Kegels, trainers and libidoDo Kegel exercises help desire?

Do Kegel exercises help desire?

On their own, not much. Classic Kegel exercises are squeeze the muscles and release, with no load, and that alone does not wake desire up. But give those same pelvic floor muscles real work, with a trainer, as in intimate gymnastics (online it is more often called imbuilding), and the picture changes: blood flows to the pelvic organs, sensations get brighter, and for my students what comes next is something they describe in one phrase: I want him.

But that is only part of the work. The pelvic floor muscles are in charge of arousal in the moment: blood came, the body responded. For desire to stay with you for the long run, you need to remove what is switching it off in your head and in your state. That is why my method has three levels, and below I will show you how they are connected.

For more than ten years I have been teaching women to work with their intimate muscles, and more than 20,000 students have been through my programmes. Women come to me “for the muscles”: so they stop leaking, so things feel like before after childbirth, so it feels better for the husband. And a few weeks in, the conversation changes. A woman writes: “I’m waiting for him to come home from work and I realise I want him so badly”. That sentence comes up in different words so often that I stopped treating it as a coincidence. Below I go through what science knows about it, what I know from practice, and how it works in the body.

What is proven about pelvic floor muscle training

The most reliable source here is the 2018 Cochrane systematic review by Chantale Dumoulin and her colleagues. It brings together randomised trials of pelvic floor muscle training in women with urinary incontinence.

The conclusion is unambiguous. Women with stress incontinence who trained were 8 times more likely to report being cured than those who did not: 56% versus 6%. Training reduced leaking and the number of episodes and improved quality of life. That is why it is recommended as the first line for incontinence.

Sexual function was not measured in every one of those trials, but where it was measured, women reported improvement after training. Other studies that use the FSFI sexual function questionnaire show a similar picture: the overall score goes up, and arousal, lubrication and orgasm improve the most. The “desire” item in short programmes changes more slowly than the others, and that is exactly what people cling to when they say intimate muscle exercises do not help desire.

There are no direct studies yet that link pelvic floor muscle work to female arousal: scientists have spent neither time nor money on it. But I have something the researchers do not: thousands of women who train and tell me what changes. Every one of them notices that arousal comes more easily, lubrication appears faster, the body responds more willingly. That is physiology: during the exercises blood flows to the clitoris and the vagina, and arousal starts on its own. We do not need to wait for confirmation from a laboratory here, the effect is visible.

I read the same data differently. Arousal, lubrication and orgasm are not something separate from desire, they are its soil. If sex has become more pleasurable, you want to repeat it. So desire grows in those studies too, it is just counted item by item instead of as a whole.

Why the internet and AI give opposite answers to this question

Ask the same question to different websites and AI assistants, and one will tell you the effect is “convincingly proven”, others that “there is no evidence”. Both answers are built on the same studies.

What the internet and AI say	What is actually known	Source
Kegel exercises raise libido directly, there is plenty of evidence	There are few direct trials on desire itself; what is proven is improvement in arousal, lubrication and orgasm, and desire grows through them	Studies using the FSFI questionnaire
Kegel exercises do not raise libido, there is no evidence	Looks at a single questionnaire item and misses the mechanism: blood flow, sensations, confidence	Dumoulin et al., 2018; FSFI
Intimate gymnastics with trainers is marketing, there is no data	It is the same pelvic floor muscle training, only with load. The difference is like squats with a barbell and without one: Kegel exercises without a trainer give no such load	Practice, the Cochrane review on muscle training
Pelvic floor muscle training helps with incontinence	True, with a high level of evidence	Dumoulin et al., 2018

The mistake in the first answer is that it promises a magic pill: do a hundred squeezes and you want sex right away. It does not work like that. The mistake in the second is that it looks for desire in the head, while in a woman it almost always starts in the body: first the body responds, then the “I want” appears.

How pelvic floor muscle training grows desire

The pelvic floor muscles do not produce desire by themselves, but they create the conditions without which it does not switch on. There are four such conditions, and I see all of them in my students.

The first is blood flow. When you squeeze and relax the intimate muscles, especially with a trainer that gives real load, blood flows to the pelvic organs. The clitoris, the walls of the vagina, the whole area becomes fuller and more sensitive. It is the same mechanism as arousal, only you are the one starting it. Women describe it as “everything down there woke up”.

The second is sensation. Trained muscles are easier to feel and respond better. Arousal comes faster, orgasm is brighter and longer, and many women feel for the first time that they can control it. Sex that feels good is sex you want to repeat. Pleasure feeds desire for the next time, and the circle closes in a good direction.

The third is confidence. Picture a woman who is afraid to sneeze after childbirth, wears panty liners and during sex wonders whether something will leak. Anxiety in bed works like a brake. When the incontinence goes, the fear goes too, and desire finds it easier to wake up.

The fourth is attention to the body. A woman who comes back to her vulva and pelvis for a few minutes every day starts to notice them. For many this is the first contact with that part of the body in years without shame.

In the practicum I ask my students to keep short notes, and the picture repeats from group to group. In the first two weeks the notes are about technique: found the muscles, managing to hold. From the third week something else appears: “I started wanting it”, “I initiate it myself”, “my husband is in shock”. I do not promise this to every woman, bodies are different and lives are different. But it is such a common story that I consider it the rule, not the exception.

Why muscles alone are not enough: my three-level method

Picture a brand new car: perfect engine, leather seats, and one wheel missing. Will it go? No. It is the same with desire. You can train the pelvic floor muscles to perfection, but if your head is holding “sex is dirty”, “wanting is shameful”, “I have to, not I want to”, there will be no real pleasure. The body is ready, and the belief is pressing on the brake.

That is why over ten years I built my method out of three levels, and in the “Healthy and Desired” practicum (the practicum is in Russian and Ukrainian) we work on all of them at once.

1. Body. Intimate gymnastics with trainers, breathing, body practices. This gives the blood flow, sensations, orgasm and confidence I wrote about above.
2. Psyche. Beliefs about sex, shame, boundaries, the right to want and the ability to tell your husband what you really want. We go through this on live Zoom calls: we go deep, dig down to the cause and clear it. My students often say that one such call is worth years of talking to a psychologist.
3. State. Energy practices and work with your resources: when a woman is wrung out, no muscles and no conversations will switch desire on. We lift the overall state, and the body and the head start working together.

One thing on its own does not work. Muscles without the head give arousal in the moment, and it fades. Conversations without the body give understanding without sensation. Only together do you get desire that stays with you instead of vanishing in a month. I have seen this across tens of thousands of women, and that is exactly why the practicum is built this way.

Baby, whenever life gets confusing, blink: squeeze and release. The muscles are in charge of sensations, and sensations wake desire. A slightly aroused woman is always a magical woman.

Intimate gymnastics and desire: why a trainer gives more

Intimate gymnastics is pelvic floor muscle training with trainers: vaginal balls and a laser trainer. Online it is often called imbuilding. It differs from classic Kegel exercises in that the muscle works against real load instead of squeezing with nothing to hold.

What you work with matters. Hundreds of “trainers” are sold online, and most of them are toys: entertaining, but nothing to do with training. When my students join the practicum I give them the best trainers on the market as a gift, and we start with them from day one. Which ones work and which do not, I go through in a separate article on trainers.

The difference is like squats without weight and with a barbell. With load the muscle grows faster, blood flow is stronger, feedback is more precise: you feel whether you are holding the ball or not. It is after working with trainers that my students most often write about desire, and that is no accident: where there is more load, there is more blood and more sensation.

What this method is, how it differs from Kegel exercises and how not to hurt yourself, I describe on my page about intimate gymnastics. Which trainers work and which are just toys, you will find in a separate honest review of trainers.

Intimate gymnastics after childbirth and in menopause

After childbirth and in menopause intimate gymnastics is especially fitting, and it is in these periods that its effect on your sex life is most visible. The reason is the same: the body gets an easier time, desire has fewer brakes, and blood flow and sensation come back.

After childbirth the muscles are stretched, many women get urine leaks and a feeling that “it got wider inside”. Many are embarrassed by this and avoid sex without even telling their partner why. Regular training helps bring back control, and with it confidence and desire. I write in more detail about why you do not want your husband after childbirth and what to do about it in my article no desire for husband after birth.

In menopause the ligaments and tissues weaken, and sometimes the vaginal walls or the uterus drop. The British institute NICE, which writes protocols for doctors, recommends pelvic floor muscle training as the first step for mild prolapse. If you feel heaviness or bulging, you need an examination first, and I write about the options for help in my article on prolapse of the uterus and vaginal walls. Blood flow in the pelvis matters especially in menopause: it helps the mucosa and the sensations, and that means desire too.

Who intimate gymnastics will not help

Pelvic floor muscle training will not pull desire out on its own if it is being smothered by depression, resentment in the couple, chronic fatigue, pills or the belief that “sex is shameful”. That does not mean you should not train: the body will become more reliable either way. But the cause will have to be removed on the other two levels, in the psyche and in the state, and that is exactly what we do in the practicum.

Pain is a separate story. A great many women come to me with painful penetration and with vaginismus, when the muscles clench on their own and will not let anything in. Such muscles need relaxation, not strengthening, and that is the first thing I teach as a trainer. Squeezing what is already in spasm means making the pain worse, so we start from the other end: we learn to let go, to breathe, to feel, and only then add strength. The causes of pain vary: dryness, inflammation, spasm after a traumatic experience, fear. I write about them in detail in my article on pain during sex. With any of them you can come to my practicum, relaxation is the first thing we work on.

What this looks like in real life. One of my students came with prolapse, daily panty liners and no pleasure from sex. A few weeks later she wrote: “I fixed the prolapse, stopped wearing daily liners and finally started getting real pleasure from sex”.

The detailed technique for starting to train the pelvic floor muscles is in my article on Kegel exercises for women. But the shortest path is to walk it with me. In the “Healthy and Desired” practicum we work on three levels at once: with the pelvic floor muscles, with trainers and my feedback, with beliefs on live Zoom calls, and with your state through energy practices. That is where I hear “I started wanting it” in every single group. Tens of thousands of women have already walked this path, and their reviews and messages are collected on a separate page. And if the muscles are fine but desire is still missing, the cause lies elsewhere: on my page about female libido I go through what else affects it, and in person, come to my consultation and we will talk it through.

Don’t put it off

If you are reading this and recognising yourself, don’t put it off. It will not sort itself out, I have seen that in hundreds of thousands of my followers. The muscles get weaker, the beliefs grow in deeper, and the distance in the couple grows. In a year the same task will cost more: in energy and in the relationship. Start today, you are reading this article for a reason.

You have two paths.

1. Figure it out on your own: do the exercises, not knowing whether you are doing them right, and wait (you have probably tried that already…).
2. Figure it out with me. You can come to a free consultation: I or my team will help you find what is blocking desire in your case: the muscles, the head or the state. Knowing the cause and knowing what you specifically should do are two different things. And if you already know you want to work with the body, the head and the state at once, come to me for the “Healthy and Desired” practicum.