The Smart & Simple Strength Building Guide for your Vagina
This post is intended to clarify and also summarize the points I was trying to make in my super long post about optimizing training of the pelvic floor for hypertrophy.
If anything said here doesn’t make sense, go ahead and read that other post or comment and ask. 🙂
Training the muscles of the pelvic floor and vagina to get stronger with Kegels is similar to training other muscles in the gym but also different and requires a slightly different approach.
The closest form of “normal” gym training to Kegel training is grip training. Grip training is when hand grippers are used to provide resistance to strengthen the hands and forearms.
For hand grip training, the most well known brand of grip trainers is Captains of Crush. For training your vagina, the Kegelmaster is basically a Captains of Crush gripper for your vagina.
Why is hand grip training similar to Kegel training?
There are 2 main reasons:
- Low Amplitude- Both hand grip training and Kegel training have a relatively small amplitude compared to exercises like squats, deadlifts, and pull ups. This means that the movement itself is a smaller movement and it takes less time for you to travel through a full range of motion with the exercise.
- Muscle lengths at maximum force production- Both hand grip training and Kegel training use spring loaded devices for resistance. When the spring is fully compressed, that is when the most force is being produced by the muscles. This is also when the muscles are contracted and at their shortest length. When the spring is not compressed, little to no force is required from the muscles and the muscles are at their longest length. (And even when other Kegel devices are used this point is still true.)
What does this means for training your vagina and getting stronger Kegels?
How many reps & sets are ideal for vaginal bodybuilding?
First, it means that higher reps are more ideal compared to the normal strength & hypertrophy rep recommendations given for other exercises.
10-20 reps for Kegels and hand grippers is like 5-10 reps on squats. And 20-30 reps for Kegels is like 10-20 reps on squats. This is because Kegels are a smaller movement compared to squats in terms of the physical distance the weight needs to travel.
Also, because of the way that grip trainers and the Kegelmaster device work, the muscles are facing the most resistance when they are in their contracted, shortened state and less when they are in their lengthened, stretched state.
This means that there is less muscular damage and mechanical tension going on than metabolic stress to grow the muscle. Exercises that focus on metabolic stress and getting a pump to grow muscle are best done in high rep sets.
So for grip training and Kegel training, the 10-20 and 20-30 rep ranges are more ideal. (This means about 75% or 60% of your 1RM for the 10-20 and 20-30 rep ranges respectively.)
It also means that it may be good to do 4-5 sets of Kegels compared to the common standard of 3 sets for exercises like squats in order to get higher volume and more time under tension.
How often should I train Kegels?
Secondly, it means training should happen more frequently compared to other exercises.
Exercises that focus on metabolic stress should be done more frequently than other types of exercises that cause more mechanical tension and muscles and damage. It’s just easier and faster to recover from the metabolic damage than it is to recover from mechanical tension or muscular damage.
Heavy squats (lots of muscular damage and mechanical tension) can be done as little as once or twice a week.
Grip training and especially kegel training for vaginal bodybuilding is best done every other day or every day up to 6 days a week, depending on personal recovery time needed between Kegel workouts.
How do I maximize muscle growth for pelvic floor strength training?
Because the pelvic floor cannot be maximally loaded with stretched muscle lengths for reps with a spring loaded device like the Kegelmaster, I would suggest that the way around this would be to perform overcoming isometric Kegels with a Kegelmaster on a level that is too high for you or with a speculum.
This would allow the vaginal muscles to exert maximum effort while being stretched and induce greater mechanical tensions and muscle tears for hypertrophy.
One could also perform half reps with a Kegelmaster on a level that is too difficult to close fully but can be closed partially. This would mean you are essentially performing lengthened partial Kegels.
However, these suggestions do not work the pelvic floor through a full range of motion. So they are nice additional variants to training but full range of motion for a muscle is ideal, especially when training for athletic performance such as when training to be able to perform Pompoir skills and particularly for Pompoir skills that involve the shortened partial range of motion such as the sucking movement.
What’s the best position to train in for Kegels?
There is no right or wrong position to train in as long as the lumbar spine is kept in a neutral position while training and is not in anterior or posterior pelvic tilt.
When training with a Perifit device or jade yoni egg, it is best to train seated or standing in order to have the pelvic floor work against gravity for a more effective workout with more resistance.
When training with the Kegelmaster, the device itself provides the resistance more so than gravity so Training lying down the the Kegelmaster is easiest, especially given the shape and positioning of the device.
Training the pelvic floor in a full range of motion while also maximizing the stretch in the muscles of the pelvic floor would mean training in a “happy baby” yoga position or a deep squat position (or seated on a low stool with hips opened into abduction if you can’t deep squat), or a child’s pose position while performing Kegels with the Kegelmaster, Perifit, or Kegel device of your choice.
Training in these stretched positions using full range of motion Kegels would be ideal since it gives the best of both worlds of full ROM (or as full as possible in the stretched position) and training the muscles while they’re stretched to create more muscle growth.
Plus, training in the happy baby position in particular mimics being in a sex position so you could say it’s a form of “functional training” that will prepare you for the real thing.
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