Are you stretching too hard?

And is it hindering your gains? Some people think so…

I discovered a couple of posts on a message forum to an old PE site I joined when I first started. I haven’t been there almost since the beginning, because after discovering PEforums and Thunder’s Place, I found that the pioneering efforts into PE here are far more cutting edge, and populated by a lot more people that I consider true masters of this art and science.

But recently after visiting there again, I found some interesting posts that seem contradictory to many of the advanced stretching techniques I’ve learned here that I have made significant gains from.

I would like to know your opinion. Is there anything valid to this information? Or do you find it erroneous and unproven? There’s a lot of misinformation about PE around the net now and a lot of self-proclaimed experts giving out opinions that may or may not be based in fact.

What do you think?

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I’ve come across several people in the chat room who are stuck on a plateau, and decided to explain something a few people just don’t understand.

Pulling too hard makes your penis stronger NOT longer.

To be successful at lengthening you only need to feel a slight tug at the base, each xtender should add a little more length. Trying to remove your penis from your body will not speed up your gains, in fact it will end them.

If you make your Penis stronger by pulling to hard your going to hit a permanent plateau, and that will be the end of your lengthening progress.

The number one most important factor in successful xtenders is total relaxation while doing them. High intensity is for bodybuilding not PE.

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If you’ve been pulling too hard for a long time your not gaining at all right now, am I correct?

When you pull a tendon to hard or jelq to hard you can actually do serious damage, and when things finally recover they are much stronger and harder than before (both ligaments and tissue), but without new size or growth. Doing xtenders is much easier than most people think, the ligaments are embedded with muscle tissue, to add new length you must be totally relaxed, and must not pull to hard. Pulling to hard will only trigger your body’s defense mechanism and cause everything to shrink temporarily when finished. The day after PE everything should be fuller, not shriveled up and smaller. (How it looks the day after is an immediate indication of whether or not your doing it right).

One of the best things you can do to ‘recover’ from over training is take a month off. Let everything settle and fully recover, then start all over again. Do not view taking a month off as a set back, it may be the exact thing your body needs to keep on growing. Also don’t get discouraged if you’ve been over-training, learn from your mistakes and move on. If your determine enough you can still make gains regardless of past mistakes, but those gains may come at a slower rate, as you do the xtenders correctly.

I do not want to sugar coat the reality that pulling to hard can and will stop growth. Your body will adapt to abuse by becoming stronger and harder. Abusing or destroying your penis does not make it grow, the proper amount of stimulation does.

Alright, you’ve officially freaked me out.

I won’t fly off the handle and say that this is total BS as there is a bit of logic and physiology behind what they are saying, I will say that a PE’er with a moderate amount of body awareness should be able to avoid these pitfalls.

Overtraining is a very real thing. Sadly, only one person can judge overtraining, that is you. It requires a bit of body awareness, not a ton but enough to realize that you’re ‘flogging a dead horse’ as opposed to actually getting a good workout. Every persons individual body response to overtraining is different. You may hit a ‘plateau’. You may experience shrinking as opposed to growth. Things along those lines.

When in doubt, take a week off. While it may be difficult, especially when you really want to see gains, that time off may be just what the doctor ordered to kickstart your gains once again.

On the other front, the body does have defense mechanisms for when a tendon is stretched too far, a doctor tests this reflex when they hit just under your crossed knee with a rubber mallet.

Avoiding that reflex is the logic behind using JAI stretches AND also the logic behind completely exhausting the PC muscle before or during stretching. While the Tunica is technically a fascia sheath, and the ligaments are a ‘bone-to-bone’ connection, if memory serves the penis does have at least one tendon that attaches to the fascia of the penis. I’m in Oregon so I can’t dive into my A&P books to be 100% certian.

Starting with a hot wrap, then moving gradually up from gentle stretches to your more forceful stretches helps to offset the ‘pulling too hard’ part of what they were saying above.

However, I’m not one to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe they spotted something that nobody has seen.

Anyone care to take on a “Gentle PE” Routine? Everything done with the minimum amount of force to feel a difference. A light tug during stretches or a light expansion during jelqs and only one workout every other day or even one workout every 3 days. Say for 2 months.

Be interesting to see if any of the hardgainers or no-gainers would gain anything off this.

Good spot, MadMax8. Thanks for bringing this up.

Namaste,

If you look into the “blasters” you will find that they are based in prefatiguing the pc muscle prior to getting to the real business of stretching. Johan had previously made the observation that the pc muscle “pulled” back in reflex to strong or long lasting stretches. His solution was to recommend short medium tension stretches - the JAI stretch. DLD innovated with the concept of makeing the muscle too tired to effectively resist the stretch - see the original description of the “blasters”.

I do think that over doing conventional stretches without prefatiguing or using RK’s to relax the pc could be mad less effective due to the pc pull back phenomenon, however even here persistance will pay off.

Great, just what I needed something else to over analyze.

It takes between six and 18 months for a ligament to remodel after stress damage. If you pull too hard you can cause injury and pain. A leakage of a lot of fluid into an injury site can harden pretty quickly but you gotta do serious damage. And that level of damage will hurt like hell. I doubt even the most aggressive stretchers pull hard enough to cause said level of damage. And the continuation of a regular program will stretch those newly formed fibers before they begin to add to the general strength of the ligament (6-18 months.) IMHO most guys don’t apply enough pressure until they gradually approach that level of pressure through testing their personal responses.

On the pullback mechanism. That may apply to Blasters since if you’re exercising in a pull-back angle the muscle is involved. The pull back mechanism is a reflex only experienced by enervated contractile tissues AKA muscles.

I think that given the research that’s been discussed here already re: ligament deformation it is important to do more than ten reps of any stretch to get maximum benefit.

Well, I can understand where your coming from, but what about all the guys who hang? I mean hanging even say 10lbs from your penis has got have more force over time than doing it manually, and if I’m right your supposed to do an hour broken up over 3 intervals.

I think this is an excellent point and probably why I feel the blasters have significantly added to my PE workouts and ultimately my own gains.

See? I knew that this would become an interesting topic of discussion when you guys start analyzing this. I hope that BIB and DLD, both of whom have introduced well thought out (and at least to me) groundbreaking ideas on stretching.

Come on, fellas, how hard do you stretch and how do you feel that helps or hinders your gains? Personally, sometimes I feel I stretch pretty hard…if I follow the “light is right” rule, I don’t think I’m pushing the envelope of gains, so to speak.

When I manually stretch, I stretch as hard as I can without tearing anything, but I only hold it for a few seconds. I go to my limit. During jelqing is the kind of stretching I consider “light”, like a JAI or something. So it’s the best of both worlds.(?)

I pull as hard as I can, the grip seems to be the limiting factor, at least for me. I’ve never been able to even get a “lig pop”. I use talcum powder to assist my grip. btw, I think that the bundled stretch isolates the tunica well and may help negate pc pull back. I’m beginning to really like them. I do pre fatigue with kegels and do RK’s every 10-15 sec during the stretch.

There is truth to the idea of pulling too hard. If you have ever studied yoga/kung-fu/etc, you know that you are not expected to be able to immediately do incredible acts of flexibility. The stretching of the fibers takes years (muscles,etc), not minutes.

When someone begins hanging, they don’t (or shouldn’t) start with 15 lbs. They start light. As the ligs stretch AND strengthen (not only have they strengthened, but physics will tell you that the weight is distributed over a longer length), a higher weight is required to get an equivalant stretch.

The retraction you are speaking of could be overcame if the penis were maintained in an elonged state. Eventually, the tissues would allow this stretched state to become the norm. However, I believe that you have some reason that it would be better to get there by using a slightly lighter load.

What I do is pull just until I feel a good stretch, building the tension up slowly over a few seconds versus just yank like hell right off the bat. Then, as the stretched feeling subsides, I increase the tension to restore it. I keep doing this throughout the entire stretch set.

Perfect

I wish I would have seen this earlier! I am going to give it a try for a few months. For the last 5 months or so I have been stuck at the same length.(size in PE DATA SITE). Plus this last time I measured I lost length and girth. I have been putting in alot of work morning, noon, and night. I have been stretching hard as hard as I can. So far as a result I have a pretty bad injury, dark discoloration half my dick is dark the other half light and recently pink to reddish color below the head. I used to get lig pops all the time now I seldom get any. For any of you guys out there that read this. If you have an injury let it heal. Dont be stupid like me and work around the injury it will probably get worse it did for me.
Listen to your body or your penis. I did and still ignored it. Now I have to take more time off now to let it heal properly.

As far as the reflex kegel aspect of this goes, you can avoid this by doing an RK, as these muscles seem to be antagonistic to the kegel muscles, meaning doing an RK will relax the reflex reaction. As well as this, the RK pushes the tunica out, putting more stress on the ligs. So at downward angles you can do reverse kegels throughout the stretching or hanging to increase the stress. At higher angles, the reflex kegel or a normal kegel will take some stress from the ligs and onto the tunica. So here you would do normal kegels throghout the stretching/hanging.

I do not agree that stretching hard will make your penis stronger, not longer.

For one thing, it does not take time into the equation, if you stretch regulary, the penis will not be able to get stronger as easily as if you were taking many rest days, as it is being constantly placed under stress. In addition, the extra work will help to keep the penis in the extended state for longer, which will prevent retraction, not cause it. Length exercises can be done every day if no other problems prevent that (conditioning of soft tissues, being a newbie, privacy etc).

Also, the tissues will always strengthen to adapt to the stress used, as well as lengthen (if the stress is enough), no matter what weight. Say your ligs can handle 15 pounds max for example. If you hung all your sets at 5 pounds, the tissues would condition to handle 5 pounds. After a while 5 pounds will seem like nothing, you would be able to hang like that all day if you wanted. If you hung 15 pounds, the tissues would condition to handle 15 pounds, and it would take a lot longer but eventually 15 pounds would begin to feel very light (When I first started, 15 pounds felt like an anvil, but before I stopped I did not feel like I am getting a good stretch until around 25). The difference between the two, is that if 5 pounds is not enough for you to gain, then you are conditioning the tissues, but not gaining length, where 15 might be enough for gains. So I propose the statement:

NOT stretching hard will make your penis stronger, not longer.

Good Luck
SS4