Your penis isn’t a muscle. Yes, you can flex it. Yes, it can atrophy. However, it consists mainly of spongy tissue and blood vessels, incapable of being built and bolstered in the way the actual muscles of our body are. Nevertheless, plenty of you will continue to try. Here’s what you should probably do instead.
Consider your penis in the same way you would your brain — that is, the penis is a muscle in the metaphoric sense. It requires “exercise” and upkeep to stay healthy. Doing math isn’t literally going to make your brain bigger, but you should probably still do it. Penis exercises are kind of the same, though they can have some literal, physical effects.
With the exception of losing weight to help the penis appear bigger, there aren’t any exercises that impact penis size. However, there are tons that can impact function. In a broad sense, staying active overall helps ward off erectile dysfunction by maintaining heart health, keeping your arteries cleared and allowing for proper blood flow to the penis.
Targeted exercises can make a difference in ED, too, though. Your penis itself doesn’t have any muscle in it, but it’s still impacted by the muscles that exist around it — namely, those of your pelvic floor. Your pelvic floor muscles, those at the base of your pelvis or your lower ab muscles, do interact with your penis. When this area is strengthened and used, blood flow to the region increases. In turn, your penis gets more blood, and you get stronger erections. Kegels are one form of pelvic floor exercise, though they can be challenging to get a feel for. Instead, exercises like bridges can work your pelvic floor in addition to your glutes.
Speaking of glutes, your butt does indeed play a role here as well. As my colleague Andrew Fiouzi previously reported, your dick’s ability to “flex” is the result of your ischiocavernosus muscle beneath your perineum/taint. There’s not much of a way to work this muscle on its own, nor is there really a reason to. Working your pelvic floor overall will help support this muscle, as well as help protect your bladder, prostate, bowel and everything else going on down there.
Beyond that, though, there’s not much in the way of “effective” penis-specific exercises. There is, however, plenty of weird bullshit out there that says otherwise. Jelqing, for example, is a practice of manually “stretching” (or excessively pulling) your penis to try to make it bigger. There’s zero evidence that this works, and you very well may hurt yourself. There are also tons of products designed to increase your penis size over time, but the same caveats apply to them as well. In some cases, however, objects like penis pumps are used as a legitimate form of “penile rehabilitation” for men who have had prostate surgery or other temporary causes of erectile dysfunction.
In addition to pumps, penile rehabilitation also often involves medications like Viagra. This is because one of the best ways to support healthy erections is simply to keep having them. Your penis doesn’t need exercise of its own, but again, you as a whole do. Staying active overall will help keep that pelvic floor tight, but it will also keep your cardiovascular system in shape to keep the erections coming. That will be a helluva lot more effective than trying to stretch your way to a giant hog.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
