PE : A Pragmatic Approach

Here you are some tips that some of you could find useful to achieve your goals. Probably you already figured most if not what I’m going to say by yourself.

Choicing exercises/techniques

If there is something you should ponder carefully in the PE field, is the technique you want to use.

Your real life should have the priority - and probably will have despite your dreams. Don’t jump on hanging if you don’t have enough free time and privacy to stick to it for a reasonable amount of time to get gains. Don’t get an extender if you dream to hide it under your pants while you are working, becuase it will be very unlikely if you work in contact with other people - and so on.

This sounds obvious, but I see many guys who start doing something, than after few weeks they have to stop the planned regimen and this will not lead to any measurable gain.

Also, don’t do too many exercises. My personal opinion is that you should pickup two exercises at most, and one of them should be the most important, the other one complementary. Too many exercises will get you and your penis confused : too hard to adapt to many stimuli, too hard to judge what has worked or not.

Sitck with it

For the afromentioned reason, don’t change exercises too often. Any kind of schedule require it’s time to give measurable gains. This time can vary from a technique to another, but you should make a realistic prediction and do loyally what you planned untill you are sure that what you are doing isn’t the best approach. I’ll make an example of what this means lately in this very same post.

Any kind of exercise or technique can give different results to different people; if you don’t stick enough time with what you are trying right now, chances are you’ll leave the good for the bad, wasting time and motivation.
It’s very unlikely that any new miracolous technique will be discovered, those who claim to have discovered the ‘holy graal’ are, 99,99999% of times, wrong.

There are also periods when a given technique seems to be the ultimate pathway for gains. Hanging is the best for X years, then extenders are the best for the subsequent Y years, etc., then manuals are re-discovered and so on. Be stubborn enough.

Don't overthink

Along the same line, if you hang around TP a lot (which is good) be strong enough to mantain theory and practice on two different grounds. There are many theories, supposedly based on ‘scientific principles’; the truth is we don’t know how the penis grows and we will not have any appreciable amount of ‘scientific knowledge’ on PE for many, many years. Theories are interesting and maybe they can be useful at some minimal degree, but they will never make any significative difference as your gains are concerned. If you want to find out how a ‘scientific approach’ can work, wait untill you have reached your goals - then, you can go experimenting.

Quantifiyi the invisible

The best way to get gains, is to be consistent. Being consistent is hard for the foremost reason that you can’t immediately see the output of your work. If you don’t have a number to measure the value of your work, it will be hard on the long run to be consistent; similarly, if you have a number - even a minuscule number - that will measure the gain you miss if you don’t do your scheduled work, it will be harder to not say - ‘Damn, I’m tired, I’ll do my PE session tomorrow’.

So, how to measure the invisible?

Here you are an example. Say the technique that you have chosen is manual stretching. You try to see if there is a way to figure out how many hours of work are on average required to get some gains. In my example, I will refer to Bennett8’ schedule : he did 20-30 minutes daily of fulcrum stretches, 7 days on 7, for three years and half. He gained 2,25” (I’m going to memory, this is just an example). His gains are basically unquestionated.

So, you use an excel sheet (or a paper journal) and you start recording what you do : in the first column you write the date; in the 2d column, you write the name of the exercise; in the 3d, the amount of PE work you do over the course of the day - so if you do three minutes of stretching in the morning and 3 in the evening, you have done 6 minutes today. In the 4th column you report the sum of the total PE work you have done since you started.

In the 5th, you calculate the ‘Gain Index’ : in this example, you have that Bennett8 did 30 minutes daily, for about 1300 days (365 x 3,5), so totally about 650 hours of manual fulcrum stretches; he gained 2,25” or 6 cm - better to write this number in metrical system IMHO; 6 cm = 60 millimeters. So the Gain index is 60/650 = 0.092.

Now, you apply a prudential parameter to the Gain Index, because Bennett could be more blessed for gains then most of people : I would apply a 0.7 prudential correction - which is purely arbitrary. So your Gain Index is
0,066 millimeters/hour. (When you write numbers, report at least 4 decimal numbers, for obvious reasons).

Now, everyday that you are consistent, you see the ‘Total Ongoing Gain’ (6th column) : it is a very small number, but is better than nothing. Move your ass if you really want gains.

Make Adjustements To Your Routine

After a significative amount of work - let’s say enough work that is giving a ‘Total Ongoing Gain’ of at least 5 millimeters - take a week off and then measure your gains. Write what you gained : if nothing, time to pass to a different technique; if more or less than planned, report that number as well; you can stick with what you have been doing if you are satisfied with your gains; in this case, adjust the ‘Gain Index’ accordingly : if you gained 9 millimeters with 100 hours of total work, you have an index of 0,09; adjut with the precautionary parameter of 0.7 (because probably in the next cycle you’ll probably gain less with the same amount of work, being your penis partially adapted to the work) and you have a ‘Gain Index’ of 0.063. Take a decon break of 2-6 weeks from PE, and then start your next plan.

I have attached to this post an excel sheet (zipped) that reports the example I made; numbers are my work; numbers are in EU format, so ‘,’ = ‘.’.

Have nice gains.

I think everyone should read your blog Marinera and study it a bit. As a former researcher, I’m happy that you pointed out some facts that deserve to be repeated:

* Be consistent with a routine, give it time to work
* There are no miraculous methods, all methods for PE are long-term commitments
* Measure and record regularly in order to evaluate each method used

So far, there is no adequate science in this field to direct a newbie to the ‘perfect’ technique to start with. This can make PE extremely frustrating, especially when you read about some guys making gains of 1/2” in 3 months (and the rest of us left to wonder if we’ll find that ‘magic’ technique that will give us the best gains per unit time).

But what really struck me as important is your Gain Index. I think you’ve hit on something here that could be a standard by which each of us can judge a routine’s effectiveness. Two questions come to mind:

1. What is the need for the correction factor? Why use it?
2. What would your opinion be regarding how many weeks to apply a routine before deciding weather to keep it or abandon it for another technique? (Say in the case where gains were zero).

Thanks

Hey, great post Marinera!

Now we can just wait for more newbies to start threads asking all of the questions you just answered. (:

Haha, right ScienceGuy, you reached a perfect understanding of how this forum goes.

Speaking of newbies, has anyone noticed an increase in “rate this woman” sorts of posts since Thunder recently opened its doors to new members? If I wanted to be bombarded with porn I’d go to porn sites.

There are two main reasons why applying a correction factor:

a) as a general rule, rarely real world is so good as you hope; let’s say you think you can do a job in 12 weeks : in most of cases, you’ll do it in 14-15 weeks. Applying a ‘correction factor’ gives you room to not be disappointed with gains. If your gains will be bigger than what the plan is predicting, then you’ll be very very glad with it and more motivated than ever; if gains will be smaller, you’ll take them as a reasonable approximation of how PE (or at least a given approach to PE) works on you.

b) you are taking your gain index from somebody else’ journey; probably you’ll be inspired by someone who had great gains. But you have to take into account that your hero could be more blessed for gains than average; beside that, you can’t discount a measurement mistake.

The second time you apply your plan, you already have a figure of what you can gain - so you can adjust the Gain Index. A conservative prediction, so applying a correction factor, still makes sense in my view, because the more you do PE, the slower the gains. Maybe the correction factor is too high or too low, one can adjust. Maybe if anyone takes the habit of having a book/sheet like the one I advised can lead to compare outcomes from different people and different routines - kinda having the same measurement system. We quantifiyi hours of work and gains, and slowly we come out from vagueness.

About the #2 question, this hits the spot. I mean, how many times you hear ‘I’ve done this routine for 3 months and I got no results?’.
But what really they are saying? What’s the amount of work they did in that span of time? The reason why I choiced Bennett8 as a model, is because he is a Great Gainer; but I think people hardly realize how much hard work he needed to get gains : if you complain you are not getting gains, are you sure you have worked enough time? We never have the answer to this question when advising fellows. Having a ‘book-keeping of PE’ can help overcoming this issue.

So, to answer your question, my perspective is a matter of hours of work, instead than weeks. As said in the post, once the total work, multiplied for the Gain Index, gives a supposed gain of 5 mm (roughly 1/5”), time to measure.

The amount of work required to get 1/5” (or 1/3”, or what you like more) of gains vary from a technique to another : I made an example for manual stretching, in my sheet. Let’s say you want to go hanging instead : pick up a guy who you think had good gains, and see if you can make a calculation of his Gain Index, then apply the correction factor. My guess is that one can expect, on average, 1/2” gains with 500 hours of hanging.

Extender? My personal guess is 1/2” gains with about 1,000 hours of work. These are roough calculations. The reason why we can’t answer to this question more precisely is, guess what? That we don’t have people using the kind of book-keeping I’m suggesting. :)

Nice.

I really like the idea of knowing what gains I’d give up if I “take a day off”. I’ve been quite motivated already knowing that missing a routine would result in giving up some amount of gains, but being able to relate a daily routine with a specific amount of gain makes it even that much easier to get motivated.

Thanks Marinera.

I kinda disagree. All work and no play makes it dull. I don’t think it takes away from the real goals of the site, and I for one like to see what other guys tastes are in women, and their critiques.

That was a great post marinera. I agree with all of it, especially the adjustments portion. I have taken the same approach of constantly fine-tuning my workouts in order to see what would yield the most potential for growth for me. It is amazing how much difference a slight alteration can have on the productivity of each PE session.

Thanks for the kind words guys.

Ok will have the girlfriend start the Excel sheet soon! Going at PE for 6 weeks. Yes, she does know and notice. No, she does not participate or watch. And yes I have Excel and even took college courses but I still suck at it.

But I can see where measuring the amount of time spent, versus the amount of gains would greatly motivate one to do more PE or even let them know “Hey it’s time to switch it up”

However, a Decon Break I think is more for someone doing PE for over 6 months correct? At this point I am already quite addicted to my PE routine and often have exercise self control to get the 1 day off for rest that is always needed.

It’s weird that I missed this thread. Nice work, Marinera . Thanks.

Correct. Or perhaps even better, a decon break should be considered when gains are stalling for some months.

More generally, advices given here are intented for those who have done with their first months of PE, since the newbie phase is kinda an exceptional one : it’s hard to predict what your future gains will be basing on the first 2-3 months of PE.

Marinera,
Good solid advice. A lot of what you said is why I recommend to newbies they start with a detailed penis inventory and use a journal. This helps determine what is working or not to refine what works for you as an individual.

Again good post. I think it should help others on this site.

Take care and happy gains,

Great read marinera. I have just switched up my routine for the first time in ages and this was a great help.