Stop Doing Kegels (Do This Instead For ED)

Hello there, modern man. Let me ask you something. Have you been squeezing that pelvic floor or doing the Kegel 100 times a day for the last 6 months and your erections are still not where it used to be? If that's you, you need to listen to this. You are not broken. You are not too old and you are not past your point of no return. You are doing the wrong exercise, the wrong muscle in the wrong way. And nobody ever told you.

This podcast is for you, the modern man. I'm Dr. Anne Truong MD, your host. I'm an intimate health medical doctor and bestselling author of the book Erectile Dysfunction Fix. I'll do a deep dive into sexual health and performance and how it affects men of all ages and backgrounds. So let's get started and be sure to visit my website at sexualhealthformenpodcast.com for more information and resources from the show. See you on the inside.

I'm Dr. Anne Truong MD. I'm a board-certified medical doctor specializing in men's sexual health. I've treated over 7,000 men with ED, and then today I'm going to settle one of the most confused, misunderstood, and poorly explained topics in men's sexual health: Kegel versus pelvic floor rehabilitation. Which one actually fixes ED? The answer is going to surprise you, so stay with me to the end here, okay? Here's the picture I see in my clinic every day, every week. A man comes in, usually in his 50s or 60s, and sometimes even younger, and he asks me, Dr. Anne, I've tried everything. Viagra, testosterone from an online clinic, supplements, Cialis, a pump I bought, and for the last 6 months, I've been doing 100 kegels a day. Sometimes the guy on YouTube tell me that it would cure my ED, and nothing has worked. So I ask him to show me how he doing his Kegel, and almost every time he tighten up his buttocks, he squeezes his inner thigh, he holds his breath, and he clenches his jaw. He is exercising every muscle in his pelvis except the two that control his erection. That is the difference between a Kegel and pelvic floor rehab. and it is the difference between 6 months wasted and 6 weeks of real change. First, let's clear up the language because the internet had made a mess of it. A Kegel is a pelvic floor exercise. That's true because Dr. Arnold Kegel invented the exercise in 1940, but it's actually for women after childbirth, and for decades, men were told it didn't apply to them. Well, that is so wrong. Then about 15 years ago, Men's Health got a hold of it, and suddenly every fitness magazine, every wellness blog, and every podcast are telling you how to do it. They say, do 100 Kegel a day. It will help your ED. It's free. It's easy. You can do it at your desk. Well, here's the problem with that advice. The truth is, a generic Kegel, the kind you see in YouTube video, is not the same as pelvic floor rehab. A Kegel is the movement. It's a contraction. Pelvic floor rehab is a structured, progressive, physician-guided protocol. One is a squeeze, and the other one is physical therapy for the muscle that hold your erection in place. And if you don't know the difference, you'll spend months exercising the wrong muscle in the wrong pattern with nothing to show for it. If you're going to rehabilitate a muscle, you have to know which muscle you're rehabilitating, right? So let me introduce you to two muscle most men never heard of, okay? But they are so important. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you can actually see that. Now, what you see here on the left here on my slide, which is really my left, which is also your left as well, is pelvic floor muscles are the muscle that connect your pubic bone all the way to your tailbone. And they literally hold up your intestine and hold up your bladder. They hold up your rectum. All of that is being held up. It's like a sling. It's like a hammock, right? And it actually coordinate with your abdominal muscle and then also coordinate with your diaphragm as well. So together it works kind of like a circle, right? And so they hold all your intestine together. And if you see it in this picture here, for a man, right? For a man, the two muscle that is critical for erection that will help you maintain the erection that is involved with orgasm and involved with ejaculation is the ischiocavernosus muscle, which is this one right here. Right, which goes up along the penis and wrap around the base of the penis. And also the bulbospongiosus muscle, which wrap around the base of the penis. And those two muscle act like a rubber band at the base of the penis that keep the blood in the penis to maintain it to be firm and to maintain an erection. And also, they are also the muscle that contract during orgasm. And they are also the muscle that propel the semen from the prostate at ejaculation. But let me ask you this. When was the last time you ever exercised this muscle, right? And the reason why I'm asking this is because most men just do it wrong. They tighten up the whole everything in the pelvic floor. So Kegel is an exercise of those two muscles alone. Pelvic floor rehab is a protocol that works on the whole entire, uh, the— that works on these two muscles over time. Now, these two muscles are, are small, but they're mighty. But the truth is, 99% of men with erection problem have very weak pelvic floor muscles. When I say pelvic floor muscle, I meant those two muscles there, okay? Not 60, not 80. Every one of you, if you have ED, you have weak pelvic floor muscle. In 25 years of practice, I've examined thousands of men and I can count on one hand, aye, who walked into my office that may have more of stronger pelvic floor muscles as well. Now, let's talk about the difference between what you're doing and a generic Kegel and what we actually do in the clinic, pelvic floor rehabilitation. Here's how most men do Kegel. They stand in the kitchen or they squeeze everything, their butt, their thigh, their abs, their jaw, and then hold their breath, right? Well, that's what you don't want to do. You want just to squeeze those two muscles alone. So How do you do that? Squeeze only the muscle that is responsible for stopping and starting your urine stream. Those only muscle is very slight. So when you urinate, try to stop your urine stream so you have a feeling what that feels like, okay? That's the bulbospongiosus and the ischiocavernosus. It's very, very small. And what you don't wanna do is to tighten up your buttock, your inner thigh, and your abdominal muscle and take it and hold your breath. You don't want to do that. All right. So what does pelvic floor rehab look like? Pelvic floor rehab, the kind that we do in my office structure, progressive and specific, it is closer to how a physical therapist rebuild a knee after surgery, right? This is here what it looks like step by step. Step 1, isolation. Before you contract anything, you have to relax everything else. So relax your buttock, relax your inner thigh, relax your abdomen, breathe slowly. And kind of start with lying on your back. The only muscle that should fire are the two pelvic floor muscles at the base of your penis, right? Those two muscle. And how do you know? Just try to start and stop your urine stream. That's how you know, okay? And if anything else is moving, you're doing it wrong. Just those muscle. And sometimes you can take your hand, and go touch those muscles as well too. Step 2, what you wanna do, this may be a little complicated, but what I want you to do is when you take a breath in like that, when you take a breath in, you want to relax those two pelvic muscles. You just wanna relax it, you don't wanna tighten it. When you breathe in, you relax, and then you breathe out, you start contracting those muscle. Because what that does is that it coordinate with the diaphragm, which is the muscle that help you open up your lungs bigger, right? And then it also coordinate that with your abdominal muscles as well too. So if your abdominal muscle is strong, then it's gonna help you also do your Kegel exercises as well too. So when you're breathing in, you wanna relax those muscle. When you're breathing out, you wanna contract those muscles. Okay. Most men do it wrong. Step 3 is progressive loading. 2 sets of 10. So you want to do 2 sets of 10. You want to hold that contraction for about 3 seconds. 3 seconds, 1,001, 1,002, 1,003. You start lying on your back, start doing that with your legs bent. And as you get stronger over 2 to 4 weeks, You progress to doing it on your knees, then on your stomach, then standing, and then walking. And then you can integrate this into real life movement, right? So this is the therapy progression. This is how you rebuild a muscle. Yeah, remember what I talk about integrating that breath, because when you integrate the breath, you also are activating your abdominal muscles as well. And you're also facilitating some relaxation that will also help with your penis as well too. Why, why does generic Kegel fail and make some men worse? Well, here's something nobody talks about. Some men do not have weak pelvic floor muscle. They have tight pelvic floor muscle. The muscle that are chronically clenched from stress, sitting all day, or years of anxiety around sex that they cannot release. If you have a tight pelvic floor muscle, you start doing 100 kegels a day, what happen? You don't strengthen it. You actually make it tighter and you're making your erection worse. This is why you have to be examined by a physician and that will create a protocol for you and recommendation what you can do. When I see men with ED, I always examine the pelvic floor muscle, whether it's tight, whether it is relaxed or not. And that's when we will decide whether you need to do Kegel, because if your muscles are tight and you do Kegel, then it will make your ED worse. But if your muscles are weak and you do Kegel, it will improve your ED. But if the pelvic muscle tight, what we do is that we actually will help you relax it sometime with, sometimes with just therapy, sometime with massage. And sometimes with just a little bit of dry needling to facilitate that as well too. I see this mistake every week. And this is why sometimes you're doing Kegel, you're not seeing result. Maybe those muscles are tight there, okay? So, but the hard truth is that Kegel alone won't fix your ED. Now I have to tell you something you may not wanna hear because I respect you too much to lie to you and to say something that may not help. So even if you do pelvic floor rehab perfectly, he will not fix your ED because an erection is not a muscle event. An erection is an orchestra, a coordinated symphony, 6 systems working together in time with no wrong note. Remember we talked about the 6 systems, the Get Hard System, which involves the brain, the emotion, the hormone, the nerve, the blood vessel, and the pelvic floor muscle, which is the penis muscle. So if your hormones are off, stronger Kegel will not fix that. If your penis arteries are narrow from 20 years of high blood pressure or diabetes, stronger Kegel will not rebuild those blood vessel. If your nerves are damaged from prostate surgery or uncontrolled blood sugar or uncontrolled high blood pressure, then Kegel cannot regrow those nerve. The pelvic floor is one instrument in a 6-piece orchestra. It matters. It matters a lot. Now, don't take me wrong. It is very powerful, but alone it does not make a symphony. So that's why you have to keep the 6 system in mind. The brain is your ignition signal. The emotion is your biochemistry of desire and safety. The hormones is the full cascade, not just testosterone. The nerve is the signal from from the brain to the penis. And the blood vessels, the plumbing that deliver the blood from the heart to the penis, and the muscle in the pelvic floor and the penile tissues, what hold the blood together. If you fix one and neglect the other five, you'll be doing Kegel the rest of your life with no result at all. This is why I built the Get Hard System to diagnose, to treat every single one of those six system for each individual. Patient, one of the best research-backed ways to boost circulation, support healthy testosterone, and improve sexual performance is the Mediterranean diet. It's packed with food that open up your blood vessel, lower inflammation, and fuel your hormone naturally. I've seen men notice real improvement in both energy and erection within weeks when they shift to this style of eating. So check out the Mediterranean diet link right here below and get that as soon as you can. Take one of my patients. He's had, Terrence, he's 60 years old. He has had ED for 10 years. And when we start fixing the sick system again, he now says, I have more confidence in and out of the bedroom. I notice morning erection 3 to 5 times a week. "I had one that felt like I was in my 20s. I'm firmer now. I feel like a young man. I don't worry or stress about sex anymore. My relationship with my wife is a lot better. We are happy again." So when Terrence came in, he's been doing Kegel on his own for almost a year. Nothing happened because nobody have ever tested his hormone. Nobody has ever touched down in his pelvic muscles as well. Nobody has even looked at his blood work as well and his inflammation. Nobody taught him how to actually do Kegel exercise. We address all the 6 systems. The pelvic floor rehabilitation was one piece of it. So, and everything else. And guess what? 6 months later, he's now having morning erection 3 to 5 times a week. And him and his wife are all happy. Here's what I want you to take away from this video. If you've been doing Kegel for months and nothing is working, you either may be doing it wrong or maybe you don't need Kegel. Maybe you're tight. You mean well, right? But you maybe you're trying to fix only one of the 6 systems. But you have to know what of those 6 systems is broken so you can start fixing it, right? So that's why going to see an ED specialist doctor and addressing the whole system system matters a lot. So this is not just about your sex life, it's actually about your quality of life, because if you fix your ED, you may even fix how long you will live better as well. So this seems like something that you'd like to explore and see an ED specialist who can figure out what is the root cause of your ED, what sick system is involved with this. Book of a discovery call with our team to see how we can help you figure out which system it is. And maybe TGO is needed or not at this point, but let's start fixing those 6 systems to get you back in the game again, okay? So click the link below right here, or just go to renewwithdranne.com. Men travel all over the world to come and see me. If you want to get things done right, check the link below. Just know that you are not broken, right? There are alternatives. You just need to get the right treatment as well. And if you are far away, we also have the Modern Man Club, which is an online community of men with ED, and you have access to me and my team to see what you can do at home to restore your sexual functioning again. Either way, in the office or online, You have choices. Check out the Modern Man Club at NoEDMan.com. So let me know what you think. Let me know if you've been doing Kegel. Is it working or not for you? Make sure to subscribe. Share this with somebody that you feel may find this helpful. We'll see you in the next episode. Take care.

Thanks for listening to the Sexual Health for Men podcast. If you love this episode, then please take a screenshot on your phone and post it on Facebook, Instagram, or wherever you post, and be sure to tag me and let me know why you like this episode and what you'd like to hear in the future. That will help me know what's great for you, and I would love to give you the most incredible free gift designed to help you improve performance quickly. Go to my website at sexualhealthformenpodcast.com to get the book, The 5 Common Costly Mistakes Men Make When Facing ED. I would appreciate if you subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and just know that you can have sexual vitality for life. I appreciate you. Until next time.