What are sexercises and why are they important?

Sexercises are designed to maximize sex muscle strength and control. Weak flabby muscles cannot do their job well. Your arm muscles can do their job fairly well because you use them every day. Your sex muscles, though, are rarely used in your daily life. You use them to hold in urine or faeces until you can get to the bathroom. That's about it.

But if you don't exercise your sex muscles on a regular basis they get flabby and slacken. In childbirth through vaginal delivery the muscles can become stretched beyond the point of natural elasticity, and after menopause they just fade away and atrophy because of the lack of oestrogen.

When this happens, the lack of contact between the penis and vagina is not a laughing matter - despite the number of jokes on the subject! It's frustrating for both parties and can be a major cause of relationship failure. Sex after children is just not what it was - for very physical reasons.

So much is written about Female Sexual Dysfunction. The lack of contact between the penis and vagina suggests a specific reason why many women take much more to get turned on and could be more of a factor than emotional issues, tiredness and depression that pharmaceutical companies want to treat with drugs!

It may not be news that you can exercise your sex muscles. The popularity of Kegel exercises has seen to that. But do you know that the Kegel exercises are a rediscovery?

Effective sexercises have been practiced in China and India for thousands of years. The ancient experts viewed the human body-mind as a bucket full of energy with holes in the bottom where life energy leaked out. These holes are the urethral opening, the anal opening and, in the woman, the vaginal opening. It was believed that when the sex muscles were sufficiently strengthened through exercise they sealed the bottom of the bucket. The Eastern sexercises were developed in cultures that placed less emphasis on the genital orgasm.

The monarch of the sex muscles is the pubococcygeus (pew-boh-cox-uh-jee-us), or PC, muscle. This muscle contracts at the rate of one every 0.8 seconds in both sexes during orgasm. The anal muscles also contract. The contemporary rediscovery of the great value of these muscles for sexual health and pleasure is credited to a Los Angeles physician, Arnold Kegel. He developed the famed Kegel (ka~gill) exercises in the 1950s.

Currently, sex experts recommend the development of the sex muscles as a way to achieve, intensify, prolong and control genital orgasm in both sexes. However, when less emphasis is placed on getting the orgasmic payoff though, other personal gains such as emotional growth or health benefits may become more noticeable. Whether or not you focus on having orgasms is not the real issue. That is a matter of personal style. It is also worth noting that some men and women have observed that these sexercises have a significant rejuvenating effect.

Ask any group of women how many regularly do Kegel or yogic PC muscle exercises. Usually, only a few hands go up. Given the endless emphasis on exercise in our culture, this seems surprising. Perhaps it is guilt about sex, perhaps it is the fact that it is not obvious (until you make love!) that you do these sexercises, as they do not give you big breasts or bulging biceps. Addicted to appearances, we fail to become artists of love. As the paint brush is to the painter, these sexercises are to the love artist. They are not crude mechanical gestures but symphonies of the body-mind that lead to self-generated waves of bliss.

For those so inclined, these methods lead to the awakening of the mystic life force, and the arousal of and union with the cosmic lover within who leads us beyond inner conflict to happiness.

Based on extracts from Sexercises - A Practice from the book Sexual Energy Ecstasy by David and Ellen Ramsdale.