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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Kegeling promises to help prevent incontinence and "enhance physical intimacy."
Jul 16, 1999 | Once upon a time, a gynecologist named Arnold Kegel invented an exercise. To do this particular exercise, you clenched your pubococcygeus muscle over and over. The pubococcygeus controls the bladder's escape hatch, making the exercise particularly useful for women whose hatches have a tendency to leak. Kegel named his workout Kegeling, inextricably linking himself to pubic squeezing and ensuring an obituary that would gloss over all other salient aspects of his career.
As the months went by, some of Kegel's patients confided a secret. For the first time in their lives, they were having orgasms. Intrigued, Kegel linked up with a sexologist named Marilyn Fithian, who was doing a study on non-orgasmic women. Throughout the early 1970s, the two of them took their show on the road, preaching the benefits of Kegeling to doctors in 20 cities coast-to-coast and making Kegeling a household word.
I spoke with Fithian last week, because I wanted her opinion on Kegeling's newest wrinkle: vaginal weight lifting. (I didn't call Kegel because he's dead.) The principle behind pubococcygeus weight lifting is the same as with any other muscle: progressive resistance training is the best and fastest way to build strength. You don't just squeeze your biceps if you want strong arms, so why should you just squeeze your, as they say, feminine muscles? (Well, for one thing, because you have to insert a one-pound weight into your vagina, but we'll get to that later.)
Although Fithian, 77, remains a devoted Kegeler, she hadn't heard of the Feminine Personal Trainer, which is a one-pound stainless steel weight that comes with a video and a Discreet Hard Shell Carrying Case. Fithian did not, however, deem it an extreme or nutty thing. Although this could have to do with all those years spent working alongside Arnold Kegel. Kegel was a gynecologist who dared to go where no gynecologist had gone before, or at least where no gynecologist had gone with dental plaster. Kegel made life casts of vaginas, called mulages, to show the effects of diligent Kegeling. "You had to be sure to get the plaster out before it got hard," recalled Fithian. If you dawdled, the plaster chunk would become trapped, and no amount of pelvic floor muscle strength was going to help you. "You had to break it inside the vagina," said Fithian matter-of-factly.
Kegel also invented a device to measure pubococcygeus muscle strength, called a perineometer. Using this, he and Fithian gathered scientific evidence for what his patients had been telling him. "A large percentage of the (non-orgasmic) women that we saw back then had very loose, gaping vaginas," said Fithian. The more toned the women's muscles became from squeezing, the less likely the women were to be frigid.
Imagine what weight-lifting could do for a gal.
