Most health experts agree: Kegels are good for your pelvic floor health. And a healthy pelvic floor can prevent or help with incontinence and pain or discomfort during sex, while potentially improving arousal and orgasm.

But I hate doing Kegels.

Maybe hate is a strong word for how I feel. But whenever I saw or heard the advice to “do your Kegels,” it was on par with “floss your teeth.” Sure, I need to do it for my overall health, but it’s boring and annoying and ugh. It’s something you do for the result, not the experience itself.

And when it comes to exercising, I’m less interested in activities like calisthenics or rope climbing and more interested in ones like biking and Zumba! Kegels felt like cookie calisthenics, and even came with instructions like:

Contract your pelvic floor muscles for 3 to 5 seconds.
Relax for 3 to 5 seconds.
Repeat the contract/relax cycle 10 times.

Step-by-step guide to performing Kegel exercises – Harvard Health

Enter the exerciser with a twist.

Pelvic floor exercisers have been around for a while. If you search for “pelvic floor exerciser,” you’ll see everything from insertion devices to Kegel weights to inner thigh exercisers to biofeedback devices.

Some are excellent products, but none of them dealt with my main issue: I don’t wanna.

Then I saw a product advertised that piqued my interest: Perifit uses video games to get you to exercise your Kegels. Wait, what?!

I contacted the company and requested an exerciser to try, they sent me one with the request for an honest review, and I’m happy to report that the Perifit is pretty awesome! It made doing Kegels easy and fun. Yes, fun.

I was doing Kegels wrong.

If I’d read one, I’ve read 20 explanations of how to do Kegels. And yet, I was doing them incorrectly! I realized this when I first used my Perifit, squeezed like I had, and didn’t get the anticipated response from the device.

I squeezed differently, and then another time, until… oh, now I’ve got it! Oddly enough, I was over-squeezing before, so it’s actually easier to do Kegels now.

You begin using the exerciser by turning it on and inserting it inside your vagina. (And no, this doesn’t feel like a vibrator or a penis. It’s not a turn-on. It doesn’t shake or thrust. It’s a health device.) You open the app you’ve already downloaded and receive a prompt to calibrate. You’re asked to relax, then squeeze, relax, then squeeze, etc., and the app takes note of the movements and strength with which they’re done.

That’s the first part of knowing how well you’re doing Kegels. But the games help with that too.

Your game controller is your hooha.

Well, that heading title was an odd sentence to type.

Many of you don’t love doing Kegels either. You’re a responsible adult woman, so you do them, but you can think of 50 other things that would be more fun. But what if you were playing a game while you did them?

That’s literally what you do. Your Kegels—relaxing and squeezing—control the movement of your game piece on the screen. Some Kegels are a quick squeeze in and out, others are slower, thus developing more control of the pelvic floor muscles over time.

I know you need visuals to picture this! So here you go:

In this game, you’re the butterfly, and you’re supposed to hit the lotuses and avoid the birds. How much and fast you squeeze and release depends on the position of the lotuses (and birds).

Here’s another, simpler game:

Here, you control the black dot (with a tail) and try to stay within the red lines.

The games are not complicated, more on par with Candy Crush or Angry Birds. But they’re fun and motivating to complete. You can see your progress, want to do better, and receive encouragement to complete levels, as that opens up new games (including one where you’re driving a car!).

You can see the gains you’ve made.

You know your Kegels are getting stronger when you play the games better. But the app also measures contraction quality, strength, agility, endurance, and relaxation and compares your current performance to your overall average.

There’s a practice mode where you can simply work on squeezing and releasing at whatever pace you want to try, thus making sure you’re doing Kegels correctly and strengthening your ability to master the games.

The app has six training programs: pelvic floor prevention, urge incontinence, stress incontinence, mixed incontinence, post-natal recovery, and sexual wellness. Your program varies according to the health issue you’re training to address.

You can set up notifications to remind you to exercise at whatever intervals you choose, and the app reminder doesn’t read “Exercise your love tunnel!” but rather has a tasteful flower icon and a reminder: “Got five minutes? Why not work out?” So if your kid or your mother-in-law see your phone, your cheeks won’t suddenly redden with embarrassment.

Does it improve “sexual wellness”?

That’s not the training program I chose. But a wife’s pelvic floor health can impact to her comfort during intercourse, her arousal and orgasm, and his sensations during penetration.

I won’t share how pelvic floor gaming impacted my marriage’s intimacy, but I will admit benefits.

Yep, I recommend it.

I was not contacted about Perifit; I contacted them. They didn’t demand a positive review; they asked for an honest review. I have not received any money for this post or joined an affiliate program with them (they only do that with medical providers); I simply received a product to try.

But hey, while I thought the Perifit was a cool idea and I might like it, I ended up loving it. So I figured I should tell other wives!

I dreaded doing Kegels before, and now they’re easy and fun. I don’t have to play the game for a long time to get the benefit of strengthening my pelvic floor, just a few minutes a day or several minutes a few times a week.

Also, I think husbands everywhere will be impressed by what their wives can do with their sweet-spot muscles. (You men may call your penis a joystick, but I’ve never known it to play a video game on its own. Just sayin’. ~grin~)

Anyway, if you wanting to improve your pelvic floor health—and you should—then I can recommend Perifit as one great option for encouraging you to do your Kegels correctly and easily while having fun.

Related posts: What Are You Doing for Pelvic Floor Health? and 12 Ways to Make Good Sex Even Better

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A good friend uttered that sentence at a table full of women. There was a brief pause, and then we all erupted in laughter. We got it. You see, we’d all given birth in the not-too-distant past and had experienced stress incontinence.

Stress incontinence occurs when your bladder is “stressed” in some way — through physical activity, laughing, coughing, sneezing — and urine leaks out. It’s not uncommon among women after childbirth or in later age.

But it isn’t inevitable. There are ways to strengthen the pelvic floor to keep everything tight and in check. One of the added benefits of pelvic floor health is that it permits more pressure and flexing during sexual intercourse, which can be pleasurable for both husband and wife.

What’s the primary method for strengthening the pelvic floor? Let’s all say it together, ladies! Kegel Exercises.

Now if you’re like me, you hate doing Kegel exercises. Not because they’re painful, but because you can’t remember to do them often enough, and when you do them, you’re not exactly sure if you’re doing them right. Or you wonder if maybe someone does notice that you’re flexing your down-there muscles since you just remembered to do them in the grocery store line and that woman over there is looking at you funny.

So I started looking at other options. Because I don’t remember to do push-ups, sit-ups, or jumping jacks either, but if you buy me exercise equipment or sign me up for the gym, I’ll exercise (at least some) because I don’t want to waste the money and that gadget looks kind of cool.

I’m sharing what I found, and then asking you to comment on what, if anything, you’re doing for pelvic floor health.

Vaginal Weights. There are several different types, but the main idea is to place a weight of some kind in the vagina. The inner muscles reflexively contract to keep the weight inside, and over time the pelvic floor is strengthened. Examples include Ben Wa Balls, Lelo Beads, and vaginal cones.

This form of pelvic floor exercise has been around for centuries, but professionally manufactured vaginal weights are often recommended by obstetricians and gynecologists today.

Pelvic Exerciser. If the examples above are like the free weights in the gym, pelvic exercisers are like the body-building machines. These mechanical contraptions are inserted into the vagina and then expand and contract to work your pelvic floor muscles into shape. They come with such names as Kegel Pro and Kegelmaster and — for the uber-serious, I guess — the Kegelmaster 2000.

Vaginal Sensor. A vaginal sensor comes with a small part to insert into the vagina attached to a sensor that you hold. The sensor prompts you when to flex and when to release, thus exercising your Kegel muscles properly. I suppose it’s like having your own personal trainer at the gym. There are several brand names for such products, and sensors are also used in urology offices to detect incontinence issues.

“The Flexible Accessory.” I have no idea where to categorize this thing. But I found something called The Magic Banana. It has an odd shape but purports to exercise Kegel muscles and thus strengthen the pelvic floor. It’s sort of like that home gym equipment you see on some infomercial that you’d never know how to use without them demonstrating it for you. So I watched the demo video.

Very soon, I was thinking that this banana was a little too magical. It was going beyond pelvic floor muscle exercises to G-spot exploration. I was starting to have impure thoughts looking at my fruit bowl. But one doesn’t have to use the tool that way. You could just use it to give those Kegels a workout.

So here are my questions:

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