How often do you do your Kegels?
“I obviously started doing them as soon as you asked,” responds Out of Shape Mother of Two.
“Could you please be my very personal trainer, and email me every Monday so I can keep up with this routine?”
My pleasure.
Kegel Mythology
I wish I could begin this story about Kegels with an erotic tale of how, one night, years ago, a woman named Saraghina climbed on top of me and demonstrated every last one of the extracurricular benefits of her Richard Simmons-like exuberance for and dedication to pelvic floor muscle exercise. That Saraghina had squeezed and released me and squeezed and released me inside her superhuman vagina until I couldn’t release anymore.
But, alas, my initial exposure (ahem) to the almighty Kegel strength and conditioning program was not nearly as romantic. It went something more like this:
About a week after confirming that Susan was pregnant with our first child she called me on her way home from work. “Hello,” I said. No response. I could hear NPR in the background, but no Susan. “Hello?” Still nothing. Figuring it was just another episode of her famous cell phone butt dialing, I was about to hang up.
“Hey!” Susan exclaimed with a heavy breath just before I pushed the receiver’s “end” button.
“You okay?”
“Great!” It sounded forced, and cut short, like she only had time to annunciate the consonants.
“Okay, well, what do you want for dinner?” I asked. “I’ll get it started.”
Silence … until she suddenly blurted out, “Burritos!” And she said it in two syllables instead of three.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked. “Wait a second. You’re doing those Kegel exercises the doctor told us about aren’t you?”
“Yup!”
Maintenance Plan
I remember nodding my head when the doctor told me to be sure to remind Susan to do them, but I also remember that I really had no idea what she was talking about because I was still reveling in what she had said immediately prior: “There’s a good chance your breasts will start to swell. Probably at least a full cup size, maybe two.” As bad luck would have it, Susan’s breasts did not balloon by two cup sizes…or one…or a half, for that matter. Fortunately, though, Susan was paying attention to the Kegel portion of the “You’re-officially-pregnant” lecture so that region of her anatomy didn’t expand either.
“I had heard about Kegels before, of course, and done them off and on,” Susan says, “but when the doctor told me to get started right away, I took her seriously. I’m glad I did, too, because as the pregnancy went on, I could feel those muscles getting weak. Sometimes when I’d laugh or sneeze—especially the sneezing—I’d squirt a little pee. I would have had a full-on gusher if I wouldn’t have started Kegel-sizing months earlier.”
While there shouldn’t be any more pregnancies in our future, Susan has continued a fairly regular routine. “I still do them, usually before I go to sleep at night. It’s pretty good meditation, really,” she says. “Obviously, it’s important for the incontinence factor—nobody needs that—but you just gotta keep your shit right. I sort of get off on being able to ‘grip’ Rydell’s cock with my pussy. It makes me feel strong
A Bit Sidetracked
In addition to the obvious physical attributes, focusing some attention on your Kegel muscles at what some people might consider not exactly the most appropriate time can have enjoyable psychological effects, too.
“Ben-wa balls—and most of the variations on that concept—are great,” says Susan. Internal excercisers come in different sizes, shapes, and materials. The general concept is to insert the balls, and then use your pelvic floor muscles to hold them in place—or flex and release in order to shift them around subtlety. But Susan says she’s less interested in their actual intended purpose as she is for using them to spice up the evening. “I enjoy putting them in during a party and then whispering to Rydell about it before going off to mingle,” she explains. “Then I know he’s thinking about my pussy … and so am I!—All while I’m trying to have a regular conversation with friends. It feels very naughty.”
Thirty-five-year-old Genevieve, who has been married for 10 years and has three children, might not be big on the exercisers (“I can barely motivate enough to get my butt to the gym. The last thing I’m interested in is P90X for my vagina,” she says), but she has weathered a few mind-numbing workplace gatherings by concentrating on what’s going on between her legs instead of between her ears.
“I’ll do them when I’m on a really boring conference call,” she says. “I always think it’s kind of funny … If this guy only knew how completely tedious this meeting is, that I’m doing Kegels instead of paying attention to what he is saying.”
Cherice, another married mom of three who is now in her mid-thirties, once used Kegels to work through a different kind of difficult discussion. “I remember doing them during a final exam,” she says. “It was in interview format and it was just me and my professor. There was absolutely nothing sexual about it; I was just trying to give myself something else on which to focus. It was like being nervous about speaking in public and so you picture everyone in the audience naked. It definitely helped calm my nerves.”
Wonder Woman
Since that test, and through three pregnancies, Kegels have continued to be a calming force in Cherice’s life—especially during her commute to and from work—but what inspired her to start doing them in the first place when she was back in college was nothing to do with serenity.
“I’d heard about a girl who was legendary in her Kegel achievements,” Cherice says. “Some of my guy friends were talking about this girl who had a pussy that was so amazingly strong, she could snap a guy’s dick. Seriously, that’s what they were saying! Out of curiosity, I started to strengthen my Kegels—never with the goal of being destructive. The guys seemed pretty excited by what she could do, so I thought I’d see for myself if there was anything to it.”
And rightly so. Urban legends of broken dicks notwithstanding—and with all clinical benefits of proper Kegel exercise duly noted—aren’t most of us guys just hoping for our own personal Saraghina to show up, and, as Cherice says, surprise us “with a supremely buff muff?”