Welcome to another monthly roundup of marriage and sex resources with links to recent posts, as well as:

• podcast episodes with Knowing Her Sexually and Sex Chat for Christian Wives
• my monthly post over at KHS Ministry (for husbands)
• any new resources I’m involved in (from online seminars to new site store products)
• resources and products I can recommend for your marriage and sex life
• news and events I need or want to share with y’all
• biblical inspiration for the upcoming month

Scroll through to find what you might have missed or your next great resource for marriage.

This Month on the Blog

Quick note: I’m trying to blog twice a week, but sometimes I only get one blog post out.

From Sex Chat for Christian Wives Podcast

• Episode 101: Enjoying Sex, with Joyce Penner
• Episode 102: What You Need to Know About Sex
• Episode 103: Take Time to Titivate

From Knowing Her Sexually Podcast

• Episode 26: What “Take It Slow” Means to Her
• Episode 27: Does My Wife Think I’m Hot?

My Post at KHS Ministry

Click the image below to read.

A Few Great Reads Elsewhere

• I’m in love with my podcast partner Gaye’s Healthy Life Toolbox series. I have felt seen, called out, and encouraged! Here’s a particularly great one: Decide What You Really Deserve – Healthy Life Toolbox, Tool #11 – Calm.Healthy.Sexy. (By the way, Gaye has also pointed out that Dear Wife, You Deserve a Great Sex Life Too).
• Some great thoughts about sexual release vs. sexual relationship in marriage in this guest post from Juli Slattery: Stop Hooking Up In Your Marriage  | Shaunti Feldhahn.
• How does the security of your marriage relate to your words? I wrote it about it this past month, but here’s another excellent post on that topic: The Importance of Encouraging Words – Fierce Marriage.

Also, to the WIVES, please help Chris Taylor of Honeycomb & Spice learn more about chronic illness & sex. You can visit her post about it below or just take the survey at: https://tinyurl.com/chronic-survey

Recommended Resources & Products

I’ve often mentioned Christian Friendly Sex Positions as a good resource for positions tastefully drawn yet well displayed and described. But it can be rather unwieldy to lie in bed with your spouse searching through their database. Hey, CFSPs just launched a deck of physical cards with 52 of their most popular positions! It comes in a blank box, so no one but you and your beloved will know what’s inside, and cards include QR codes that you can scan to find the online instructions. (affiliate link)

I wrote a whole post about this product, but I just have to say again: what a smart idea! Ladies, if you want to do Kegels right and in a way that’s actually fun, check out the Perifit pelvic floor exerciser. (And no, this is not a sex toy, but a device for women’s health.)

What J’s Up to These Days

These days, I’m down more than up. Meaning I sleep way more than I used to, but it is what it is. I’m in a season of rest.

• My battle with chronic illness continues, with several doctor appointments lined up and ongoing investigation to answer the question: What is wrong with me? (I mean, beyond my fun craziness. ~wink~) No certain answer yet, but I found an app that helps me track symptoms. In case it helps someone else, the app is Bearable.
• My TBR (to be read) pile is quite large, but sadly it’s been difficult for me to read anything longer than a few pages. I’ve been keeping up with my field through online articles—often read to me with the text-to-speech function—and audio/video content. All of which reminds me that I really need to get my own books into audio!
• Spock and I recently took a short driving date outside Houston to soak up the beauty of Texas wildflowers. Unfortunately, the flowers were in short supply. Some have wondered if Snowmaggedon (our rare snowstorm in mid-February) impacted their growth, but Texas Parks & Wildlife says the flowers should still blossom, though more in April. We hope to take another drive soon and verify that “the sage in bloom is like perfume, deep in the heart of Texas.” (It is.)

Biblical Inspiration for the Coming Month

How do we read the Bible? That is, a lot of us “read” the Bible by seeing and sharing verses or short passages. While time doesn’t always permit, I now try to open up my Bible where the excerpt appears and scan the context. Sometimes, it’s an eye-opener to see the verses that come before or after what was cited.

For instance, we love to share Jeremiah 29:11:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

That sounds great, God! Let’s do that.

But if you read the whole chapter, that verse appears in a section telling the Israelites to hang out in Babylonian captivity for a while yet. Wait a minute—I didn’t know CAPTIVITY was part of this deal!

My point is that we want to rest on all of God’s amazing salvation promises, and they are true! He loves us so much and wants the best for us. But sometimes we have to hang out for a while, doing the best we can and finding contentment in an imperfect situation.

If your marriage or sex life isn’t everything you know God wants it to be yet, don’t give up hope. But also don’t demand a miracle from God by tomorrow.

His plan may unfold more slowly, but incremental improvements are often the ones that become permanent and teach us gratitude for both the result and the journey.

The post Resource Roundup: March 2021 appeared first on Hot, Holy & Humorous.

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

The post Kegels Made Easy and Fun! appeared first on Hot, Holy & Humorous.