Sexual health preoccupies all of us, especially as we get older. A quick internet search will tell you all about kegels and how men should do them to get stronger “down below.” Muscles commonly known as the PC (pubococcygeus) and BC (bulbocavernosus) can get a workout using kegels to make erections stronger, help you last longer during sex, and have more pleasurable orgasms. Sounds amazing!
However, many men aren’t doing their kegels right. They and their pelvic floors could be in for a rude awakening.
Do NOT do kegels without reading this guide first. This is your walkthrough of the pelvic floor, kegeling, and how to improve your sexual health. Kegels aren’t just for women anymore. But you still have to do them correctly.
A Pelvic Floor Crash Course
Your pelvic floor is like a “hammock” of soft muscles slung under your seat. There are a lot of them (we’re not going through them all here). Just know that like any muscle, the pelvic floor can be strengthened through a “workout.”
However, unlike your biceps, quads, or pecs, the pelvic floor is never “off.” If it ever totally relaxed, we’d wet every pair of pants we own; sex would last .01 seconds and we’d have no orgasm. We wouldn’t be able to control anything down there.
This means that since the muscles are never truly relaxed, they also never recover from a workout like other muscles do.
Imagine doing a bicep curl. You can feel the burn in your muscle, the arousing tingle of muscle fibers breaking down so that they can be rebuilt beefier and more beautiful. When you give your bicep a day to rest, you know that you’ll have a stronger bicep as a result.
Now imagine doing a bicep curl and holding it for 45 years. You can’t expect your bicep to get bigger and stronger if it never rests. It will just tire out, hurt, and probably stop working. What does this have to do with the pelvic floor? When men get it in their heads to start kegeling for strength, it has everything to do with it.
Kegels: The Infinite Pelvic Floor Curl
Kegels are a common prescription for postpartum women to strengthen their pelvic floors after the trauma of childbirth. Today, however, both men and women can easily find advice on why they should do kegels regularly for sexual health. The online kegeling guides all say the same thing. Here’s an excerpt from the Mayo Clinic:
“Tighten your pelvic floor muscles, hold the contraction for three seconds, and then relax for three seconds. Try it a few times in a row. When your muscles get stronger, try doing Kegel exercises while sitting, standing or walking … Repeat 3 times a day. Aim for at least three sets of 10 repetitions a day.”
This is sound advice for how to perform kegels, but only for people with very specific conditions, such as those who have had their prostate removed. For most normal men who just want to improve their sexual health, this advice can lead to disaster without some essential extra information.
For most men, a kegel routine includes squeezing to find the muscles and then repeatedly flexing and contracting them until they feel tired. Like the Mayo Clinic says, you can hold it for three seconds, ten times a day. That’s thirty seconds a day that your pelvic floor is held in a screaming corkscrew of sustained contraction. Here’s the problem with that (there are two).
The first problem is that you have to give muscles time to relax. But again, the pelvic floor doesn’t relax like normal muscles do – it has to remain contracted to protect our pant seats and orgasms. Without consciously relaxing the pelvic floor, kegels can increase tension down there without building any strength. This is where the second problem comes in.
Many sites like the Mayo Clinic and even many doctors don’t understand the difference between a tight pelvic floor and a strong one. Pelvic anatomy and health is relatively new because humans didn’t have nearly as many problems with it in the past. Why not?
The pelvic floor muscles are all connected to the muscles in your back and legs like your hamstrings and adductors and hip flexors (oh my). The more civilized we are, the more we sit. And the more we sit, the more those muscles shorten and become restricted. This creates more tension that gets loaded onto our pelvic floors.
So what do we do? We kegel, kegel, kegel. Three seconds, ten times a day, maybe even more because we want results. A results-driven mindset makes kegels dangerous. Lacking the knowledge of how to relax those muscles can cause kegels to do more harm to many men (and women) than good. They achieve the opposite of the results they wanted.
Beyond Kegels: How to REALLY Work Out Your Sex Muscles
If all you do is contract muscles that are already contracted by nature, you can cause them to develop tension, to become shorter, or even to go into spasm. This will lead to more difficulty maintaining erections, less pleasure, and less control. In the pursuit of sexual health, many men give themselves sexual hindrances. And they may not even know they’re doing it.
The truth about kegels is that most of us don’t have pelvic floors that are too relaxed or weak unless we’re very old, have continence issues, or have had our prostate removed. Most men need a pelvic floor that’s stronger, but all they’re doing is making it tighter. Which leads to weakness, dysfunction, and even pain.
Here’s what to do instead.
After you’ve figured out which muscles are the pelvic floor, deeply breathe into your belly. This will make the muscles “push” out and down, sort of like passing gas. Don’t push too hard. Especially if you do a few kegels during the day, which is okay if you don’t overdo them, this is how you can help those muscles relax.
Perform this breath in a squat as well. Proper squats reinforce the muscles that give your pelvic floor its strength, especially the glutes. They’re your best friend if you want to work out your sex muscles for better performance in bed.
Realize that the pelvic floor is connected directly to nervous system functions, which is a fancy way of saying that it tightens automatically when you’re stressed and can be consciously controlled when you’re relaxed. You know how a dog pulls its tail between its legs? That’s what you’re doing for most of the day and it makes you weaker down there.
To undo this pattern, seek help for your stress issues, especially related to sex. Talk with your partner about your misgivings and give yourself some slack. Many men have the world on their shoulders when it comes to their partner’s pleasure. But the odds are that your partner is much more understanding about it than you are with yourself.
The Takeaway for Men Looking to Improve Their Overall Sexual Health
For many men, sexual health is a problem they want to “fix.” Results-driven thinking leads them to research blogs and even reputable medical sites with a goal in mind. With incomplete information, they begin squeezing the living hell from their pelvic floors, praying that it will make their erections stronger. They may achieve the opposite.
For these muscles, tight means weak and relaxed means strong. Imagine a hinge that’s screwed in so tight it looks like it’s about to break and approaching the problem by finding new ways to make it even tighter. All the sitting, stressing, and clenching you do literally holds these muscles back from their true potential.
Letting go of that tension, breathing deeply, and doing squats can give you the strength you need. Resisting the urge to power through spasms of delicate muscles in the hopes of more stamina in bed will be the best “kegel” you’ve ever done.
For more information on directly strengthening the PC muscles for sexual health, see here:
Have a good one!
-David Carreras aka Mr. Manpower
Mr. Manpower’s Guide to
Overall Manhood Enhancement
the ultimate sex guide for men… “male potency without drugs”
–
