Tighten My Vagina

‘I don’t need to do any vagina exercise!’ The young woman asserted vehemently.

Single and 23, she smoothed down her svelte figure and stalked off as I turned off the projector and packed away my samples and papers.

Thinking back to the women in the audience, there would be other women like her, as well as teenage mums who worried more about regaining their six pack abs than applying the same attention to the far more important muscles that lay invisibly a few inches further down.

But the ones who worried me the most were those who kept refusing to address some of the more embarrassing personal issues that had been troubling them for years since they had their youngest.

Carrying the additional weight of a pregnancy and the muscle loosening effects of those hormones that help to prepare the pelvis and cervix to stretch wide enough to allow the baby to push its way out, followed by the rigours of giving birth vaginally, had left a lot of them with an irritating predisposition to leakage when they sneezed and coughed. But they were the lucky ones.

There would also be a few who could actually feel something falling down inside themselves where their womb, bladder or rectum had begun to prolapse into their vagina.

These problems were exacerbated by the fact that they had just never been able to lose the extra pounds from the pregnancy and had piled on a few more from finishing off the kids’ tea whilst waiting for the other half to get in from work to have dinner together. Being overweight exerted even more pressure on the already slack muscles of their pelvic floor.

Some of these women would end up in an operating theatre under the surgeon’s knife for a hysterectomy. A procedure that would rob them of the parts that most essentially defined them as a woman and bringing on all the symptoms of premature Menopause. An operation which could so easily have been prevented if only they had set aside 20 minutes each day to do a few simple pelvic floor contractions.

If only I’d met them two decades before and been able to explain to them about the relevance and value of exercising their kegels when they were in their late teens and early twenties. Giving those muscles a regular work-out could have kept that pelvic diaphragm in the tip-top condition of youth and prevented so many of the problems they were now experiencing as a result of labour.

As young women, all our muscles are naturally firm and tight and that includes the Pubococcygeus or pelvic floor muscle. The PC muscle is like a hammock that runs between the base of the spine and the pubic bone and then across between the two halves of the pelvis. Like a pair of cupping hands, with its interlinked fingers tensioned to just the right degree to hold all the internal organs in place.

However, as we grow older, everything naturally becomes looser, especially as a result of the hormonal changes of pregnancy and Menopause. When the PC muscle is allowed to slacken off, prolapse and both urinary and fecal incontinence can be the unpleasant consequences.

But, it’s more than that. Every woman wants to have the most pleasurable experience in the bedroom. Regular pelvic floor exercises can keep a woman in touch with some of her most intimate muscles, allowing her to give and receive the in the most optimal way.

This is why regular vagina exercise is so important. Sucking the muscles up one floor at a time and then letting them down again a few times a day, that’s all it takes. There are no special work-out clothes or expensive gym memberships. You can perform the most important exercises a woman will ever need whilst waiting at the bus stop or the supermarket checkout.

As the young woman walked away, I knew that, one day in the not too distant future, her weighted vaginal cones set would become her best friend and she might remember this conversation and smile wryly at the time she wasted.