What Does Shilajit Do for Men?

What does shilajit do for men? On the published evidence, two things have been measured and nothing else has. Shilajit is a purified rock resin, and exactly two randomised controlled trials have been run in men specifically. One measured blood hormone readings in 75 men aged 45 to 55 over 90 days. The other measured leg strength in 63 men averaging 21 years old over eight weeks. Both were funded by the company that manufactures the extract they tested. Neither asked a single participant how he felt.

That is the honest total of the evidence base, and it is why this page is written the way it is. Below, both trials are read line by line: the preparation, the dose, the duration, the screening, the dropouts, the numbers that get quoted and the numbers that do not. Then the part nobody publishes, which is what else moves the same measurement, and by how much. If you are deciding whether to spend money on a jar, that comparison is the decision.

How to read a shilajit trial before you read its headline number

Every commercial page ranking for shilajit benefits for men quotes the same two percentages from the same paper. None of them tells you how to judge whether those percentages mean anything. These are the six things we check before a result is allowed to count, and they are the reason our answers are narrower than the ones you have been reading.

Who paid for it. A trial funded by the manufacturer of the tested product is not automatically wrong, but it is a fact the reader is entitled to. Both trials in men were paid for by Natreon Inc, the company that produces and sells the patented extract used in each. That is stated in the acknowledgements of one and the funding declaration of the other.

Who was actually in the room. “Healthy volunteers” is a phrase that hides a lot. The screening instrument matters more than the label, because a trial that recruits symptomatic men and calls them healthy is measuring something different from a trial that recruits genuinely unremarkable ones.

What preparation was used. Neither trial tested a jar of resin. Both used PrimaVie, a patented, HPLC-standardised extract specified to contain not less than 60 percent total bioactives, not less than 50 percent fulvic acids and not less than 10 percent dibenzo-alpha-pyrone chromoproteins. Results from a standardised extract are evidence about that extract.

What was measured, and what kind of thing it is. A blood hormone reading is a surrogate marker. A leg extension torque figure is a performance outcome. Neither is the same as a person reporting that something changed, and only the second sort of endpoint answers the question most readers are actually asking.

What the control arm did. A between-group difference has two halves. If the placebo group moved sharply in the opposite direction, the headline gap is not driven only by the supplement, and the honest reading changes. This is the single most-skipped detail in the coverage of the 2016 trial.

What was never measured at all. The most useful column in any of these papers is the empty one. Fertility outcomes, sexual function scores, prostate markers, symptom questionnaires at the end of the study: none of these appear. Absence of evidence is not a negative result, but it is also not a reassurance, and no page should let it read as one.

Shilajit and testosterone: what the 2016 trial measured

Can shilajit increase testosterone? That is the question behind almost every search for shilajit for testosterone, and there is exactly one human trial in men that goes anywhere near it.

The paper is Pandit, Biswas, Jana, De, Mukhopadhyay and Biswas, published in Andrologia in 2016, volume 48, pages 570 to 575. It ran at the J. B. Roy State Ayurvedic Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata between December 2012 and March 2014.

It was randomised, double-blind and placebo-controlled. Of 145 men assessed, 49 were excluded and 96 were enrolled, split evenly into two arms of 48. Twenty-one men then discontinued, leaving 38 in the shilajit arm and 37 on placebo. Mean ages were 49.44 and 48.89 years. The dose was one 250 mg capsule twice daily after major meals for 90 days, so 500 mg per day. Blood was drawn at day 0, day 30, day 60 and day 90 for total testosterone, free testosterone, LH, FSH and DHEAS.

Here is what the paper reports, taken from its own Table 2. Every figure below is a mean, and the study’s own standard deviations were wide enough that individual results varied a great deal around them.

Marker	Shilajit day 0	Shilajit day 90	Placebo day 0	Placebo day 90
Total testosterone (ng/ml)	4.84	5.83	5.82	4.45
Free testosterone (pg/ml)	15.36	18.30	19.30	12.21
DHEAS (µg/dl)	145.09	190.57	139.60	138.77
LH (mIU/ml)	6.33	6.79	6.49	7.45
FSH (mIU/ml)	6.94	8.41	6.91	10.23

Within the shilajit arm, total testosterone readings were 20.45 percent above baseline at day 90, free testosterone 19.14 percent above, and DHEAS 31.35 percent above, each significant at P below 0.05. LH held steady. FSH rose in the shilajit arm at days 30, 60 and 90.

Two details that change how those numbers read

Look at the placebo column. The placebo arm started higher than the shilajit arm on both testosterone measures, 5.82 against 4.84 and 19.30 against 15.36, and then fell by roughly 24 percent and 37 percent respectively over 90 days. The paper describes this as a significant decreasing trend and offers no explanation for it. That matters, because the day 90 gap between the two arms is produced as much by a falling control group as by a rising treatment group, and a control group of healthy men whose testosterone readings drop by a quarter in three months is not a normal expectation. It is the number nobody quotes.

Second, read the screening. Volunteers were selected using the St Louis University ADAM questionnaire, a ten-item symptom screen, and were included only if they answered yes to the question about libido, the question about erections, or any three of the other eight. In plain terms, every man enrolled reported symptoms associated with declining testosterone before the trial started. Calling them healthy volunteers is defensible, because they were free of organic disease, but the group is not a cross-section of men.

What Pandit and colleagues did not establish

At least as much as the above, and it deserves the same word count.

The trial did not measure whether anyone felt different. The ADAM questionnaire was used as an entry gate and never re-administered as an outcome, so nobody knows whether libido, energy, mood or erections changed. It did not measure fertility of any kind: no semen analysis, no pregnancies. It did not measure prostate markers, body composition, strength, or sleep. It reported no adverse-event table.

It also cannot speak for anyone outside its own frame. One age band of 45 to 55. One patented extract at one dose for one duration. One centre, one country, one 90-day window. Analysis was by paired and unpaired Student’s t-tests with no adjustment for the number of comparisons made, and there has been no independent replication at scale in the decade since. A single small trial, funded by the manufacturer, is a reason to keep reading the literature. It is not a reason to expect an outcome, and under Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 it does not license a claim: the European Commission’s own guidance is that only claims authorised and entered on the EU register may be used on a food, and there is no authorised claim for shilajit.

Shilajit uses for men in a strength trial: Keller and colleagues, 2019

The second and more defensible piece of evidence is Keller, Housh, Hill, Smith, Schmidt and Johnson, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition in 2019. Sixty-three recreationally active men, mean age 21.2 years, were randomised into three arms of 21: placebo, 250 mg per day, or 500 mg per day of the same standardised extract, for eight weeks.

The protocol was concrete. Before and after supplementation, participants performed maximal voluntary isometric contractions of the leg extensors, then two sets of 50 maximal bilateral concentric isokinetic leg extensions at 180 degrees per second with two minutes of rest between sets, then repeated the isometric test. The outcome of interest was how much maximal strength was lost to that fatiguing protocol. Serum hydroxyproline, a marker associated with collagen turnover, was measured alongside it.

In the subgroup performing above the median, the 500 mg arm lost 8.9 percent of maximal isometric strength after the fatiguing protocol, against 17.0 percent in the 250 mg arm and 16.0 percent on placebo. Baseline hydroxyproline was lower in that same 500 mg subgroup.

Now the limits, which the authors state plainly. The findings sit in an upper-median subgroup analysis, not in the whole sample. Across the full group, the isometric strength outcome was not significant. Concentric peak torque did not differ. The 250 mg arm did not separate from placebo, so the lower of the two doses showed nothing. The sample was a male-only convenience sample of young, recreationally active men, the protocol tested concentric work only, and the authors note they could not distinguish muscle from tendon collagen turnover and did not measure bioactive concentrations in the participants. The study was funded by Natreon Inc.

What that leaves is genuinely interesting and genuinely narrow: in one trial, in young active men, at 500 mg per day, in half the sample, less strength was lost to a specific laboratory fatigue protocol. It says nothing about training outcomes, muscle size, or performance in a sport.

What happens when a man takes shilajit, and why men use it

Why do men use shilajit? Overwhelmingly because of what they have read about shilajit testosterone, which is the search that built this entire category. Here is the part the trials cannot tell you, so it will be described rather than claimed. The reliable, observable effects of taking resin are the taste, which is bitter, smoky and distinctly mineral, and the routine of dissolving a portion the size of a grain of rice in warm water or milk. Most people notice the taste on day one and nothing else on day one.

Reports from men who take it are not evidence, and we will not present them as such. They are also the reason a lot of people search for this in the first place, so the honest framing is this: no trial in men has measured a subjective outcome, which means every account you read of how it felt, including a positive one, is uncontrolled and unblinded. If you want to know whether onset is a real thing and how long a fair trial of it would be, that question has its own page.

Is shilajit good before bed? No trial has compared morning with evening dosing, so nobody knows. Pandit and colleagues gave both daily doses after major meals and Keller and colleagues did not report timing at all, which means any rule you have read about the best time to take it is somebody’s preference dressed as a finding.

Practically, that means treating a purchase as a personal test rather than an expectation. Fix the dose, fix the time of day, keep everything else stable for a defined window, and write down what you are actually trying to observe before you start. A test with no pre-registered endpoint always succeeds, which is exactly why it is worthless.

What moves the same measurement far more than a supplement does

If your interest in shilajit is really an interest in testosterone, this section is the most useful one on the page, because the comparison is rarely made and it is not close.

Leproult and Van Cauter, writing in JAMA in 2011, took 10 healthy men with a mean age of 24.3 years through three nights of 10-hour bedtimes followed by eight nights of 5-hour bedtimes, sampling blood every 15 to 30 minutes around the clock. After one week of restricted sleep, daytime testosterone was 10 to 15 percent lower, from 18.4 nmol/l rested to 16.5 nmol/l restricted, with the decline most visible between 2pm and 10pm. That is a week of short nights in ten young men, producing a shift of the same order as the 90-day between-arm difference in the shilajit trial, in the opposite direction, for free.

The same logic applies to the other large inputs. Body composition, alcohol intake, chronic training load relative to recovery, and age itself all act on the same measurement, and they act continuously rather than for the 90 days you happen to be taking a capsule. Age in particular is why the 2016 trial recruited men aged 45 to 55: that is the window in which the decline the trial was interested in becomes visible.

None of this means a supplement is pointless. It means the sequence matters. If you are sleeping five hours, drinking most evenings and training through fatigue, a jar of resin is the smallest available lever, and no honest page should sell it to you as the largest. Sort the sequence, then decide whether you still want to run the test.

Sexual function, fertility and the prostate: what has and has not been measured

This is the question behind a large share of the searches, in several languages, and it deserves a direct answer rather than an evasion.

On sexual function, nothing has been measured. Neither trial in men used the International Index of Erectile Function or any comparable instrument. The 2016 trial screened for symptoms including reduced libido and weaker erections at entry, then never asked again. There is no published human trial reporting sexual-function outcomes after shilajit supplementation, and any page telling you otherwise is extrapolating from a hormone reading to an experience, which is not a step the data supports.

On fertility, there is one earlier and quite different study. Biswas and colleagues, in Andrologia in 2010, gave 100 mg of processed shilajit twice daily for 90 days to men diagnosed with oligospermia, meaning sperm counts below 20 million per millilitre. Thirty-five were enrolled and 28 completed. The paper reports higher total sperm count, motility and total testosterone against each man’s own baseline, and unaltered liver and kidney markers. Note what that design is: an uncontrolled, unblinded study, with no placebo arm, in a patient population with a diagnosed condition, at a different dose from the 2016 trial. It is evidence about that clinical group and no one else, it does not report pregnancies or live births, and it is not a basis on which we would make any claim.

On the prostate, there is nothing at all. No published human trial has measured prostate-specific antigen, prostate volume or urinary symptom scores after taking shilajit. If you have a prostate concern, this page is not the answer to it, and a urologist is.

Shilajit side effects for men, and who should not take it

The published trials in men reported no alteration in liver or kidney blood markers at the doses tested, but both were small, both were short, and neither was designed to detect uncommon harms. That is a limit on the safety data for shilajit for men, not a safety claim, and the two are constantly confused in this category. The exclusion list and the reported effects are covered properly on the side effects page; the specifics that matter most for men are here.

Iron is the first. Shilajit is iron-rich, which is a reason to avoid it entirely if you have haemochromatosis or any other iron-overload condition. Purity is the second. Raw material collected from rock can carry lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium, which is why purification and batch testing are the whole subject rather than a detail, and why a cheap unlabelled jar is the real risk in this category rather than the resin itself. That is covered in heavy metals and purification.

Beyond that: do not take shilajit if you are on prescribed medication without speaking to a doctor or pharmacist first, particularly anything affecting iron status or anything you take for a diagnosed condition. It is not for children. It is not for use in pregnancy or while breastfeeding, and the mirror of this page covers what has and has not been studied in women. If you have a diagnosed condition of any kind, ask a clinician before you start rather than after.

What actually decides whether this is worth your money

Three things, and testosterone is not one of them. First, whether the larger inputs are already in order, because a supplement taken on five hours of sleep is answering the wrong question. Second, whether you can verify what is in the jar, since every trial above tested a standardised, laboratory-characterised extract and none of them tested an anonymous lump of resin bought on a marketplace. Third, whether you are prepared to run a fixed, boring, self-honest trial for a defined period and accept a null result, because the alternative is paying for a story.

If those three hold, the format decision is the last one, and it is a practical rather than a scientific one: resin is what the traditional preparation is and what most people mean by shilajit, capsules remove the taste and fix the dose. Our shilajit resin is the starting point most people want, and the format comparison sets out the trade-offs without pretending one is stronger than the other. If you have not read the wider evidence review yet, what the trials show across all outcomes is the page to read before you buy anything.