The
facts about sex
Sexual
health for women and men: Kegel exercises
This
page describes "Kegel
exercises", an effective way of
improving sexual health and sexual pleasure
for men and women. These exercises aim to
strengthen your pelvic floor muscles, also
called pubococcygeus muscles (or PC muscles
for short). These muscles are part of the
pelvic floor area and support the organs
above them.
Like
all other muscles, if we don't use our PC
muscles they lose their strength. In other
cases they may become too tense if we hold
on to stress in our bodies. Women can easily
test the condition of their PC muscles by
inserting a finger into their vagina. The PC
muscles are those which help you to squeeze
your finger while it's in there. Your PC
muscles should allow you to insert a finger
easily (which means they're not too tense)
and allow you to squeeze it (which suggests
they're in good shape). When you embark on
your own training program for your PC
muscles, remember that as with any other
muscles you will need to relax them as well
as strengthen them. And give yourself some
time: doing too much too quickly can get
them tense rather than nicely toned.
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The
benefits of doing the Kegel exercises for
women
are an increased blood flow to the
pelvic area, resulting in generally better
sexual health and a fuller experience of
sexuality. Also, Kegel exercises can tone
the muscles to prevent or cure stress
incontinence in older women or after a
vaginal birth. They are often used as part
of a treatment for sexual problems in women
such as pain during intercourse.
Additionally, the Kegel exercises will build
up the strength of your PC muscles, which
will increase the strength of your orgasms.
Finally, good PC muscles are a must for
female ejaculation, if you wish to
experience this.
Kegel
exercises also benefit men.
They are
used to relieve stress incontinence in older
men. However, exercising your PC muscles
when healthy will go a long way to
developing your sexuality. Fitness-training
your PC muscles will increase blood flow to
the pelvic floor area and increase sexual
health and orgasmic pleasure in general.
Good PC muscles are essential for powerful
ejaculation and strong orgasms. And finally,
knowing how to use your PC muscles can help
you to regulate when you want to ejaculate.
The Kegel exercises are therefore great for
men, who experience problems like premature
ejaculation or are interested in Tantric sex
techniques.
Before
I describe how the fitness training is done,
just a few words about the history of the
Kegel exercises. They are named after Dr
Arnold Kegel, an obstetrician and
gynecologist, who was concerned about the
great numbers of women who experienced
urinary stress incontinency due to age or
after childbirth. In 1947 he developed a
device called the Kegel Perineometer
to help women exercise their PC muscles.
This was basically a device shaped like a
dildo, which could be inserted into the
vagina and which measured the pressure with
which women could squeeze it with their PC
muscles. Kegel managed to cure more then 90%
of his patients through exercise of their PC
muscles alone, at a time when most other
clinicians still opted for surgery. Today,
similar devices are still used to exercise
PC muscles and one can purchase different
models via the internet. However, you don't
necessarily need one of them to exercise
your PC muscles! It only takes
patience and effort to do so.
Kegel
exercises: How to do it
Step
1: Identifying the right muscles
This
is really the only potential difficulty with
the exercises. You should aim to squeeze
only your PC muscles when exercising, not
your anal muscles, abdomen, thighs or
buttocks. The PC muscles are those muscles
you would contract to stop yourself from
urinating. Therefore an easy way to find
them is to sit on the toilet (this applies
to men too!), start urinating and then stop.
The muscles you use to do this are your PC
muscles. Once you have learned which muscles
are your PC muscles you can contract them
whilst doing other things, such as sitting
in your car or waiting at the bus stop! Make
sure you check that you do not contract any
other muscles at the same time. If you
experience any discomfort such as lower back
pain, check your technique.
Step
2: Exercising your PC muscles
As
with any other muscle group there are
various ways of going about strengthening
your PC muscles. You could, for example, go
for repetitive squeezes, say a block of 5
squeezes, repeating each block of 5 three
times, and doing the whole set twice a day.
Or you could try squeezing and holding for 3
seconds and then repeating.
Make
sure you do not tense any other muscles or
hold your breath while you are doing these
exercises. It's also a good idea to vary the
pattern you're using to squeeze your PC
muscles, and to keep adding more
repetitions. Once your PC muscles are the
strength you want them to be, doing
your exercises 3 times per week will keep
them in shape.
Step
3: Remember to relax your PC muscles
After
your exercises remember to relax your PC
muscles. Experiment with how it feels to
really let them go loose. You could also
combine this with any other physical
relaxation exercise such as autogenic
training or a visualization.
Step
4: Keep it up!
One
of the tricky points about training your PC
muscles can be remembering to do the
exercises. You may want to do your exercises
in bed, once in the morning and once before
you fall asleep. Or you could link doing
your PC exercises with another activity, so
that, for example, each time you eat
breakfast (or think about sex!) you do some
squeezes. It may take a while for you to
notice the difference in your PC muscles,
though generally speaking, people report
results after 4- 6 weeks. This may seem a
long time to keep investing in these
exercises. However, if you think about how
much energy and money you may invest in your
sexual attractiveness in other ways (such as
going to the gym, slimming products,
cosmetics or your car), the Kegel exercises
are a convenient, cheap and reliable way to
improve your sexual health. So, get
squeezing!
Comment about the Kegel exercises by Abigail
O’Donovan, founder of Kegelmaster Europe
A common misconception about Kegel exercises
is that they can be effective without
resistance. Kegel exercises that do not
involve exercising the muscles against
resistance are not strictly speaking Kegel
exercises. Dr Kegel ALWAYS stressed the
necessity of isolating the pelvic floor
muscles and working the muscles against
RESISTANCE. With resistance exercise Dr
Kegel achieved a 93% relief rate of urinary
stress incontinence in a study involving 300
women in 1950. There followed a cessation of
surgery for urinary stress incontinence in
his hospital as a result. His success at
alleviating urinary stress incontinence far
surpasses the generally accepted success
rates of surgical interventions today.
Dr Kegel was a gynecologist who worked with
thousands of women over a period which
spanned over thirty-two years. Many women
reported that their sex lives had also
greatly improved as a result of resistance
exercise. In 1952, he wrote, “Observations
in [more than 3,000 women,] both parous and
nulliparous..., ranging in age from 16 to 74
years, have led to the conclusion that
sexual feeling within the vagina is closely
related to muscle tone, and can be improved
through muscle education and resistive
exercise." Dr Arnold Kegel, ‘Sexual
Functions of the Pubococcygeus Muscle’,
Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics &
Gynaecology, 60, pp. 521-524, 1952.
Working your pelvic floor muscles against
nothing is about as effective as trying to
rehabilitate or build muscle in your arm
simply by moving it up and down. One could
do that forever and see little improvement.
However, if one puts a small weight in one’s
hand and exercises against the resistance of
the weight, improvements in strength and
muscle tone are inevitable.
Imagine going to the gym. All the equipment
has been removed and somebody tells you can
go through the motions of your exercises and
achieve the same result. Would you believe
them?
If women were aware that for the Kegel
exercises to work they needed to exercise
against resistance, we would not be seeing
the great amount of surgery being carried
out today. Dr Kegel set out to find a way to
prevent unnecessary surgery and find a
healthier alternative for women. Since their
invention his exercises have been diluted.
As a result, some women have had surgery for
incontinence and various types of prolapse,
which could have been prevented.
In all the years my colleague and I have
toured various health shows, exhibitions and
conferences, and have talked to many women
on the phone, we have met only one woman out
of well over a thousand who had managed to
resolve a problem by squeezing against
nothing!
Lack of knowledge about the need for
resistance is one of the reasons why I
regularly get calls from women who have been
told they need surgery, even if they have
worked at what they believed to be Kegel
exercises for years. Women today are not
being given the correct information about
authentic Kegel exercises.
Kegel exercises when properly performed are
extremely powerful. They can empower women
to more fully enjoy their sex lives and
relationships while reducing the need for
pelvic surgery to near zero.
Abigail O’Donovan is the founder of
Kegelmaster Europe. She discovered through
researching the subject of pelvic floor
exercises that the way the exercises are
taught today is a watered down version. She
is committed to raising awareness of the
need for a correct application of the Kegel
exercises.
To find out how you can achieve real results
with
Kegel exercises click here!
(Sex and
Relationships.com would really like to thank
Abigail for her generous contribution and
her passion for women's sexual health.)
Other
related topics:
Female
sex hormones and reproductive cycle
Men's
sexual anatomy: Penis and scrotum
Men's
sexual anatomy: Testes, epididymis, prostate
How
does an erection work?
For a bit of
fun, have a look at
this website all about Kegel exercises!
He
says:
Men may be reluctant to try out
these Kegel exercises because they are so
often prescribed to improve the sexual
health of women. However, if you as a man
are interested in strengthening your
orgasms, this is a sure-fire way to do it. I
know the exercises work, because I tried
them myself. The results were quite
spectacular! Instead of ejaculating weakly,
or even just dribbling at the moment of
ejaculation, I achieved a powerful
ejaculation (which impressed me as much as
it did my partner). But even though this
looks impressive, the greater benefit is
that the intensity of the muscular
contractions which accompany your orgasmic
ejaculation are greatly increased, and this
means that your pleasure is intensified many
times over. You will also find that your
orgasm continues for longer; you may even be
able to develop male multiple orgasms by
continuing to thrust after you have
ejaculated. I know that this can be painful
for some men, but the interesting thing is
that the sensitivity of the glans quickly
diminishes if you continue to thrust, and
once you have gone through the discomfort,
you may well find that you continue to
experience powerful orgasmic contractions
with no ejaculation. These contractions are
much more diffuse, seeming to spread out
through the whole body, and they are
extremely pleasurable and long-lasting.
Source for the facts
cited in this page:
ABC of Sexual Health
(2005) Second edition edited by John M
Tomlinson, British Medical Journal Books and
Blackwell Publishing.
Female ejaculation and
the G-spot (2003) by Deborah Sundahl. Hunter
House Publishers.
Kegelmaster.
Written by Anna: May
2006, edited 20.08.07
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