The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (24 page)

And at first, the exercises should also be tried whenever urine is voided. “With good control,” says Dr. Hungerford, “urine can be released a teaspoon at a time.”

How much exercise is needed? The plan can be varied widely, but a usual recommendation is for some ten contractions in a row, made at six intervals during the day. This makes sixty contractions in all. Though it may sound laborious, each contraction need take no more than a second. Each group of ten contractions might take ten seconds. Six such sessions in a day would make a total of one minute.

Gradually, the number of sessions and the number of contractions made in each can be increased. For example, twenty contractions in a session would bring the six-session total to a hundred and twenty a day. Dr. Kegel suggests that each voiding of urine be an opportunity for exercise. If this is done three times a day, adding exercise before arising, when retiring and at one other time, the initial program is completed. (However, Dr. Kegel often suggests that the day’s exercise be done in three twenty-minute periods.)

This program should then be stepped up, for the contraction becomes almost effortless. Many women find that thirty contractions in a session is a comfortable number, and can be done in a minute once training is under way. There is no rush to increase, but eventually most women find that two hundred and three hundred contractions a day are easily achieved, spaced throughout the day at convenient times. This would make a total of three hundred contractions in the day’s exercise. Dr. Kegel says most patients reach a total of about three hundred a day in some six weeks. By this time, control of voiding is usually very good, though in some women with especially weak musculature ten weeks might be needed. Most women can note sexual and other changes within three weeks, but nevertheless are urged to continue.

How long? After six to eight weeks, when the three hundred-a-day pattern has been reached, further exercise is usually not necessary. One reason is that the normal state of the P.C. is not full relaxation. To do its job of pelvic support, it stays in a state of partial contraction and tends to maintain its strength. Without such partial contraction, for example, urine would not normally be retained. The P.C. relaxes completely only under anesthesia.

The exercises strengthen this steady state of contraction. After a few weeks, a mold of the vagina shows a markedly changed shape. Moreover, sexual activity helps preserve the new muscle tone in several ways.

First, it appears that the steady-state contraction is heightened during intercourse. Second, sexual stimulation seems to produce mild reflex contractions of the vaginal muscles. Third, many experts counsel women to make occasional conscious contractions as a technique of intercourse, as we shall see in greater detail. Finally, in sexual climax, the P.C. contracts involuntarily, strongly and rhythmically, from four to ten times, at intervals of about four-fifths of a second. (The feeling of release and the disappearance of tension follow this contractile burst.)

Women who have difficulty in determining whether or not they contract the P.C. are taught to do so at first only while voiding urine. Other women, who seem to have little sense of the position and existence of the muscle, may need a doctor’s help in learning to exercise.

At the American Institute of Family Relations, women are counseled to use the new contractile ability in intercourse consciously at first, squeezing firmly and slowly. In fact, a series of conscious contractions are recommended before the entrance of the male organ. This is thought to help set the stage for the function of the muscle as an automatic reflex. And it appears to heighten sexual tension, which is desirable, since it is the buildup of such tension which, reaching a summit, seems to trigger the orgasm….

Participation by the woman is among the most important of modern concepts of successful physical love. Speaking of this, Dr. Charles Lloyd, a leading sex authority, comments that in our society “adult women are often incapable of sexual aggressions and assume an inactive role during marital intercourse. Frequently they do not experience clear-cut orgasms. Societies in which there is training for the sexual role,” he points out, “usually produce a higher degree of aggressiveness in sexual activity with vigorous participation by the woman and much more regularly complete and satisfactory orgasm.”

The use of the P.C. muscle provides a clear mechanism for such participation. It offers a concept of the vagina, not merely as a passive receiver of action, but as an actor.

Some forty years ago, Van de Velde described this concept: “The whole structure [of the female organs] accentuated by the working of the… muscles… is an apparatus for gripping and rubbing the male sexual organ, during and after its insertion or immission into the vagina, and thus to produce the ejaculation of seed or sperm-cells, in the culmination of excitement, and at the same time, by pressure and friction, to ensure this orgasm, or some of pleasure and ecstasy, in the woman also.”

How intrinsic in intercourse is this pattern? Some reports indicate that it occurs through simply an awareness and strengthening of the vaginal musculature.

According to Dr. Hungerford,

“In childbirth education we teach the contraction exercises in order to strengthen the birth canal, and to help the canal distend more easily so that pain and injury for the mother can be avoided. At first, in teaching the exercises, I made no mention of the sexual value. I taught them only in terms of childbirth.

“But within weeks after I began teaching, one woman took me aside before class to say she had experienced orgasm in intercourse for the first time. The same thing has happened repeatedly. Many women seem to think this was the most important thing they got from the courses and report they have taught others with the same result.

“Some years ago a marriage-counselor colleague, a woman of sixty, observed my class and listened as I taught the exercises. By now I was explaining the sexual importance, and the counselor questioned me about this. When I saw her a month later, she threw her arms around me and said that for the first time in forty years of marriage, she had experienced a full orgasm.”

The exercises seem able to restore sexual adjustment which has been lost, apparently through the extreme stretching of the P.C. during childbirth. As Dr. John Oliven explains: “If it [the P.C] is constitutionally predisposed to weakness, it may not regain normal tonus, even following relatively normal childbirth, and especially after several childbirths in succession.”…

Some doctors recommend that their patients exercise during pregnancy to give the walls greater strength and tonus. Like other muscles, the P.C. actually thickens with exercise. For similar reasons, doctors also use the exercises restoratively, after delivery.

If, as Dr. Kegel suggests, perhaps two-thirds of American women have P.C. muscle weakness enough to interfere with sexual function, one would expect that childbirth injuries associated with weak muscle, along with other medical groups of P.C. weakness, would be common indeed. There are indications that this is the fact….

The prevention and restoration afforded by exercise of the P.C. muscle are said by many experts to make the exercises valuable to most women at some time in life, especially for women who bear children. Good tone of the muscle is accepted widely as medically desirable. And exercise to achieve that tone is certainly harmless.

Sexually, the strengthening of the muscle and an understanding of how it functions have relieved many cases of inadequacy. And the understanding has further implications. Together with other new scientific knowledge, the concept has considerable effect on what has been believed and is now known of the art of physical love.
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Occasionally I have encountered resistance to these exercises from Christian wives. In one such case, a mother of five and married almost twenty-five years said, “Pastor, it all seems so unnatural to me. If God wanted those vaginal muscles strong enough for me to get more sensation during lovemaking, He would have made them that way.” I explained to her that He did originally, but her five births and natural aging process had so relaxed them that they were of little help to her, and the older she grew, the more she would need them toned up through exercise.

Quite reluctantly she went home to try, but admitted she had little faith it would work. Still, she did her exercises diligently, and as she reported later, “Within one month I experienced sensations I had never felt before. Within five weeks my husband, who had been experiencing a little trouble maintaining an erection, noticed the added dimension of excitement in our love life. Now we both think our next twenty-five years of love will be more exciting than the first twenty-five.”

Some women who refused to try it for their own benefit were prevailed upon to attempt it for the sake of their husbands. Before the eight weeks were up, several of them acknowledged their first orgasmic fulfillment in many years of marriage. Eight weeks really isn’t very long for an experiment that may bring lifelong benefits. Try it—the chances are good that you’ll like it.

N
OTE:
Many doctors, gynecologists, sex counselors, and marriage counselors recommend a unique gynetic exerciser called “Femogen” that was designed to enhance and simplify the performance of the Kegel exercises. It is inexpensive and is said to shorten the time of the exercises and has proven extremely successful with women. Results are guaranteed. For a free descriptive brochure write to Family Services, P.O. Box 9363, Fresno, CA 93792.

An Update on the Kegel Exercises

Twenty-two or more years since the original edition of this book was published and literally hundreds of inquiries and testimonials later, it would be appropriate here to give a brief update on the Kegel exercises. I am still quite enthusiastic about them as a means of enriching the love life of married couples by improving the muscle tone of many women and increasing the sensitivity of the genitalia. Particularly is this true of women who have had several babies. As we mentioned, everyone knows that pregnancy stretches a woman’s reproductive system way out of its original form. Most of her organs return to normal within six months after childbirth. Unfortunately, the muscles in the vagina may be left permanently relaxed unless she exercises them. (This is also true of her abdominal muscles.) Her muscle tone may recover enough to maintain good sexual relations, but not quite as tight as before. When she has had three or four children, the problem can become acute. Later in life, as a woman goes through menopause, many of her muscles begin to relax just a little, making sexual feeling for both her and her husband less stimulating.

The Kegel exercises seem to be the procedure of choice for many therapists. I have noted new devices on the market that may prove helpful, but all are based on the Kegel exercises. From the messages we have received from women who have read this book, they are still very effective. In fact, a recent letter came from a frantic woman who had given birth to three boys within five years. She was twenty-seven years old and had lost much of her sexual sensation. She was a bit upset with me because she had tried the exercises faithfully for four weeks and still had not experienced an orgasm. But by the time her letter had worked its way to me and I found time to respond, I received her second letter saying, “It finally happened, I am becoming a new woman!” This is not an uncommon response, for we all want success right now.

We are now convinced that a woman should not quit her exercise program after she achieves her desired results, even if she continues for twelve weeks. We think it wise to plan to do them at least three times a week for life. If she does, she will be assured of maintaining the good results of her efforts for life. Most physical fitness experts tell us that even the most conditioned athletes will lose their muscular buildup if they stop exercising altogether. Exercising three or more times a week as a lifetime habit is a small price to pay for the pleasure you gain for yourself and the man you love.

Men Can Benefit from Kegel, Too