Wow, what an amazing thread sparkyx.
I agree this should be mandatory reading before anyone does their very first jelq, but only if they want to save themselves years of wasted effort! It’s just too bad they’ll likely have to make the same mistakes (for years) before they finally heed it, like me, haha.
It’s so tempting to model beginner routines after the advanced big gainers but we forget they started somewhere too. I argue that guys with big gains are either super intuitive and just naturally “get” this, or they have naturally given freak recovery abilities. Either way they worked up to their high workload AND most importantly, are able to recover from it.
Which brings up a couple points not really fleshed out here. I’ve stolen these concepts from strength training which oddly seems entirely applicable here even with the differences of tissues involved. The same principals which allowed me to achieve a double body weight front squat (I’m heavy) and some of my lighter buddies triple body weight, seem to be the same principals required for breaking plateaus and continual growth without burnout in PE? Who knew.
It’s my experience that “active recovery” always outperforms passive. We’re suggesting people just take weeks completely off but the latest concensus for overstrained or injured tissues (muscle, bone, connective) seems to be to get it moving and working as soon as possible. Mind you not overstess it but begin ramping up what you can tolerate.
Times that I clearly overdid it for competition (read: so sore couldn’t walk the next day) I wanted to take days off but my coach would just respond “you’ll always be able to squat an empty bar - get started”, and he was right. By greasing that groove I’d feel much better and recovered by doing whatever my body could handle (often ultra light) and could recover in hours or days what would have taken days or weeks had I just sat at home on the couch doing nothing. Also, anecdotally, me going for a light swim for 20 minutes seems equivalent to 3 days of couch surfing in terms of recovery (cns and muscular)
So, instead of “take 6 weeks off” can we refine this and find PE that is more restorative and that lead to more positive PIs? Active recovery. Heating pads, light jelqing, even frequent (not harsh) sex come to mind.
The other side of the coin is we have to keep increasing our stress tolerances. It’s one thing to be able to do X routine or squat X lbs but I think by default our body will stagnate there. If we want extreme gains we will ultimately have to be able to tolerate either extreme intensity, duration, frequency or all the above. The difference between success and failure is if we can ramp up our recovery ability to match.
My gut feeling and limited experience tells me that it’s not enough to just do enough and recover and hope that we will automatically progress slowly over time - we have to actively fight to be able to do more and more work while maintaining these positive PIs.
I hope people can chime in and we speculate the best way to do this but my initial thought is increasing short bursts of intensity. Clamp hard (but comfortable) but for a single set and recover, for example. Similar to how if I go sprint 50 meters as fast as I safely can with good form, I’m invigorated and sleep better, and feel strong. If I do sprints for a full 30 minutes, I’m not getting out of bed tomorrow. But additionally, if I did a single walk or jog, I probably wouldn’t get much training benefit at all. Intensity is good, but going past what I’m conditioned for, bad.
Also I wanted to add a very weird but very early and telling PI for me. I will notice this even before my flaccid hang changes. When I kegel, I always feel the ligament tug back on my penis. But if my penis is healthy (Positive PI) then I can feel and see it engorge with blood. Like a single breath into a balloon it expands a bit briefly before returning back. I can pump blood into my wiener. When I’m in negative PI mode and flex my kegel, there is zero response, zero blood moved, just the ligament tug.
Again thank you so much for this forum, this thread, and all this collective wisdom!