There are many ways in which fitness improves your sexual health, but is there such a thing as sexual fitness? According to wellness expert Susan Crain Bakos, author of The Daily Sex Bible: Inspirations and Techniques for the Best Year of Sex Ever, ‘You, too, can become a sex goddess. I’m perfectly serious: By investing a little time, less effort and no money, you can become a powerful erotic force, a woman capable of reducing your partner to a state of gasping, spent gratitude. All you have to do is become sexually fit – and I swear you won’t have to set foot in a gym.’ However, before you start imagining all sorts of weird, kinky exercises, fear not; achieving your sexual fitness and wellbeing is as easy as breathing.
Crain Bakos notes, ‘Like Kegels, breathing exercises are easy to learn and practice, and require only a few minutes…You don’t have to do breathing exercises every day or every time you make love. Some women use them only when they’re having trouble focusing on lovemaking or sustaining arousal during sex.’ The following breathing exercises have been adapted from Kundalini yoga, often described as sexual yoga because the exercises target your pelvic and genital areas.
1. The Breath of Fire: Crain Bakos advises, ‘Use this before or during lovemaking to get you in the mood or increase arousal, especially if you’re having trouble reaching orgasm. There’s no simpler way to oxygenate the blood, a process that increases sexual energy and elevates desire. Take rapid, rhythmic and shallow breaths through the nose. Keep your mouth closed. Breathe this way for one to three minutes.’
2. Fire Breathing: Although this has a similar name to the first breathing exercise, it involves a very different technique. Before you incorporate it into lovemaking, you should practice the fire breathing exercise alone. Crain Bakos instructs, ‘Lie on your back, knees bent, feet spaced well apart. Start by taking deep breaths: Pull each breath into your body so deeply that you feel your diaphragm expanding. Imagine this huge intake of air going all the way down into your genitals. When you exhale, pull that air all the way up from your genitals and out of your body. After a dozen or so deep breaths, pant by breathing rapidly from your belly with your mouth open. Do this 10 or 20 times, then breathe deeply, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. Make the breathing a continuous circular motion. Imagine a circle of fire, beginning as a small circle, composed at first only of nose and mouth, then expanding to include chest, belly and finally genitals. Feel the erotic heat moving in a circle throughout your body as you breathe. And feel your arousal growing with every breath.’
3. The Fire-Breathing Orgasm: Crain Bakos directs, ‘While you’re making love, flex your PC muscles in the same pattern as you perform your Fire Breath, squeezing as you inhale and releasing as you exhale. Start by flexing with the panting, then deep breathing and finally Fire Breathing. This may sound a little complicated, but it really isn’t; Fire Breathing becomes a reflex action after you’ve practiced it a half dozen times. Your orgasm will be stunning in its intensity.’
Hot stuff (pun intended) but does it work? Reader Jill, 34, reports, ‘I had problems with focus during lovemaking. I worried about whether he would come too soon, or would I come at all—and lost my momentum. Fire Breathing helps me regain sexual focus. The breathing and flexing get me very excited. I can make myself have an orgasm this way, even if he’s already come. I can hold him inside me and sustain his erection for a little while by the sheer force of my PCs. I have an explosive orgasm. And he loves it too.’