Every man who goes looking for help lasting longer gets the same instruction within about ten minutes. Do kegels. Do more kegels. Do them at your desk, do them in the car, do a hundred a day.
I have coached men who did exactly that, faithfully, for two or three years. Some of them finish faster now than when they started.
Nobody ever told them that a squeeze has a second half.
What each one is
A kegel is the squeeze. The pelvic floor is the sheet of muscle at the bottom of you, running from the base of the penis back to the anus. You already know how to use it, because it is the muscle you use to stop yourself urinating halfway through. Squeeze the base, the perineum and the anus together like one fist. The perineum is the patch of skin between the testicles and the anus. That closing is a kegel.
A reverse kegel is the opening. It is the deliberate letting go. The feeling is a gentle push down and out, the way it feels in the first second of starting to urinate, or the way the floor of you drops when you sigh out and give up on holding your stomach in.
Gentle is the word. This is not straining, and it is not pushing hard at anything. If your face is going red you have misunderstood it.
Try both now, in your chair. Squeeze, hold three seconds, then let go. Then, from that released place, breathe in and let the whole bottom of you soften and drop a little further. That second thing is the reverse kegel, and for a lot of men it is a completely new sensation.
The idea that changes everything
A muscle that can only clench is not strong. It is stuck.
Think about any other muscle you train. A bicep that could only contract and never straighten would not be a strong arm, it would be a useless one. Strength is the full range, in both directions, on demand.
The pelvic floor is a muscle like any other, and it gets treated as the one exception. Squeeze it more, forever, and never once check whether it can still open.
Here is what I see. A good number of the men who arrive with years of kegels behind them do not have a weak pelvic floor at all. They have one that has forgotten how to let go. It sits half clenched all day, and a muscle that is already halfway to its limit has almost nothing left to give when it matters.
That is also why the advice fails so quietly. When more kegels do not work, the man assumes he is not doing enough of them, so he does more, and he gets tighter, and it gets worse. He never questions the direction, only the volume.
A self test for which one you need
Do this lying down, somewhere quiet, with five minutes.
Test one, the hold. Squeeze the whole floor firmly and hold it for ten seconds without your breath stopping and without your stomach, buttocks or thighs joining in. If you cannot hold ten seconds, or you cannot do it without recruiting half your body, you are short on strength.
Test two, the release. Squeeze hard for five seconds, then let go and pay attention to what happens next. Is there a clear drop, a distinct sense of something opening? Or does the squeeze just stop, with everything staying where it was? If you cannot feel a release, only an absence of squeezing, that is the missing half.
Test three, staying open. From the released place, take five slow breaths and keep the floor soft the whole time. Most men cannot get past the second breath before it quietly creeps back up.
Test four, the reverse itself. Can you deliberately open and push down gently, and hold that for three breaths? If you feel nothing at all when you try, you are not weak. You are tight.
Then the everyday signs of a floor that is stuck. A dull ache in the perineum after a long day of sitting. Finishing very fast despite years of squeezing. Noticing that you clench down there when you are stressed, in the same way other men clench their jaw. A backside that is never actually relaxed.
One honest line here. If you have real pain, if starting to urinate is difficult, or if anything hurts during or after, go and see a doctor before you train anything. I am a coach. I am not a doctor. I do not diagnose anything and I never will. Get it looked at, then come back and train.
If you need kegels
You are the man who could not hold ten seconds, or whose whole lower body joins in.
Three times a week, not daily.
- Ten slow squeezes. Three seconds on, five seconds of complete release. The release is not a rest between reps. It is a rep.
- Ten quick ones. One second on, three seconds off.
- Three long holds. Ten seconds each, with fifteen seconds of full release after each one.
Breathe the whole time. If you are holding your breath, you are using your throat to do the work.
If you need reverse kegels
You are the man who felt nothing on the release, or who cannot stay open for five breaths.
Daily is fine here, because you are learning to let go rather than loading a muscle.
- Lie on your back, knees up, feet on the floor. One hand on the belly.
- Breathe in slowly through the nose, belly first, and as you breathe in let the whole floor of you soften and open downward. Nothing forced. Think of it as unclenching a fist very slowly.
- Hold that open for two or three seconds.
- Breathe out and just let it be neutral. Do not squeeze on the out breath.
- Ten of those, twice a day.
Then add it where you actually need it. In a session, at seven on the arousal scale, breathe in and open instead of gripping. Most men grip harder as they climb, which is a fight, and fighting is exhausting and it loses.
If this is the half you have been missing, the reverse-kegel work goes deeper into it.
Most men need both
The honest answer to the kegels vs reverse kegels for men question is that you are training one movement with two directions, not two exercises.
So the standard I give almost everyone is simple. Every squeeze gets a full release, and the release is at least as long as the squeeze. If you take nothing else from this article, take that.
Once you have both halves, the squeeze becomes an actual brake. That is what makes the 8-out-of-10 rule work in practice, because a floor that can open is a floor that can also close hard when you need it at eight.
Do not overdo it
More is not better here and it is not close.
Three sessions a week for the squeezing work. Not a hundred a day at your desk, not sets in the car at every red light, and never a set held while you clench your jaw and hold your breath.
Signs you have gone too far. Aching in the perineum. Everything feeling tighter rather than stronger. Finishing faster than before. A sense that you cannot switch it off. If that is you, stop the squeezing completely for two weeks and do nothing but the opening work and slow belly breathing. Then start again at half the volume.
What to expect
Week one. Mostly discovery. Half the men reading this will find out this week that they have never once released properly.
Week four. You can tell squeeze and open apart without thinking about it, and you can hold either on demand. That sounds small. It is the whole skill arriving.
Week nine. It starts showing up where it counts. You reach eight, you open and breathe instead of gripping, and you have somewhere to go.
Marathon, not a sprint. Weeks and months, not days.
From my own practice
I was a champion clencher. On the island in Thailand I squeezed for hours, for years, and I got extremely good at it, and I could not work out why my control was still not where I wanted it.
What was missing was the other direction. Nobody had told me that letting go was a skill you train rather than a thing that happens when you stop trying. When I finally spent a few months on the opening instead of the closing, the squeeze itself got stronger, which was not what I expected at all.
Run the four tests on yourself this week and go where your own results point, not where an article on the internet points.
If you want a second pair of eyes on which half you are missing, book a free 30 minute call.
Individual results vary. This is coaching, not medical treatment.
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