Sex Tips

Doing Your Kegel Exercises Just Got A Lot More Fun

January 24, 2020 by Justin Lehmiller

**Note: This post is sponsored by Perifit, a Kegel exerciser that turns pelvic floor exercises into a video game. 

Strengthening your pelvic floor muscles through Kegel exercises is a well-established way of giving your sex life a boost. Indeed, study after study has found that these exercises offer a range of sexual benefits to women and men alike.

For example, the potential benefits for women include increased sexual desire, relief from pain during intercourse, as well as the ability to reach orgasm more easily [1]. Kegel exercises have also been shown to enhance sexual satisfaction [2], as well as improve the sexual functioning of women postpartum [3] as well as post-menopause [4].

In order to obtain benefits from these exercises, however, it is important to ensure that you’re doing them correctly and consistently. In other words, you need to be sure you’re targeting the right muscles. It’s for this reason that most clinical studies provide detailed instructions coupled with the use of biofeedback devices to help patients figure out which muscles to contract, when, and for how long.

So what can you do to ensure that you’re getting maximum benefit from your Kegels? Enter the Perifit: a pelvic floor trainer that not only teaches people how to do these exercises, but that also turns them into a game you can play on your smartphone!

The Perifit has two parts: one is a silicone pelvic floor sensor that is inserted in the vagina, while the other is an app for your phone. The sensor communicates with the app via Bluetooth and relays information on the frequency and strength of your pelvic floor contractions.

Perifit pelvic floor trainer.

Within the app, you can select different workout routines as well as your training level (beginner to advanced) in order to customize your exercise program.

Although I focused on the sexual benefits of Kegels above, these exercises have the potential to do a whole lot more. Indeed, strengthening these muscles can also resolve issues with urinary incontinence, they can help treat and prevent issues with prolapse, and they can also speed up recovery from childbirth. They can also potentially make the process of childbirth easier. So depending on your goals, you can select the routine that’s right for you.

The app offers an initial training session that’s designed to help you target the right muscles. Once completed, you can begin your exercises, which are designed to be fun and interactive—in fact, within the app, you can play a whole series of games.

One of the games is similar to Flappy Bird, only you use your vagina instead of your hands to control the movements. Here’s how it works: there’s a butterfly on screen and, as you contract your pelvic floor muscles, it rises—as you release them, it falls. The goal of the game is to follow the path that’s laid out for you, which necessitates moving the butterfly up and down at specific intervals. The strength and length of contractions required to follow the path varies.

The app also tracks your progress over time so that you can see your improvements and adjust your goals accordingly.

Perifit is a unique and inventive pelvic floor exerciser that is designed to ensure that people perform their Kegel exercises correctly. However, I also like that it helps motivate people to continue them by turning these exercises into a game and by providing a virtual “coach” to guide users through all of the steps.

For those who are interested in obtaining the potential intimate and other benefits of Kegel exercises, I recommend choosing a biofeedback device like this because the research is pretty clear that the key to achieving these benefits is proper instruction and training.

To learn more about Perifit and to order one for yourself, click here.

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[1] Beji, N. K., Yalcin, O., & Erkan, H. A. (2003). The effect of pelvic floor training on sexual function of treated patients. International Urogynecology Journal14(4), 234-238.

[2] Topuz, Ş., & Seviğ, E. Ü. (2016). Effects of kegel exercises applied to urinary ıncontinence on sexual satisfaction. Int J Clin Exp Med9(6), 12365-74.

[3] Sobhgol, S. S., Priddis, H., Smith, C. A., & Dahlen, H. G. (2019). The effect of pelvic floor muscle exercise on female sexual function during pregnancy and postpartum: A systematic review. Sexual medicine reviews7(1), 13-28.

[4] Nazarpour, S., Simbar, M., Tehrani, F. R., & Majd, H. A. (2017). Effects of sex education and Kegel exercises on the sexual function of postmenopausal women: a randomized clinical trial. The journal of sexual medicine14(7), 959-967.

Images provided courtesy of Perifit

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Written by
Dr. Justin Lehmiller
Founder & Owner of Sex and Psychology

Dr. Justin Lehmiller is a social psychologist and Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute. He runs the Sex and Psychology blog and podcast and is author of the popular book Tell Me What You Want. Dr. Lehmiller is an award-winning educator, and a prolific researcher who has published more than 50 academic works.

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