic!

Possible Health Benefits of Ashwagandha’s Anxiolytic Effects:

Finally, there are low-level benefits to a range of health markers we all need to keep an eye on:

• Blood sugar and insulin action
• Blood pressure (mediated by stress and anxiety)
• Sleep quality and insomnia-risk
• Cholesterol levels
• Sperm quality

These are all minor compared to the powerful anxiolytic effects of Ashwagandha but they do offer additional benefits. If you make this kind of change to your lifestyle in multiple areas, while practicing a healthy diet and exercise, the results would add up to better health and wellbeing rapidly.

Ashwagandha is a great addition to an active lifestyle. It’s not going to do all the work for you - and it works best as a blend with other powerful healthy ingredients - but it can support better health and mood while you gain weight.

How to Get the Most out of Ashwagandha Supplementation

Ashwagandha Synergies to Look For:

Ashwagandha also has amazing synergies with the vitamins and minerals in AppetiteMax. Each of them has a unique benefit that you should be making the most of - pushing Ashwagandha’s mild benefits to the max:

B Vitamins: improving your mood, driving better metabolism, and helping you to get the most from your food. This is a powerful metabolic support pair that supports hormonal and metabolic wellbeing at the same time.

Vitamin D: A great testosterone protector and perfect pairing for Ashwagandha, driving better hormonal health while both ingredients protect mental health, mood, and healthy hormone levels against stress and dysregulation.

Magnesium: a key electrolyte and powerful enzyme for over 300 bodily processes. Magnesium is a key player in hormonal wellbeing, metabolism, and performance - just like Ashwagandha - offering double effect on the most important benefits.

Zinc: a powerful growth-regulating mineral that interacts with hormones and metabolism alike. It’s a great combination for the anti-stress, pro-regulatory effects of Ashwagandha and helps you maintain a rock solid sleep, recovery, and energy-turnover system.

AppetiteMax: A Great Ashwagandha Supplement for Weight Gain

When it comes to blending Ashwagandha with other high-quality ingredients, AppetiteMax is the place to go.

With the addition of D-Aspartic Acid, a powerful ashwagandha synergist, it helps drive testosterone up. DAA boosts testosterone in the mid-term while ashwagandha supports healthy levels, protects your mood and hormones, and capitalizes on the strength and power potential of your higher T levels.

Ashwagandha’s virility and mood benefits also combine well with appetite boosters like hunger spark and digestive enzymes. These help improve appetite and post-feeding relaxation, key to driving the “rest and digest” processes that turn food and exercise into muscle and strength.

Combining these with piperine and ginseng also ensures you’re getting the most of every gram of Ashwagandha. This means you’re not just peeing it out, and the benefits stay in your body, absorbing it to support better hormonal health without just increasing the dose. (More space for other benefits!)

Final Thoughts: Can Ashwagandha Make You Gain Weight

Ashwagandha has a great role in many healthy processes - but it’s not going to cause you weight gain by itself. Can you use ashwagandha for weight gain? Absolutely. It’s just got to be combined with a healthy diet and exercise regimen - and ideally as a supplement with other ingredients.

AppetiteMax is a perfect example of Ashwagandha use for weight gain, ensuring that every effect is paired up with an excellent synergist. The result is a far more powerful, high-quality weight gain supplement to help boost appetite and recovery, reduce stress, and help your hormonal health.

Putting ashwagandha into your diet isn’t going to cause weight gain all by itself, but is a powerful tool for wellbeing. It’s a way to make the most of your weight gain to support health and healthy hormones - essential parts of a healthy lifestyle all by itself.