Is LESS more, or is MORE more?

Well said!

“Cording” feeling or that tough cordy feeling is the smooth muscle contracting. Usually indicates too much.

I think your mistake was trying to make your sessions, “shorter/softer”. I think if you just go “softer” but keep the time length, you will probably see good results.

Cheers :up:

In this particular instance, based on what you’ve described I’d say yes it’s definitely time for a decon break. Take a look at the rest of this post and it should help answer the ‘less or more’ question for you.

Have you been steadily increasing your routine? Adding more time, intensity and effort? It sounds like you moved through the envelope that was giving you gains up to an intensity that’s now probably just causing your unit to respond by toughening up. If you consistently cause trauma to any part of your outer body it’ll respond by toughening (this is the principle by which kick-boxers and martial arts practitioners thicken their calves, knuckles and wrists; how guitarists and weight-lifters develop callouses and toughened skin, etc.).

What you have to do is find the range within which you can continue to stimulate growth without it triggering toughening. As long as you remain under the threshold for toughening, theoretically you might even be able to make consistent and uninterrupted gains.

The trick is to find the point at which the minimum amount of effort gives you the maximum return and stick at that rate. Depending on your own physiology it may just surprise you how little you have to do to make consistent gains, and how easy and enjoyable it is to maintain that kind of routine.

Having said that you have to consider that intensifying a routine won’t accelerate gains proportionally. Believe me, if all you had to do to gain faster and faster was to jelq all day every day as hard as you possibly could we all would have reached our length goals a long time ago. Natural PE takes time and there’s not really any way around that. Hypothetically there’s probably a ‘maximum gain-rate’ and an ‘optimum gain-rate’, ‘maximum gain-rate’ being the fastest you can possibly gain regardless of toughening and ‘optimum gain-rate’ being a rate at which you can make consistent gains with the minimum of toughening.

For example (and these are approximate figures given for ease in understanding the principle)…

If you could gain no more than three eights of an inch in one month with a routine that required a two month decon break after every month of practice, each three eights of an inch would require a three-month cycle. Four of these three-month cycles over the course of one year gives an average result of one and a half inches per year (a three eighths of an inch increase over a single a month, in this example, might be considered a ‘maximum gain rate’)

If you could, by decreasing the effort, intensity and design of that routine, gain two eights of an inch over one month with a routine that only required a one month-long decon break every two months, each three-month cycle would yield four eights of an inch. Three of these cycles over the course of a year would yield an average of two inches per year— a half inch per year improvement. (This might be considered an ‘optimum gain rate’)

A guy of average strength probably shouldn’t ever need to force himself in order to make gains. The optimum gain rate can’t be increased by brute force and stubbornness alone. That will most likely just toughen the penis causing cessation of gains. The process of gaining when handled properly should be stimulating, invigorating, fun and to a certain extent pleasurable. For the average guy, if it’s a gruelling, punishing process then you’re absolutely, definitely overdoing it. The best response to increasingly slowing gains from a steady and ongoing increase in time and effort is: Stop and decrease time and effort and/or just stop altogether and take a decon break.

As for toughening being a PI, I guess you could call it a PI but I’d be hesitant to since it’s best to find other PIs to rely on. Ones that don’t require the level of time and effort needed to cause toughening. You want to stay out of that zone. Stay below that threshold to maintain your optimum rate.

On the contrary, I used to more or less exclusively hang weights. I was trying to hang heavier and heavier as quickly as possible to get into the ‘sweet-spot’ reported by old-time hangers.
All I really achieved was the strengthening and toughening of my unit and a subsequent cessation of gains. I reached a point where I couldn’t hang any heavier without considerable pain (enough pain for me not to be able to bare it for more than a couple of minutes even with desktop-VR/3D games to take my mind off of the pain (it’s been used successfully with burn treatments, so I was using it to cope with the discomfort of hanging)).

At that point I ended up re-designing my routine so that I was hanging sets from the moment I got up to before I went to sleep, challenging myself to see how many sets I could get into the day. I found a weight that I could only hang for almost exactly as long as one set before pain set in and which I couldn’t continuously hang for more than one sixteen hour period provided I was efficient enough to get as many sets into the day as I possibly could. I’d challenge myself to do this every day.

I did that for a couple of months until my gains slowed to a near stop and at that point, following the advice of the old-timers, continued to hang that way for another three months to cement the gains I’d made (I also wanted to double-check that my gains had definitely stopped). Over those three months it’s possible that I may have gained an extra sixteenth of an inch, accurately measurable only because my EQ had more or less totally disappeared. By that time my eq was so bad and my physical response to the sight of my metal ruler was so extreme that I was having to measure my stretched flaccid and cross-reference it to earlier comparative measurement to extrapolate a BPEL measurement.

Around that time I also saw a graph of average gains achieved which (after removing the ‘noise’) seemed to show that people only ever seemed to gain a maximum of two inches of length, and this was where I thought I was— a two inch increase with cessation of gains at the maximum effort and intensity I could possibly manage. It was at this point that I became disillusioned and gave it all up entirely. Every bit of it, without even a maintenance routine. If two inches was all I could possibly get it would leave me permanently half an inch below my goal and my goal was eight inches or nothing.

However. After a long break of probably over a year I started clamping again purely for pleasure and found that my unit was just as big but responding to clamping and jelqing like a newbie dick, so I came back.

Right now I’m not hanging and I’m not sure if I even could gain any more from hanging, even if I wanted to. After this long and total break, having never before seriously committed to Jelqing and clamping, low level jelqing and three or four clamping sets were enough to giving me gains similar to newbie-gains. I’ve now taken clamping and jelqing out of my routine to minimise the risk of conditioning and so that I can focus on pumping to get the shape and girth I want without exceeding my length goal (which, at this point and at the rate I’m gaining, seems to be almost unavoidable).

My recommendation is 1. Listen to Sparky and follow his advice, he knows what he’s talking about; and 2. find and ease your way into your optimum routine using the new newbie technique. For beginners and those returning to PE after a long break I’ve not found an improvement on the ‘new newbie’ technique, New Newbie Technique. The little time you spend easing into it will almost certainly, ultimately, save you a lot of wasted time and effort.

I’m not clear on what “cording” is: is there a thread about it? Just before my injury I couldn’t get hard, and my dick looked like a pale piece of overcooked pasta: tough in the middle, cold and feeling like it was stuffed with snot on the outside: mostly pale with red flecks under the corona.

I haven’t had that lately: what I meant by “leathery” was the outer skin looking tanned and the inside generally being tougher yet more elastic feeling. Is that cording?

And yeah, I think “softer and longer” is the way I’ll go after my break.

Mr. F:

Yeah, I’m in the middle of a week-or-more decon break as we speak (since saturday night).

I actually think I steadily increased my routine until I got injured, then erratically/jerkily ramped it *down* - to the point where I wasn’t doing any good, but - *simultaneously* - not taking a long enough total break to detox.

When I first started PE (feb), I thought I could keep ramping up my routine, so long as I kept myself above the negative PI point - I’m now thinking, maybe I hadn’t realised that time and force were separate. I definitely agree that “toughening” would be a negative PI, or negative-neutral - when I started PE, jelqing would give me inner-tube foreskin edema and fully-erect sized flaccids, but gradually (2.5 weeks?) my dick got rubberier - stretchier but tougher (is that “cording”?). Or maybe that’s just normal de-newbieing, I dunno.

Maybe toughening (without other negative PIs) indicates a need for less *force* but equal *time*? Presumably, every PI is a specific, separate piece of feedback, right? I’d like to think they’re not interchangeable, even if they’re not the same for everybody.

Also - your EQ *disappeared* for 3 months? And you were still alive? My injury killed my EQ for 3 *days* (0 erections, 0 libido - unprecedented for me), and people remarked that I looked like crap. I don’t know if there was a causal connection, but it felt like it.

I know it must sound absurd but at the time I wasn’t really concerned with my EQ because I wasn’t sexually active (I’m still not). At that time all I was really using it for was to pee out of, so I didn’t really see EQ as a problem. Also, I was so invested in my extreme hanging regime and so focused on completing it (just for my own PE research as much as anything else) that I had hadn’t yet learned about PIs. I’d read enough threads to understand the concepts and to know what it was about but I hadn’t identified mine or applied it to my approach.

As for your specific jelqing question, I couldn’t give you an answer. I have experience of jelqing, the ‘power-jelq’ :rolleyes: , clamping, ballooning etc. but not the transitional phases. When I started PE I was unwell and not strong enough to Jelq so I went straight to Penimaster and then to a hanger, then to clamping. I’ve jelqued when I was super-conditioned and not gaining, just because it was the best way to stimulate my unit during those tough hanging months, and having returned to thundersplace after my long break I’ve been getting newbie-type gains from jelqing but I’ve since discontinued in favour of pumping to see if I can get the length I need while working on girth, reducing my baseball bat etc. Also, I’m cut so I don’t have experience of jelqings affects on the foreskin, my apologies.

Hopefully one or two of the other members could advise you on that.

I haven’t been PEing very long, but I noticed manual stretches are what overdoes it for myself. I find that 3 minutes is optimal, followed by 10 minutes of good, slow jelqing (6-8 seconds per jelq). I can always tell when the stretches have over done it because when I try to get an erection, it takes more time and then when I’m finally jelqing, it’s harder to maintain the proper erection level.

When trying to assess a new routine think about each aspect of it; warmup, stretches, jelqs, etc. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were alot of guys only incorporating a short 2-3 minute warmup. I think a solid 10 minute warmup is a must to help your penis cope with the stresses of PEing.

If you feel your penis after a decon, you squeeze it with your fingers and its soft, almost mushy. When you get “cording” the smooth muscle contracts and the penis feels harder and more rigid. Almost like a stiffening of it when its soft. I’m sure some “turtling” will go along with it.

Mr F,

Really nice understanding of the underlying concepts that I believe are correct and essential to understand. Good job and write up!

Mr. F: If it was just a loss of erections, I might have felt the same way - but my zero EQ seemed to make me feel like crap all over - I doubt you’d have gone 3 months with *that*. I thought it might have been an extremely coincidental cold with no symptoms beyond “feel terrible” and “lose all erections” - but it came right after my hardest session, colds never affected my erections before, and EQ and general “not-feeling-like-crap” came back at the same time.

Thanks for your thoughts, in general - I think the various theories are knitting together for me. Just wish I could separate PIs into their causes more.

Sparkyx: Is cording separate from toughening/conditioning? Are there different kinds of toughening? If your dick feels more resistant to PE in general - less like sensitive flesh, more like cooked rubber - is that just normal, unavoidable de-newbieing?

Jmanr: You’re right about warmups - I cut my warmup short one day and grew some visible blood vessels on my glans. Now my warmups are a strict 10 minutes, minimum, usually 15.

sprkyx, again, thanks :) and thank you for being so generous with your knowledge. It’s certainly helped me.

Foryourprivacy,

I have depression (which is why I was in a state that prevented me from jelqing when I originally joined) so I don’t have a clear idea of the emotional effects of overtraining. I certainly felt invigorated by the jelqing I did recently; that I can absolutely confirm.

Basically too much stress to the tissue. Neg PIs are their reaction.

We used to think “turtling” was due to the contraction of connective tissue. But most of the turtling guys experience is gone in hours to days. True contraction of connective tissue wouldn’t reverse like that. So with study, I’ve come to the conclusion that its primarily due to smooth muscle contraction. A good dose of Cialis usually reverses it, which in my mind is proof its smooth muscle.

Now, you CAN get toughening of the tunica, from using high forces like hanging heavy wts. This toughing is not so easily or quickly reverse. I think if you cause changes in connective tissue like the tunica, it could be months to reverse it…if EVER!

Which is which by feel? I can’t really say, because I’ve never really toughened my tunica, but I can tell you this. If you have over-done it and your penis is feeling tougher, take a few days off. If it gets back to a softer feel, its probably just the smooth muscle that was effected.

You’re welcome. Glad to hear it has helped.

Hmm, makes sense.

“Turtling” is “shrinkage” - a smaller than normal flaccid - right? To add my bit of anecdotal data: I get that from cold, but never from PE - the worst I got was lowered EQ, or a regular-sized flaccid that seemed tougher yet less erectable (“corded”, I guess).

About my detox (since saturday night): I don’t think my EQ’s changed too much - maybe it got a bit better in the *first* 3 days (or maybe that was just because I was paying more attention than usual, looking for it), then plateaued. Looking forward to that longer and softer routine.

To second F’s thanks - you’ve definitely improved the way I approach PE.

Do you feel that most of us guys “over do it” with girth work or length work?

I have in the past lost some length, gained it back and lost it again. And I struggled with finding a cause.

This drove my decision to purchase a Bib Hanger, in hopes I would get the length gains that had eluded me with just manual exercises. I expected the more intense hanging workouts to bring on some Negative PI’s, but it has not. I’m surprised to find that even after 2 hours of hanging a day, I have as good or better morning wood that I did before hanging.

My girth work has been reduced a bit due to my focus on length and the added time investment with hanging.

This makes me think, that my “over doing it” came mostly from Girth work, and that the resulting loss of length was not from Length exercises as one might think. I just associated length loss, with length exercises, which I believe was wrong.

I have never lost any girth BTW, it just keeps inching up.

So for me, Length work is More is more, and Girth work is Less is more.