In the world of supplements, almost all of them are used for one of two things: to lose weight or to boost your overall health. One among them stands alone with a different purpose.
That supplement is Maca and that purpose? To give you bigger, healthier curves.
The quest for health is endless, and the search for the perfect appearance is even more so. Losing weight is only part of the battle. Millions of women lose weight, only to find that they've lost the curves they – and their partners – so enjoyed.
Of course, it's difficult or impossible to put weight back on, but only in the specific areas where you want it. If you just start eating cake after dinner, you'll end up with more "junk in the trunk" and a curvier figure, sure, but you'll also put some on the hips, on the stomach, and hanging from your arms.
You can also strive to gain weight through muscle building. If you want a curvier rear, squats and other glute workouts are the way to go, but even that has a cap on how well it can work. Muscles grow and bulk up, but they get denser after time, and it takes a ton of dedicated time, effort, and workouts to build bulk beyond just the basic butt.
Maca as a supplement has been used for a variety of different purposes, including sexual enhancement, nutritional supplements, and disease-fighting. However, it's also broadly known as a superfood to help boost your curves. The question is, can it do that?
What is Maca, Anyway?
If you're not certain what maca is, let's start with the basics. It's a root vegetable and herbal remedy that comes primarily from a single lake area in the Andes mountains, high in Peru. For centuries, it was a staple vegetable and supplement for a small group of Peruvian people, and only in the last few decades has it made it out of the borders as an herbal remedy and supplement for sale. Even now it's not widely cultivated anywhere else, simply because it needs such a specific set of environmental conditions to thrive.
If you were to harvest maca by hand and use it, you'd be getting a root similar to something like ginger, turmeric, or ginseng. Maca is so similar to these that it's also occasionally known as Peruvian ginseng. It's a different species, however, and is more closely related to cruciferous vegetables, including cauliflower, broccoli, and kale.
Instead, you'll generally find maca in the form of a powder. Maca is dried with a low and slow warmth, and once dried, it is ground into a fine powder. This powder is used locally as a replacement for flour (since traditional grains are as prevalent in the area) but can also be more concentrated. You may also find it in liquid form, or with the powder packaged in capsules, for easy consumption.
You'll find maca included in a variety of different super-supplement powders, often used as general health boosters, as well as fertility enhancers, sexual performance boosters, and mood lifters. It may also be part of nootropic mixtures meant to boost your attention, focus, and mental clarity.
These days, you'll also find maca as a stand-alone supplement or as part of a blend specifically formulated as a "curve booster" or "glute enhancer", meant to help you grow and maintain those curves you want.
Can Maca Give You a Bigger Butt?
Maca is frequently advertised today as a way to get a bigger butt, healthy curves, and a toned body. Does it work?
The answer is… it's complicated. Yes, we know that's not really what you wanted to hear, but(t) bear with us.
Eating maca alone, and doing nothing else, might not do much of anything for you in that department. It may give you some energy, it may help you out with some stamina, it may give you a boost to your libido or your fertility, but passively, it's not a hugely active ingredient. You can't maintain your current lifestyle (probably, depending on what that lifestyle is) and expect maca to give you curves.
What maca does is function as a workout supplement. When you do your workouts, maca helps you out.
- Maca can give you a boost of energy, helping you find the motivation to work out on off days.
- Maca can give you more sustained energy, to keep your workouts going longer.
- Maca helps you push past barriers, lifting more weights and doing more reps.
- Maca is full of protein and fiber, giving your body the fuel it needs to rebuild after working out.
- Maca can even help adjust your bodily hormones, making working out feel better and helping you grow afterward.
In general, then, maca is a good workout supplement. It serves the purposes of a protein powder and an energy booster, albeit not quite as well as a dedicated version of either one of those. It's also more robust and well-rounded, which is what you want to be, so it works out!
How Maca Helps Build Curves
When you're looking to build curves, you can do it in one of two ways. You can build fat, or you can build muscle.
Fat is not a good way to build curves unless you mean a lot of curves. Love handles and jiggle physics are the names of the game when you're racking up the fat. Sure, some people are into that, but it's not a healthy way to live for most people, and it's usually not a goal you need to work towards. Quite the opposite, in fact; it's a lack of work that leads to a fat-filled body.
Most people who are concerned with building healthy curves want to do it right. That means cutting down on body fat, but building toned muscle in all the right places. You don't want to become a bodybuilder, but trust us, that's not much of a risk.
Bodybuilders have to put a ton of time, work, and effort into their appearances. Many of them also have to resort to anabolic steroids to get the results they want. You will never accidentally end up looking like a bodybuilder. That kind of appearance is the result of 6+ hours of training a day, a huge and very carefully controlled diet, and a lot of guidance and planning, plus supplements and more.
If you just want a toned body with a nice butt, that's a lot easier. You need to lose enough body fat that you cut down the love handles and the extraneous fat, but not so much that you end up as thin as a reed. We call it a "healthy weight range", but that's kind of putting the cart before the horse.
Maca helps you build these healthy curves in a few different ways.
- It can help balance out your hormones. This is true in both men and women, and yes, even men can be concerned with having a nice rear end. Balanced hormones help you avoid the doldrums of depression and the lack of motivation that makes it hard to work out.
- It's a supplement that gives you protein without a lot of calories. Protein helps you build muscle and recover from working out more easily. Since working out is the core of building these brilliant curves, taking a supplement that enhances the power of working out is a great idea.
- It's full of beneficial minerals and vitamins your body needs, especially when you're working out. You get calcium, potassium, iodine, manganese, zinc, iron, and vitamins B1, B2, C, and D from the supplement. What's not to love?
Of course, you can take maca in a few different ways. You can take it as a powder, but some people find that this causes them a bit of digestive stress. While getting stuck on the toilet will give your rear a bit of a workout, it's not the kind of workout you want, so if you find this happening, consider instead some gelatinized maca. The gelatinization process is a way of preparing maca that makes it more palatable and easier to digest, which reduces the issues that people have to virtually nothing. Chances are, you'll be able to treat it just like protein powder at that point.
Don't be confused either; just because it's called gelatinized does not mean it's like jello; it's still a powder, it's just processed differently.
If taking a powder-based supplement isn't on the table for you, you can try it in capsule form (where the powder is contained within a capsule that dissolves in your stomach, so you don't have to deal with a powder directly or cope with the taste), or you can try maca drops. Liquid maca extract is a sort of concentrated "oil" of maca that has many of the same benefits, in an easier-to-consume package. It just has less protein and no fiber since it's, you know, a liquid, so you'll want to augment your intake of those in other ways.
We also recommend that you make sure you're getting high-quality, 100% real maca. Maca is one of those supplements that has a poor history of being cut with other substances, usually more inert powders like flour, which reduces how effective they are. Get your maca from a trustworthy source and you should be fine.
How to Build a Great Maca Rear
There are several keys to building the curves you want using maca as a supplement.
First of all, you need to get yourself locked into a healthy diet. Cut out the unhealthy fats, sugars, and the processed foods. Going full keto isn't necessary – you can do this on a vegetable-based diet just as easily – but you want to make sure you're eating healthy.
You'll also want to calculate your calories. Identify how much you're taking in every day, and how much you're burning. Set a target weight, a target BMI, and a target figure. Use calculators to figure out how many calories you should be eating each day, and work hard to cut yourself down to the weight level you want.
Then, get working out. You'll want the core of a good workout that covers your whole body. Building muscle is one of the best ways to lose fat, because the more muscle you have, the more calories it takes to fuel them, and thus the more fat you burn. Lifting weights, doing cardio, climbing; whatever you choose, get a robust workout plan going.
As you go, you can start working on specific exercises that enhance your curves. There are quite a few exercises you can do to help enhance your rear, including:
- Single-leg deadlifts with light weights.
- Squat-to-wood-chops, where you squat, stand and do a chopping motion with weights.
- Squat to calf raises, where you go from a full squat to standing on your tiptoes, again with weights.
- Walking lunges, which help build up the muscles in your legs across the board.
- Side lunges, which work out muscles in your legs that you may not even know you had.
- Stair climbing.
Pretty much all of these workouts will target your glutes and the related muscles in your rear and will help bulk them up, assuming you're working out hard and heavy, and taking the appropriate supplements to help rebuild them larger and stronger. Maca is a core component of these supplements, but it's not all; you also want a healthy set of dietary ingredients, protein to rebuild your muscles, vitamins to fuel them, and more. Dietary science is a huge industry, and we're only scratching the surface here. The best choice is to consult with a personal trainer and a nutritionist to build goals and workout plans that are right for you.
Once you get going, build the habits, and build the workouts, you can get the curves you want. You just need to work for them, maca or not.
What were your thoughts after reading about maca today? Did anything surprise you? Be sure to leave us a comment down below with all of your thoughts and questions!
