To those who have built an exceptionally strong PC muscle

[RichB]

...How have you increased the demand on your PC muscle over time, such that it continually grows stronger to accommodate?


Clearly there's a number of ways to evolve your kegel routine over time - increasing frequency of training, increasing reps, increasing sets, increasing duration of holds, increasing intensity of contractions. Adding weight to weighted exercises.

What type of training progression has benefitted you? There's much wildly differing advice on the net, but alot of it is speculation. I'd love to hear what has personally worked for you in transforming your PC muscle strength, power and endurance.

[remek]

RichB: Welcome to the PE Gym! You're right - there is a lot of speculation on the Net. It's hard to know what works. I suppose every man is different, but what works best for me is:

• Doing the Kegel Start/Stop every time I use the restroom
• Giving my Pelvic Floor Muscles plenty of rest (i.e. working it hard one day, then taking the next day off)
• Gradually increasing the intensity by doing the things you noted above.

What about you? What do you find works best?

[RichB]

Thanks for the welcome You have an awesome forum and site here, the objective & experimental approach really appeals.

I've not really been doing Kegels long enough to form a judgement. At the moment I'm going for 2-4 sets of 100 quick reps, and 2-4 sets of 10-second PC holds, 10 reps a set - all spread throughout the day. All done well clear of muscular failure.

I understand the principle behind training hard & giving 48hrs rest, i.e. it's how you should train skeletal muscle for size and strength, e.g. classic bodybuilding.

My intuition with kegels was that what is most important is developing the neural highways and nerve innervation into the PC muscle so more of the muscle fibres that are already there are getting recruited and contracting harder. This is more aligned with the thinking behind functional strength training as opposed to bodybuilding.

Again it's just personal speculation so it'd be great to here from others. I'm going to stick with the everyday approach for 2 months or so, maybe taking 1 day a week off for recovery. I guess I'll judge it by erection strength, etc.

[remek]

RichB: Glad you like the site. We're trying to build a database of both applicable information and theoretical/experimental information.

About your approach: I think I follow you, but let me ask. You're saying that Kegeling every day will help build stronger muscles opposed to giving a day between rest? Isn't this against everything they teach you about building stronger skeletal muscles?

[HealthNFitn3ss]

Hey I'm new to PE but i have a little concern about your approach. I started my PE very intense and while i only had what I considered minor side effects I got a lot of warning about starting with too much intensity. I'm very big into the gym and eating to gain and how to work out to gain, so on and so forth. It is true that you need rest to build but still I and many other successful weight lifters I know work out 5-6 days a week. However We obviously are not using the same muscle each day and there are the slacker weeks where you maybe cut back to 4 times. That being said, if the PC is a skeletal muscle I would really urge you to reconsider working it every day. Personally I feel like I could kegel every single day... but I don't. I do think if you do it every other day you will see better results and possibly kegel a little lighter. Again I'm new to PE but I'm not new to muscular exercise. That may be the reason I don't find kegels to be strenuous. Before I even did or heard of what a kegel was most commonly after leg days I would sometimes literally get a charlie horse cramp in the PC muscle when urinating. Possibly if you overwork your PC muscle the same thing might happen to you. My (unprofessional) opinion is that you should ease up on that exercise.

[RichB]

Yeah my thinking behind it was more along the lines of functional strength training, rather than classic bodybuilding for mass/strength. More similar to the way olympic lifters train (although they train for speed-strength) than bodybuilders or most people on any sort of mass/strength program. The aim being not to grow more muscle fibre, but purely to develop the neurological highways to the fibres that are already there.


Exercise strength training kettlebell conditioning diet health ultimate fitness workout is a good source of functional strength training info (no affiliation); you'll see routines with people doing several sets of pullups everyday throughout the day, steering well clear of muscular failure, in order to quickly develop pullup strength for the army.... etc etc.


Of course its just speculation that this is the optimum way to train the pelvic floor muscles... I'm not entirely clear on their role in erections to be honest. Time for some research!