How To Make Kegels Harder! - Challenge Your
Pelvic Floor
Are your kegels starting to feel too easy? Are you looking for ways to make kegels harder? If you answered yes, then this post is for you and don’t worry, no kegels balls are required!
Why would I want to make kegels harder?
Kegels target your pelvic floor muscles which, like any other muscles, can be strengthened through exercises. And like any other muscle, to further enhance strength, you must progress your exercises as your strength increases.
Imagine if you stuck with the same 5 pound weight for bicep curls for months on end. At some point, the 5 pounds will start to feel really easy. Continuing with the same weight will maintain strength in this muscle but if your goal is to get even stronger, you would need to increase the weight. So simple, you move up to curling 8 pound dumbbells.
It’s not so simple in the pelvic floor because we don’t usually use weights to strengthen it, remember I said no kegel balls required! So that’s why I’m here writing this post, to lay it out for you so you understand how you can progress the strength of your pelvic floor muscles in a simple way that requires no equipment!
You can learn more about the pelvic floor muscles in detail in this post: What Is The Pelvic Floor?
A few things to know before trying this exercise....
Before we get into the exercise to make kegels harder, I want to clarify two things.
First is that kegels don’t fix all problems. Some people actually need to relax the pelvic floor which is the opposite of what you’re doing with kegels. For more information surrounding this topic, this post goes into more detail: Should Everyone Kegel?
Second thing is that a lot of people do kegels wrong. If you’re doing them wrong, you’re definitely not at the point where you need to make them more difficult. I talk about common mistakes and shed light on this in this post here: Kegel Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make. In that post, I also teach you how to do a kegel which we won’t be reviewing here.
Also if you’re only doing quick kegels, before you do the exercise I’m about to explain, read the Kegel Mistakes post and reference mistake #2.
This post is for people who are at the point where they feel like their kegels are getting easy and they want a little more of a challenge. If you aren’t there, don’t feel bad at all, kegels are pretty freaking hard even in their basic form, so keep working on it!
How do you make kegels harder without equipment?
So you’re doing all the right things and your kegels just feel easy, you want more of a challenge but don’t know what to do.
Enter…..elevator kegels.
Elevator kegels are an amazing way to step up your kegel game by providing an extra challenge to your pelvic floor muscles. When you do a regular kegel, you only work at two points in the muscles range. So you go from fully relaxed, to fully contracted, and back to relaxation.
Let’s think about a bicep curl again to understand how this works. Hopefully you know what a bicep curl is as I love to use this example….It’s basically bending and straightening your elbow with a weight to work the muscle on the front part of your upper arm.
If you did a bicep curl as if you were doing your regular kegels, you would fully bend your elbow, hold your elbow fully bent for a few seconds, and then bring it back to straight. Now if you did this like an elevator kegel, you’d curl a bit, hold, curl a bit more, hold again, and then do the same thing as you gradually uncurled. Just as this approach would be much more challenging for your bicep, it will be more challenging for your pelvic floor.
How do you do elevator kegels?
You can do elevator kegels in any position so laying on your back, sitting, or standing. The position you’re in changes the difficulty just as it does with regular kegels. So laying on your back will be easiest, sitting will be more challenging, and standing will be the most challenging.
If you’re just doing kegels laying down and have difficulty doing kegels when you are sitting or standing, stick with regular kegels and work on building up that way.
If you choose to do kegels standing, don’t lock out your knees! Remember to keep the knees soft and slightly bent.
Step by step instructions
Think about being on an elevator and stopping at different floors. That’s what we’re doing with the pelvic floor muscles during elevator kegels, stopping at different floors to give these muscle an extra challenge.
We will be moving up through 3 different floors. The base floor will be when your pelvic floor is relaxed.
- Start at the base floor by allowing the pelvic floor to relax. Let go of any tension you may be holding here.
- Next you’ll move to floor 1 by contracting the pelvic floor slightly. So just a small contraction. Hold it here for 2 seconds.
- Next move up to floor 2 by contracting the pelvic floor a little bit more. Hold it here for 2 seconds.
- Now move up to floor 3. This is the top floor so it is a full pelvic floor contraction. Hold it here for 2 seconds.
- Now we are coming back down the elevator so relax back to floor 2, so this was your midpoint contraction. Hold it here for 2 seconds.
- Next back to floor 1, that very slight contraction. Hold it here for 2 seconds.
- Lastly, come back to the base floor by fully relaxing the pelvic floor.
Some things to note to make sure you do these correctly:
Make sure you don’t forget about the base floor! You need to come back to that full relaxation of the pelvic floor before moving onto another elevator kegel.
Also, make sure you are continuing to breathe! Keep the breath steady while you do your kegels. If it’s still hard to hold a pelvic floor contraction while breathing naturally, work with regular kegels first before moving onto elevator kegels. There’s more information on breathing while you do your kegels in the Kegel Mistakes post. It is under mistake #1 in this post.
How many elevator kegels should I do?
As seen above, I recommend starting with a 2 second hold at each ‘floor’ to get used to this exercise.
When you feel ready, you can progress to holding for 5 seconds at each floor.
Hold the base floor (the relaxation point) a little longer before moving onto the next round. I suggest relaxing for 5-10 seconds.
Start with 5 rounds of elevator kegels. As you get stronger, you can progress to 10 rounds.
Elevator kegels are hard…Elevators are supposed to make things easier, what the hell!
This exercise requires a lot of muscle control so it will definitely challenge your pelvic floor muscles.
I hope you found this post helpful in making kegels harder and more challenging for your pelvic floor. Enjoy the elevator ride!
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