Month: October 2023

__How to do it:__Start by instinctively squeezing the muscles you’d use to stop the flow of urine. Got ’em? Great. Now hold them in (squeeeeze!) for 10 seconds, and then relax for 10 seconds. Build up to five sets of 10 squeezes. As you get more advanced, there are several variations and speeds to try (and I can get to that another day!), but the most important part is just sticking with them.Here’s how this magical exercise translate into better sex: The muscles that you’re strengthening, also known as the “pc” (pubococcygeus) muscles, are the same ones that contract during an orgasm. If you strengthen and tone them with regular workouts, it will amplify those sensations and make it easier to reach climax during sex.Having strong pelvic floor muscles will also make your vagina feel tighter, potentially making your orgasm much more intense. So, you know, bonus!One of the hardest parts of keeping up with your Kegels is knowing how to do them RIGHT. Luckily, there’s now a new addition to your goodie drawer that actually does you Kegels for you, and can give you orgasms in the process! The Intensity by Pour Moi is an innovative “sexual wellness meets sex toy” product that is a total pelvic floor game-changer. It takes al the effort out of Kegels, leaving nothing but the benefits!After a few weeks of dedicated Kegel exercises, that vaginal orgasm should come at last. If not, you’ll still have increased sensitivity, heightened orgasms (yes, even clitoral ones) and a healthy pelvic floor.XO,EmilyEmily Morse is a sexologist, host of the Sex With Emily podcast, and cofounder of the intimate care line Emily & Tony. She has a doctorate in human sexuality and is the author of Hot Sex: Over 200 Things You Can Try Tonight and a weekly cohost of the nationally syndicated radio show Loveline With Dr. Drew Pinsky.Watch: The Female Orgasm, Explained With Science Projects

Article Source > www.glamour.com

If you ever pee a little when you sneeze, cough, or laugh—or complain about your postpartum sex life—you probably have received this advice from a well-meaning friend or even your doctor: “Do your Kegels.” (Check out these 8 solutions for a leaky bladder.)Kegels, named after the MD who popularized them, are pelvic floor exercises that work and strengthen the muscles surrounding the vagina and the rectum and promise everything from better bladder control to stronger orgasms. The key to a correct Kegel is isolating the pelvic floor muscles and then squeezing and lifting. “Imagine that you are sitting on a marble and want to pick up the marble with your vagina,” instructs the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. “Imagine ‘sucking’ the marble into your vagina.”(Discover the ONE simple, natural solution that can help you reverse chronic inflammation and heal more than 45 diseases. Try The Whole Body Cure today!)Simple enough, right? But it’s not as easy as it sounds, and plenty of women get it wrong.“Patients come in and say they’ve been doing their Kegels, and it turns out they’re doing them backwards or maybe they don’t even need to do Kegels at all,” says April Dominick, a pelvic health physical therapist affiliated with Memorial Hermann Pelvic Floor Health Center in Houston, Texas. “If you don’t know how to do them right, you could be making matters worse.”Watch out for these five super common mistakes.Mistake #1: Holding your breathYou should breathe normally while doing Kegels, Dominick says. Otherwise, you may not be isolating the correct muscles. “A lot of times women are not really aware of their pelvic floor muscles so they’re just trying to tighten anything they can. Holding your breath increases intra-abdominal pressure, so that can make you feel like you’re doing something.” (Strengthening your pelvic floor can help you orgasm. Here are 6 easy exercises to get you started.)Strengthen your pelvic floor with pilates:​​Mistake #2: Forgetting the liftMany women believe that a Kegel is just a squeeze, says Mercedes Eustergerling, a pelvic floor physiotherapist in Calgary, Canada. However, you can’t forget the “lift.” “I like to tell my patients to use visualization. Imagine picking up a blueberry or drinking a thick milkshake…with your vagina.”MORE: 5 Sex Positions You Should Finish With For An Orgasmic Grand FinaleMistake #3: OverachievingThe biggest mistake that women make when they’re doing Kegel exercises is trying too hard, says Eustergerling. “These are small muscles that do subtle movements.”Erin Weber, a physical therapist in Brooklyn who specializes in pelvic floor therapy, says she starts out by having patients lie on their backs with knees bent, which eliminates the forces of gravity and allows them to become more aware of the specific muscles they need to focus on. “I cue them to draw up and in, narrowing the space between their sit bones and closing the space from their coccyx bone to their pubic bone.” Also important: Keep the inner thighs and glutes relaxed.Mistake #4: Letting your glutes do the workWhen pelvic muscles are weak, sometimes the body compensates by using other muscles, such as the thighs, abdominals, or buttocks, says Dominick. To avoid this, she suggests a quick check while Kegel-ing: Place one hand under your butt and the other on your abs. If you feel a large movement or contraction from the buttock or abdominals, it’s a sign that you’re not concentrating on the right muscles. (If you do want a shapely butt, this is the one powerhouse exercise you should be doing.)To reduce reliance on the stronger muscles in your body, Dominick suggests lying on your back and putting your legs up on a couch seat or a chair so that your hips and knees make a 90-degree angle. “This will make it harder for your body to compensate for weak pelvic floor muscles by using the legs during a Kegel.”MORE: The Best Sex Positions For Your 30s, 40s, 50s, And 60sMistake #5: Waiting too long to see resultsIf done regularly (a few times every day), you should expect to see results pretty quickly, says Weber, who treats many women after childbirth. “I often have patients who notice a reduction in urinary incontinence after a week of performing the exercises. Once you are able to isolate the muscles properly and contract them, you can better facilitate your pelvic floor muscles during daily activities.” (If you have a leaky bladder, here’s a tampon-like device that can prevent bladder leaks.)If you’ve been doing Kegels for weeks and everything down there seems pretty much status quo, talk to your doctor. You might need some training—or maybe you don’t need Kegels at all. For example, some women who experience pelvic pain and discomfort actually have tight pelvic floor muscles and need a different approach. “This group should not be performing Kegels,” Weber says. Instead, “I have them work…

Article Source > www.prevention.com

The fertility market is projected to be worth more than $30 billion by 2025, and today on the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage, a new device called the Kegg, a Bluetooth-connected silicone kegel ball that monitors mucus to help determine a woman’s fertility by being inserted for no more than two minutes every day, is launching a device it hopes will make some waves in it — literally and figuratively.
The device, when shipped in the near future, will sell for less than $200.
For the uninitiated, a kegel ball is an object that a woman places in her vaginal passage. Designed to be held in place by a woman’s kegel muscles (also known as the pelvic floor), holding a kegel ball in place helps to exercise those muscles and strengthen them — which can be useful to help recover after you’ve given birth, to keep yourself from involuntarily peeing as you age and (yes) to make sex more enjoyable. (It’s not a completely glamorous list, but one that I’d argue is pretty useful for many women.)
Kegg’s product takes that one step further and creates another use case by using it to measure mucus viscosity, with the daily, two-minute measurements producing a cycle that looks something like this:

In doing so, it is also exploring another aspect of fertility that’s not typically a part of many consumer-focused assistants: the viscosity of the mucus in a woman’s vaginal passage.
We have seen a wave of startups (and more traditional female health businesses) emerge in the last several years that are focused on tracking metrics like pulse and body temperature or your ovulation cycle to determine your fertility window. (There is even a kegel ball-based device on the market that measures your temperature, alongside other connected kegel balls.)
Mucus is another important determinant of what is going on. As an egg gets released from a woman’s ovary, the consistency of the mucus changes. Not only does the viscosity give you an indication of where the egg is in its travels out of the ovary, but the more viscose it gets, the more viable it is for holding sperm to survive for longer before they connect with the egg. (Typically sperm do not survive for that long, and so the thicker the mucus, the bigger window you have for that sperm getting to the egg to fertilize it.)
The Kegg comes with two gold bands on it that emit electric pulses that are used to measure the thickness of the mucus.
Using analyzer chips on a custom-designed PCB inside the Kegg, the device monitors the response from the mucus surrounding the Kegg’s sensors. It then “reads” the electro-chemical properties in the mucus to detect which electrolytes are present in the mucus. And this in turn is sent to the cloud for further processing through Kegg’s algorithm, ultimately determining the consistency of the mucus. 

Kristina Cahojova, the CEO and founder of Lady Technologies (the startup behind the Kegg), says her team chose to focus on mucus because it’s too difficult, if not impossible, to use the other metrics to determine fertility if a woman has an irregular cycle, there are already a lot of products out there that are already measuring those metrics for those who are regular and there weren’t any products like the Kegg on the market already today.
“The tech has been around for 50 years,” she said, in reference to the ability to measure the viscosity of the mucus and tie that to a specific woman’s fertility. And yet, there have been very few products created based on it up to now.
Indeed, the most well-known consumer-focused product on the market today that measures a woman’s mucus is the OvuCue, which retails for more than $200 and is a larger and more complex probe. “I think you have to be a woman to invent something like this,” Cahojova said of the Kegg.
Right now, the Kegg is only using its measurements to help define the window for when you might be most fertile, but of course there are potentially many other areas of women’s health that could be informed by way of the diagnostics it is picking up, provided the startup finds the funding and manages to make it through the regulatory hoops to do so.
The bigger picture that we should all find encouraging is that the rise of connected devices, big data analytics and ever-more medical research is coming together to give us a much better idea of what is going on with our bodies, and what we can do differently to help influence the outcomes. Cahojova also sees the benefit of that competition.
“It’s very nice that users have a lot of options,” she said. “For me none of the existing options happened to work because I am very irregular. We are trying to address how to reduce fertility stress for other irregular women.”

Article Source > techcrunch.com

Photo: Peter Willi/Getty Images/SuperStock RM

According to the NIH, roughly one in four women are affected by pelvic-floor problems, which typically occur when the pelvic floor is weakened or injured. This can often happen after childbirth or simply as you age. Kegel exercises can help strengthen the pelvic floor and can increase both the duration and intensity of orgasms. As physical therapist Amy Stein, the author of Heal Pelvic Pain and owner of Beyond Basics Physical Therapy, explains: “The pelvic floor connects from the pubic bone in the front to the tailbone at the back and out to the sides of the hips, so it literally makes a bowl.” To determine whether you’re experiencing pelvic-floor weakness, many of the nine experts we talked to recommend the “pee test”: When you go to urinate, squeeze your muscles and try to stop the flow of urine. If the flow does not stop, it is a strong indicator that you could be a good candidate for Kegels.

Physical therapist Heather Jeffcoat, the author of Sex Without Pain and owner of Femina Physical Therapy, cautions not to start Kegel exercises if you’re experiencing pelvic pain, but says that “otherwise, Kegels are a great way to help get your sexual and pelvic health [get] back on-track.” Still, Stein strongly recommends talking with a doctor or physical therapist before starting a Kegel regimen. That’s because the exercises can cause more harm than good if you perform them when you don’t have to, according to many of our experts. Pelvic floor problems typically occur when the muscles that make up the bowl are too tight or too lax (conditions otherwise known as a high-tone or low-tone pelvic floor), and if your muscles are too tight, Kegels can lead to a variety of problems, including urinary and bowel issues, poor sexual functioning, and even pelvic pain. To help those who’ve been given a green light for a Kegel regimen, we asked our experts about the best Kegel exercisers. Their 11 favorites — which range from basic Kegel weights to vibrating exercisers to smart devices that give biofeedback via apps — are below. No matter which you choose, sex and relationship therapist Cyndi Darnell recommends that “all Kegel exercisers should be used with a water-based, glycerin free lubricant to ensure easy insertion and an irritation-free experience” — so you might want to check out our guide to the best personal lubricants once you’ve settled on your preferred Kegel tool.

If you’re unsure how to properly perform a Kegel, opting for a device that has biofeedback technology — or sensors in the device that tell you how well you’re doing your Kegels — may be a good place to start. Many women may accidentally “push out, instead of contracting upwards,” explains physical therapist Jandra Mueller, the clinic director of the Pelvic Health and Rehabilitation Center. She and three of our other experts recommend the Elvie Trainer, which utilizes biofeedback technology to measure the force and motion of a contraction in order to detect when a user is exercising incorrectly. It has a “comfortable fit, is compact and sleek looking, and has an app that connects to your phone,” according to Mueller, who told us that the physical therapists at her practice routinely recommend the Elvie to patients for at-home use. The well-designed app makes it easier to visualize what’s going on internally, adds sex therapist Jamye Waxman. “The app helps monitor your progress and can really motivate you to see results,” she explains. The Elvie is made with medical-grade silicone and, as sex and relationship therapist Megan Fleming notes, is also waterproof, so you can use it in the bath or shower. It also comes with a guide to six unique workouts that challenge and strengthen different muscles at four different intensity levels (training, beginner, intermediate, and advanced).

“The kGoal is a squeezable, silicone ‘pillow,’ that is inserted into the vagina,” explains New York City–based pelvic floor therapist Lindsey Vestal, who has run workshops teaching men and women about Kegels for the past six years. Like the Elvie, the kGoal delivers real-time biofeedback to your smartphone, ensuring that your Kegels are being done correctly. It also tracks your performance and progress over time and allows you to calculate your regimen. The biggest difference between this and the Elvie is that the kGoal’s “pillow design enables it to fit better inside the user’s individual vagina,” according to Vestal. Simply insert it when it’s deflated and then inflate it to fit…

Article Source > nymag.com